A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.” The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term. “There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history. 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: Bob, how are you today? Robert Pape: Oh, I’m great. I’m terrific. This is just a great time to be in Chicago. A little cold, but that’s Chicago. I was about to say, great time for you. I’m a Florida boy, so I was just in Chicago, I was like, let me go home. So Bob, I thought I would kind of start off a little bit and kind of give you my background into why I’m really interested about the things that we’re going to be talking about today, right after Charlottesville happened. When I look back now, I feel like it was such a precursor for where we are today. And also I think in 2016 I was looking back and it felt like… Strangely, it felt like Oklahoma City, the bombing in Oklahoma City was a precursor for that. Ever since then, I’ve just really been thinking a lot about where we are as a society and political violence in America. The origins of it, which I think are baked deeply into the country itself. But I’m also very interested on where we’re going, because I believe that leadership plays a big role in that, right? And so when you have leaders that try to walk us back from the edge, we walk back from the edge. When you have leaders that say charge forward, we go over the edge. And it feels like in the last decade or so we’ve been see-sawing between the two things. So let me just say that you are quite right, that political violence has been a big part of our country and this is not something that is in any way new to the last few years. And that’s also why you can think about this when you talk about 2016, going back to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing here and thinking about things from the right and militia groups and right-wing political violence. Because that in particular from the seventies through 2016, even afterwards of course, has been a big part of our country and what we’ve experienced. But I just have to say a big but here, it’s not just the same old story. Because starting right around 2016, it would’ve been hard to know this in 2016 and even really 2017, ’18 and ’19, you were there right at the beginning of a new layer, so to speak, of political violence that is growing. It’s not that the old layer went away, which is why it’s been a little bit, I think, mystifying and confusing for some folks, and that’s folks who even cover this pretty closely, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and so forth. Because it took a few years before they started to see that there was some new trends emerging, growing political violence. It was getting larger. The old profiles of who was doing the violent attacks were starting to widen. And in many ways that’s scarier and more dangerous than if they’re kind of narrow because we like our villains to be monsters who are far away from us and they couldn’t possibly be living next door to us. Whereas the closer they come, the more edgy it feels. So what you’re really experiencing there is the very beginning of where I date the beginning of our shift to the era of violent populism. We’re in a new world, but it’s a world on top of the old world. The old world didn’t go away. No, no, no. It feels like the old world is really the foundation that this new house of violence has been raised around. All of that that happened in the past was the foundation. And then in 2016, 2017, some people would say 2014, in that timeframe, the scaffolding began to go up and then Trump gets into office and then suddenly it’s a full-blown house that now all of America is living in. Well, if you look at the attacks on African-Americans, on Jews and Hispanics, except for going all the way back to the 1920 race time, except for that, these large-scale attacks have clustered since 2016. Then we have the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, that’s the largest attack killing, mass killing of Jews ever in the United States. And then we have August, 2019, the attack at the El Paso Walmart killing more Hispanics in a day than has ever been killed in our country. So there’s a pointed wave, if you see what I mean here. And race is certainly playing a role. So when you say how does this tie to the old layer or the existing layer, one of the big foundations here is absolutely race. What’s really sad and really tragic is in this new era of violent populism, that’s a term I like to use because it’s not just the same old, but it’s not quite civil war. In this new era, we’ve seen things move from the fringe where they were bad but happened more or less rarely, to more the mainstream where they’re happening more and more. And our surveys show this, people feel very fearful right now, and there’s actual reason for that. That’s not just media hype. There have been more events. We see them and they are real. We really have a time here that people are, I’m sorry to say, concerned. And there’s reason to be concerned. Yeah, as you say, the thing that pops up in my mind is the fact that white supremacy, which I think for a long time held sway over this country. And then I think that white supremacy in a lot of ways always held onto the power. But there was a time where being a racist was not cool and looked down upon. And so racism, while still evident, still holding people down, it’s built into institutions, all of that. I’m not saying that racism was away, I’m just saying that expressing it openly is now in the mainstream. I mean, we just heard President Trump recently talking about Somalis- Absolutely, yeah. In a very… I mean, just straight up, there is no difference between what he said about Somalis than what a Klansman in the forties in front of a burning cross would say about Black people, like zero difference. Yeah. So the reason I think we are in this new era, because I think you’re right, putting your finger on the mainstreaming of fringe ideas, which we used to think would stay under rocks and so forth, and white supremacy clearly fits that bill. But what I think is important to know is that we are transitioning for the first time in our country’s history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. And social changes like that in other countries around the world, so I’ve studied political violence for 30 years in many countries around the world. Big social changes like that Al, often create super issues with politics, make them more fragile and often lead to political violence. Now, what’s happening in our country is that we’ve been going through a demographic change for quite some time. America up through the 1960s was about 85% white as a country. There was ebbs and flows to be sure. Well, that really started to change bit by bit, drip by drip in the mid 1960s, whereas by 1990 we were 76% white as a country. Today we’re 57% white as a country. In about 10 or 15 years, it depends on mass deportations, and you can see why then that could be an issue, we will become truly a white minority democracy for the first time. And that is one of the big issues we see in our national surveys that helps to explain support for political violence on the right. Because what you’re seeing Al, is the more we are in what I call the tipping point generation for this big demographic shift, the more there are folks on the right, and most of them Trump supporters, mega supporters, who want to stop and actually reverse that shift. Then there of course, once knowing that, there are folks on the left, not everybody on the left, but some on the left that want to keep it going or actually accelerate it a bit for fear that with the mega crowd you won’t get it, the shift will stop altogether. These are major issues and things that really rock politics and then can lead to political violence. Talk to me a little bit about January 6th, when that happened, I’m sure you were watching it on TV. Yeah. What were you thinking as all of it was kind of coming into play? Well, so I was not quite as surprised as some folks, Al. So on October 5th in Chicago, I was on the Talking Head show in Chicago, it’s called Chicago Tonight. So on October 5th, 2020, that was just after the Trump debate where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back, but stand by. Well, the Chicago folks brought me on TV to talk about that, and I said that this was really quite concerning because this has echoes of things we’ve seen in Bosnia with some other leaders that a lot of Americans are just not familiar with, but are really quite worrisome. And I said what this meant was we had to be worried about the counting of the vote, not just ballot day, the day of voting. And we had to be worried about that all the way through January 6th, the certification of the election. But you made a point earlier, Al, about the importance of leaders. This is part of the reason why it’s hard to predict. It’s not a precise science, political violence. I like to use the idea, the analogy of a wildfire when I give talks. When we have wildfires, what we know as scientists is we can measure the size of the combustible material and we know with global warming, the combustible dry wood that could be set afire is getting larger. So you know you’re in wildfire season, but it’s not enough to predict a wildfire because the wildfire’s touched off by an unpredictable set of triggers, a lightning strike, a power line that came down unpredictably. Well, that is also a point about political leaders. So it was really, I did see some sign of this that Donald Trump said too about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And no other president had said anything like that ever before in our history, let’s be clear. And because of my background studying political violence, I could compare that to some playbooks from other leaders in other parts of the world. That said, even I wouldn’t have said, oh yeah, we’re 90% likely to have an event, because who would’ve thought Donald Trump would’ve given the speech at the Ellipse, not just call people to it, it will be wild. His speech at the Ellipse, Al, made it wild. You co-authored a pretty remarkable study that looked at the political geography of January 6th insurrectionists. Can you break down the findings of that paper? Yeah. So one of the things we know when we study as a scholar of political violence, we look at things other people just don’t look at because they just don’t know what’s important. We want to know, where did those people live, where’d they come from? And when you have indictments and then you have the court process in the United States, you get that as a fact. So now it does mean I had to have big research teams. There’s a hundred thousand pages of court documents to go through. But nonetheless, you could actually find this out. And we found out something stunning, Al, and it’s one of the reasons I came back to that issue of demographic change in America. What we found is that first of all, over half of those who stormed the capitol, that 1,576 were doctors, lawyers, accountants, white collar jobs, business owners, flower shop owners, if you’ve been to Washington DC, Al, they stayed at the Willard. I have never stayed at the Willard- Yeah. So my University of Chicago doesn’t provide that benefit. That is crazy to me because I think the general knowledge or what you think is that most of the people that were there were middle class to lower, middle class to poor. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. Yeah, it’s really stunning, Al. So we made some snap judgments on that day in the media that have just stayed with us over and over and over again. So the first is their economic profile. Whoa, these are people with something to lose. Then where did they come from? Well, it turned out they came from all 50 states, but huge numbers from blue states like California and New York. And then we started to look at, well, where are in the states are they coming from? Half of them came from counties won by Joe Biden, blue counties. So then we got even deeper into it. And what’s happening, Al, is they’re coming from the suburbs around the big cities. They’re coming from the suburbs around Chicago, Elmhurst, Schomburg. They’re not coming from the rural parts of Illinois. They’re coming… That’s why we call them suburban rage. They’re coming from the most diversifying parts of America, the counties that are losing the largest share of white population. Back to that issue of population change, these are the people on the front lines of that demographic shift from America is a white majority democracy, to a white minority democracy. These are the counties that will impact where the leadership between Republican and Democrat have either just changed or are about to change. So they are right on the front lines of this demographic change and they are the folks with a lot to lose. And they showed up, some took private planes to get there. This is not the poor part, the white rural rage we’re so used to hearing about. This is well off suburban rage, and it’s important for us to know this, Al, because now we know this with definitiveness here. So it’s not like a hand-wavy guess. And it’s really important because it means you can get much more serious political violence than we’re used to thinking about. Yeah. So what happens, let’s say if circumstances remain as they are, IE, the economy is not doing great, the middle class is getting squeezed and ultimately getting smaller, right? The affordability thing is a real issue. What wins? The first big social change that’s feeding into our plight as a country is this demographic social change. There’s a second one, Al, which is that over the last 30 years, just as we’re having this demographic shift to a white minority democracy, we have been like a tidal wave flowing wealth to the top 1%. And we’ve been flowing wealth to the top 1% of both Republicans and Democrats. And that has been coming out of the bottom 90% of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, both can be poorer and worse off. Whites can be worse off because of this shift of the wealth to the top 1%. And minorities can be worse off because of the shift. And you might say, well, wait a minute, maybe the American dream, we have social mobility. Well, sorry to say that at the same time, we’re shifting all this money to the top 1%, they’re spending that money to lock up and keep themselves to top 1%. It’s harder to get into that top 1% than it’s ever been in our society. And so what you see is, I just came back from Portland. What you see is a situation in Portland, which is a beautiful place, and wonderful place where ordinary people are constantly talking about how they’re feeling pinched and they’re working three jobs. Yeah. Just to make their middle, even lower middle class mortgages. I mean, this is what’s happening in America and why people have said, well, why does the establishment benefit me? Why shouldn’t I turn a blind eye if somebody’s going to attack the establishment viciously? Because it’s not working for a lot of folks, Al. And what I’m telling you is that you put these two together, you get this big demographic change happening, while you’re also getting a wealth shift like this and putting us in a negative sum society. Whoa, you really now have a cocktail where you’ve got a lot of people very angry, they’re not sure they want to have this shift and new people coming into power. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people that aren’t sure the system is worth saving. I really wanted to dive in on the polls that you’ve been conducting, and one of those, there seems to be a small but growing acceptance of political violence from both Democrats and Republicans. What do you think is driving that? I think these two social changes are underneath it, Al. So in our polls, just to put some numbers here, in 2025, we’ve done a survey in May and we did one in the end of September. So we do them every three or four months. We’ll do one in January I’m sure. And what we found is that on both sides of the political spectrum, high support for political violence. 30% in our most recent survey in September, 30% of Democrats support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. 30%. 10% of Democrats think the death of Charlie Kirk is acceptable. His assassination was acceptable. These represent millions and millions of adults. That’s a lot of people, you see. What you’re saying is right, we’re seeing it. And I think what you’re really seeing here is as these two changes keep going, this era of violent populism is getting worse. Yeah, I mean, so I’ve seen that Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of using violent rhetoric. So in your research, what’s actually more common in this modern area where we are right now, is it right wing or left wing on the violent rhetoric, but also who’s actually doing it? So we’ve had, just after the Kirk assassination, your listeners will probably remember and they can Google, we had these dueling studies come out almost instantly, because they’re kind of flash studies and they’re by think tanks in Washington DC. One basically saying there’s more right-wing violence than left. And one saying there’s more left-wing violence than right. Well, I just want your listeners to know that if you go under the hood, so my job is to be like the surgeon and really look at the data. You’re going to be stunned, maybe not so stunned, Al, because you live in the media, to learn the headlines and what’s actually in the content are very different. Both studies essentially have the same, similar findings, although slightly different numbers, which is they’re both going up. They’re both going up. So it’s really not the world that it was either always been one side or now it’s newly the other. So the Trump administration’s rhetoric, JD Vance is wrong to say it’s all coming from the left, but it’s also wrong to say it’s all coming from the right. Now, what I think you’re also seeing, Al, is that the politicians, if left to their own devices, rarely, I’m sorry to say do the right thing, they cater to their own constituents. But there’s some exceptions and they’ve been helpful, I think. There’s two exceptions I want to draw attention to, one who’s a Republican and one who’s a Democrat. On the Democratic side, the person who’s been just spectacular at trying to lower the temperature is Governor Shapiro. He’s a Democrat, the Governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro has given numerous interviews public, where he has condemned violence on all sides. He’s recognizing, as very few others are, that it’s a problem on both sides. He personally was almost burned to death, only minutes from being burned to death with his family here back in April. So he knows this personally about what’s at stake and he has done a great job, I think in recognizing that here. Now on the Republican side, we have Erika Kirk and what Erika Kirk, of course the wife of Charlie Kirk who was assassinated did, was at Kirk’s funeral, she forgave the shooter. But let’s just be clear, she’s a very powerful voice here. Now, I think we need more of those kind of voices, Al, because you see, they really are figures people pay attention to. They’re listening to people like that. They have personal skin in the game and they can speak with sort of a lens on this few others can. But we need more people to follow in that wake and I wish we had that, and that can actually help as we go forward. And I’m hoping they, both of those people will do more and more events, and others who have been the targets of political violence will come out and do exactly the same thing. I want to go back a little bit to January 6th and just talk about those insurrectionists. So when President Trump pardoned them, what was going through your mind? That it was probably going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency. And I know I’m saying quite a bit. I know that he’s insulted every community under the sun many, many, many times. But the reason I’m so concerned about this, Al, is that there are many ways we could lose our democracy, but the most worrisome way is through political violence. You see, because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about, irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump. And already on January 6th, we collected all the public statements on their social media videos, et cetera, et cetera, in their trials about why those people did it. And the biggest reason they did it was Trump told them so, and they say this over and over and over again, I did it because Trump told me to do it. Well, now Trump has not forgiven them, he’s actually helping them. They may be suing the government to get millions of dollars in ‘restitution’. So this is going in a very bad way if you look at this in terms of thinking you’re going to deter people from fighting for Trump. And now of course others are going to know that as well on the other side. So again, this is a very dangerous move. Once he pardoned it, no president in history has ever pardoned people who use violence for him. Yeah. So you have the insurrectionist bucket. But there’s another bucket that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, and that is that under President Trump, ICE has expanded exponentially. Yep. The amount of money that they get in the budget is- Enormous. Enormous. I’ve never seen an agency ramp up, A, within a term, like so much money and so many people- It is about to become its own army. Right. And Al, what this means concretely is, we really don’t want any ICE agents in liberal cities in October, November, December. We don’t want to be in this world of predicting, well, Trump would never do X, he would never do Y. No, we’ve got real history now to know these are not good ways to think. What we just need to do is we need to recognize that when we have national elections that are actually going to determine the future of who governs our country, you want nothing like those agents who, many of them going to be very loyal to Trump, on the ground. We should already be saying, look, we want this to stop on October 1st to December 31st, 2026, and we want to have a clean separation, so there’s no issue here of intimidation. And why would you say that? It’s because even President Trump, do you really want to go down in history as having intimidated your way to victory? So I think we really need to talk about this as a country, Al. And we really want a clean break here in the three months that will be the election, the run-up to the election, the voting, and then the counting of the vote. In closing, one of the major themes of this conversation has been that America is changing into a white minority. The question that just keeps coming to mind to me is, as somebody who studies this, do you think that America can survive that transition? Well, I am going to argue, and I’m still a little nervous about it, but we are in for a medium, soft landing. Okay. One of the things we see is that every survey we’ve done, 70% to 80% of Americans abhor political violence. And that’s on both sides of the aisle. And I think in many ways there are saving grace and it’s why, Al, when we have public conversations about political violence, what we see in our surveys is that helps to take the temperature down. Because you might worry that, oh, we’ll talk about it, we’ll stir people up and they’ll go… It seems to be the other way around, Al, as best we can tell. That there’s 70% to 80% of the population that really, really doesn’t want to go down this road. They know intuitively this is just a bad idea. This is not going to be good for the country, for their goals. And so they are the anchor of optimism that I think is going to carry us to that medium soft landing here. I think we could help that more if we have some more politicians joining that anchor of optimism. They’re essentially giving voice to the 70%, 80%. And if you look at our no Kings protests, the number of people that have shown up and how peaceful they have been, how peaceful they have been, those are the 70% to 80%, Al. And I think that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can navigate this peacefully. But again, I’m saying it’s a medium soft landing, doesn’t mean we’re getting off the hook without some more… I’m sorry to say, likely violence, yeah. Listen, I’ll take a medium. I would prefer not at all, but the way things are going, I’ll take the medium. Thank you very much. Bob, Professor Robert Pape, it has been such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out. Well, thank you Al, and thanks for such a thoughtful, great conversation about this. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much.

After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis this week, firing his weapon as she attempted to drive away, protesters have amassed around the country, many wondering: Can that officer be taken to court? The Trump administration, predictably, says the agent, Jonathan Ross, is immune from prosecution. “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Thursday. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job.” But what do independent attorneys say? After the shooting, I reached out to Robert Bennett, a veteran lawyer in Minneapolis who has worked on hundreds of federal police misconduct cases during his 50-year career. “I’ve deposed thousands of police officers,” he says. “ICE agents do not have absolute immunity.” Bennett says the state of Minnesota has the right to prosecute an ICE agent who commits misconduct. But, he adds, that might be difficult now that the FBI has essentially booted the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension off the case—blocking access, the BCA wrote, to “case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.” In the conversation below, edited for length and clarity, Bennett discusses how the shooting in Minneapolis unfolded and the legal paths forward. When you watched the videos of this shooting, what did you see? You saw what could be easily identified as four ICE officers. And they’re all experiencing, to a greater or lesser extent, the same set of operative facts, the same factual stimuli. But only one officer, seeing the set of circumstances, picked up his weapon. None of the other officers did. That’s a bad fact [for Ross]. Also, the officer walked in front of the car, which counts against him in the reasonableness analysis. If you look at the recent Supreme Court case of Barnes v. Felix, that’s problematic for the ICE agent. What happened in Barnes v. Felix? It’s a shooting case where the officer walked around the car, [lunged and jumped onto the door sill], and put himself in harm’s way. You can’t bootstrap your own bad situation [to] allow a use of force. What did the court find? They sent it back to the trial court to consider it. But there’s good language in there. You said it’s bad news for the ICE agent, Ross, that his colleagues didn’t pull their weapons. Can you talk more about that? Sure, we’ve had several other cases. There was a tactical semicircle, a bunch of officers aiming their guns at a couple fighting over a knife; one officer out of the eight or nine fired his weapon, none of the others perceived the need to. And that’s important because it suggests the officer who fired wasn’t reasonable, right? Under federal law, an officer can only use deadly force if they had a reasonable fear that they could otherwise be killed or harmed. It’s an objective reasonableness standard. So it’s not whether you were personally scared out of your wits and fired your gun. It’s: Would an objectively reasonable officer at the scene have fired his weapon, believing he was in danger of death or immediate bodily harm? In Ross’ case, there was a previous incident—Ross had shot [with a Taser] through a window before at somebody in the car, and the guy hit the gas, and Ross had stuck his arm through the broken window, and he got cut [and dragged about 100 yards]. And so he was supposedly reacting to that. He’s not an objective officer at that point. The Trump administration has suggested that Ross is immune from prosecution as a federal officer. Why do you say he’s not? There’s plenty of case law that allows for the prosecution of federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE. And it’s clear under the law that a federal officer who shoots somebody in Minnesota and kills them is subject to a Minnesota investigation and Minnesota law. Now, the feds just took that away this morning, and they’ve already decided who’s at fault. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was going to do an investigation to find out. But I can tell you, the federal code provides that when there is a state criminal prosecution of a federal officer in Minnesota or any other state, the officer has the right to remove the case to federal court. So if Ross was charged in Hennepin County, he could remove the case to the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, have a federal judge deal with his case. The code is explicitly predicting such a prosecution could take place. If there was immunity of an absolute nature, you wouldn’t need that section, right? The administration seems to argue that Ross is protected under the Supremacy Clause, which essentially says that states can’t charge a federal officer if the officer was acting within the scope of his duties. Do you think killing people is acting within the scope of their duties? What if they decided to kill the 435,000 people in the city of Minneapolis while they were here, would the Supremacy Clause give them a free pass? I don’t think so. Also, if there was an actual independent investigation, and you apply the actual federal case law to this, and you concluded that Ross violated her rights by using excessive deadly force, he could be indicted federally. Now, nobody believes that would ever happen now: For a guy who talked a lot about rigged things, this [investigation] is rigged. Kash Patel took over the autopsy, so who knows, maybe they’ll say she died of a heart attack when she was backing up. If the officer isn’t charged criminally, the other route is a lawsuit. What are the challenges there? My team and I think there are ways to do it. I hope that her mother, or her next of kin, calls us and we’ll figure out a Bivens action or a Federal Tort Claims Act case, or something else. If you look at this case carefully, it has all the hallmarks of cases we’ve either won or settled for amounts of money no reasonable person would pay us if we weren’t going to win. It is essentially a garden variety unjustified use of deadly force case. And that’s based on the facts we know now; I bet the case is going to get better.

Vice President JD Vance would like you to do anything but pay attention to those abhorrent leaked texts from young Republicans that Politico covered on Tuesday. And if you do read them, he wants you to think they’re just “kids” saying “edgy, offensive” things. Except that they appear to be full-grown adults, according to Mother Jones‘ analysis of public records and reports of the participants’ ages. The messages, culled from thousands of private texts between eleven young GOP leaders in four states, were exchanged between January and mid-August of this year, according to Politico. The texts show the Republicans extensively using racist, antisemitic, and homophobic slurs, among other consistently bigoted insults. Here’s a taste from the Politico story: > William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words > “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in > the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans > at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was > chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone > that votes no is going to the gas chamber.” Since Politico‘s story published, several prominent Republican politicians and organizations have condemned the messages. The National Young Republicans group said in a statement that the langauge used was “vile and inexcusable,” adding, “such behavior is disgraceful, unbecoming of any Republican, and stands in direct opposition to the values our movement represents.” The statement called for participants in the chat to resign from any leadership roles in GOP groups. Leaders of the state Republican parties in both New York and Kansas, states that had participants represented in the chat, condemned the texts. So did Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who has been rumored to be running for governor and told Politico she was “appalled” by the texts. Another top Republican, though, had a different take: Vice President JD Vance. On the right-wing cable channel Real America’s Voice on Wednesday, Vance dismissed the messages as representing only the immaturity of “kids,” arguing that they were getting far too much attention. “By focusing on what kids are saying in a group chat—grow up! I’m sorry,” Vance said. “Focus on the real issues. Don’t focus on what kids say in group chats.” One problem with this defense? The people in the group chat aren’t “kids” but full-grown adults. By scanning public records and media reports, Mother Jones determined the ages of eight of the 11 participants in the chat: They appear to range from 24 to 35. Ages for three other participants—Bobby Walker, Michael Bartels, and Rachel Hope—were not publicly available. (Bartels declined to comment to Politico, and the outlet could not reach Hope for comment. Walker told Politico parts of the chat “may have been altered, taken out of context, or otherwise manipulated,” adding, “The language is wrong and hurtful, and I sincerely apologize.”) Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones on Wednesday night, including about at what age Vance believes people are adults who should be held responsible for their actions. > Vance on public outrage over the "I love Hitler" group chat: "Grow up! Focus > on the real issues. Don't focus on what kids say in group chats… The reality > is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys — they tell edgy, > offensive jokes. That's what kids do." pic.twitter.com/POLAnldP2P > > — The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) October 15, 2025 Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans vice chair, and Luke Mosiman, chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, were, at 24, the youngest participants in the chat whose ages Mother Jones could determine through public reporting and records. Politico reported Hendrix used variations of a racial slur more than a dozen times in the chat. According to Kansas NPR affiliate KCUR, Hendrix lost his job as communications assistant for Kansas’ Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach after Politico reporters asked his boss, who is also the state GOP chair, about the texts. (Hendrix did not respond to Politico‘s requests for comment. The Kansas GOP said it was “disgusted” by the comments and that they do not reflect the views of Kansas Republicans, who it emphasized “elected a black chair a few months ago.” The Kansas Young Republicans reportedly became “inactive” after the messages were published.) > Hitlergate wasn’t about kids, and Vance knows it. In the chat, Mosiman called for the rape of a rival young Republican leader, and at another point said, “The Spanish came to America and had sex with every single woman.” (He declined to comment to Politico.) The oldest appears to be Joe Maligno, who public records suggest is 35. In the chat, he spoke about gas chambers and used a racial slur towards Chinese people. Maligno previously identified himself as general counsel for the New York State Young Republicans. (Maligno did not respond to requests for comment from Politico. According to a Wednesday follow-up report from the outlet, he lost his job as an employee of the New York State Unified Court System.) A handful of other participants seem to fall in the middle of that age range. According to public records, Annie Kaykaty, New York’s national committee member who, in response to Maligno’s comment about gas chambers, said “I’m ready to watch people burn now,” is 28. Alex Dwyer, chair of the Kansas Young Republicans, who wrote a series of numbers used by white supremacists and wrote, “Sex is gay,” is 29; Peter Giunta, former chair of the New York State Young Republicans, who referred to Black people as “watermelon people” and “monkeys” and said, at another point, “I love Hitler,” is 31. Chat member and supposed “kid” Samuel Douglass is a 27-year-old state senator in Vermont, according to reports. In the group chat, he claimed a woman a mutual friend was dating, who some presumed was Indian, “didn’t bathe often.” Vermont Republican Gov. Phil Scott has called on Douglass to resign; Douglass has apologized but has not yet said whether he would resign.) (Kaykaty and Dwyer declined to comment to Politico. Giunta apologized for the messages in a statement but claimed they were part of a “highly-coordinated year-long character assassination” effort by fellow New York politicos. According to Politico‘s follow-up story, Giunta lost his job working for New York Assemblymember Mike Reilly. Politico characterized Giunta as “the most prominent voice in the chat spreading racist messages—often encouraged or “liked” by other members.) Vance’s defense, though, did not stop at suggesting the participants were too young to take responsibility for their actions. He also implied that they should not have to, casting members of the chat as unfairly victimized. Instead of saying he planned to warn his children not to use such vile language, for example, Vance said he would tell his three kids—”especially my boys”—”don’t put things on the Internet; be careful with what you post; if you put something in a group chat, assume that some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.” “But the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys—they tell edgy, offensive jokes,” Vance continued. “That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke—telling a very offensive stupid joke—is cause to ruin their lives. And at some point we’re all going to have to say, ‘enough of this BS, we’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old’s group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time.'” This is particularly rich coming from one of the top officials representing a party that just mounted a mass cancellation campaign to push for the firing and punishment of anyone who its devotees felt mourned assassinated MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk insufficiently. Tl;dr: Hitlergate wasn’t about kids, and JD Vance knows it.

In a speech at last year’s Republican National Convention, then vice-presidential hopeful JD Vance shared his philosophy of national identity. “America is not just an idea,” he told the crowd. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” As I wrote last year, Vance’s speech electrified far-right corners of X, whose denizens rejoiced that contained within those clichéd sentiments was evidence that the potential veep shared their opinions on immigration. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third-world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.” Vance’s Republican National Convention speech wasn’t the first time he had held forth on the theme of America consisting of a particular kind of people. Days before the convention, Vance made a similar speech at the National Conservatism Conference, an annual gathering that attracts right-wing intellectuals, nationalists, and the nationalism-curious. The crowd also leans religious. At that same event, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) delivered a keynote titled “The Christian Nationalism We Need.” This week marks National Conservatism’s sixth annual conference, and judging from the speaker lineup and schedule, it promises to be its most politically charged. When this group began to meet, the conference talk titles were vague and sleepy. Back then, panels included “Cutting Through the Noise on Big Tech” and “Five Myths About China.” Over the last six years, the conference has hosted various conservative stars, including media personality Tucker Carlson, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Brexit leader Nigel Farage, and post-liberal theorist Patrick Deneen. National Conservatism “emerged as a guiding light of the MAGA movement—of the America First movement in general,” notes Ben Lorber, who studies Christian nationalism at the progressive think tank Political Research Associates. > National Conservatism “emerged as a guiding light of the MAGA movement—of the > America First movement in general.” This year’s National Conservatism Conference appears to be less about abstract intellectual debates and more about policy and action, a kind of an IRL Project 2025 for the administration going forward. Session titles include “Overturn Obergefell” and “Fighting the Woke-Islamist Alliance on University Campuses.” This year’s speaker lineup is also spicier: It includes former White House strategist Steve Bannon; Jonathan Keeperman, a far-right publisher whose Passage Publishing releases works that celebrate fascism; and Calvin Robinson, a firebrand Anglican priest who was defrocked earlier this year when he made a Nazi-salute-style gesture at a Michigan anti-abortion rally. Vance isn’t speaking at this year’s event, but other Trump administration luminaries are, including US Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler, director of the US Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, and director of the National Institutes of Health Jay Bhattacharya. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), a reliable fixture at these events, will also be there. The conference website says it aims to bring together people who are devoted to “the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing.” But behind those lofty goals is a more specific agenda. My colleague Isabela Dias wrote about last year’s event, noting that “for all the ‘owning the libs’ discourse, the attacks on so-called gender ideology, the harangues against identity politics, and the warnings of the ever-present specter of neo-Marxism,” the attendees “rallied themselves most fervently around anti-immigrant sentiment.” At this year’s conference, that theme is again on full display, with one entire breakout session devoted to “The Threat of Islamism in America” and a speech titled “The Case Against Birthright Citizenship.” As much as conference organizers may have been emboldened this year by MAGA’s rise to power, National Conservatism also appears to be influencing the evolution of the Republican party. A close look at the organizers reveals a religious-nationalist ideology that undergirds the conference and, increasingly, MAGA itself. The figures behind the National Conservatism movement champion the general idea of nationalism, but they have strong ties to a particular nation—and it’s not the United States. The conference is a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a Washington, DC, nonprofit founded in 2019 by David Brog and Yoram Hazony, that describes its mission as “strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries.” Brog, a lawyer and former chief of staff for Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), was the executive director of the evangelical Christian Zionist group Christians United for Israel. Hazony, an Israeli-American philosopher, political theorist, and Biblical scholar, was a former advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Edmund Burke Foundation’s annual revenue is modest—just $1.2 million in 2023—but as investigative reporter Walker Bragman recently reported, it was launched with deep connections to the conservative movement. One early donor was the Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund, which kicked in $100,000. Its namesake is a powerful Republican donor who chairs the board of the Claremont Institute, a right wing think tank. Another major contributor is the Common Sense Society, which describes its mission as a “celebration of the political, intellectual, and cultural inheritance which constitutes our shared civilization.” Hazony, whom Politico included in its recent map of Vance’s “inner circle,” is also president of the Herzl Institute, a research nonprofit in Jerusalem that is, according to its website, dedicated to “reviving Zionism as an intellectual force both in academia and in public life in Israel and abroad.” The institute, which was named after Theodor Herzl, a key force behind modern Zionism, describes how beginning in the 19th century, the Zionist movement helped shaped Jewish identity around the idea of a homeland. Hazony’s 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism, served as a kind of handbook for National Conservatism, arguing in favor of nation states that are defined by their religion, culture, and language. Hazony “looks to his reading of the Hebrew Bible as a model for nationalism writ large,” notes Lorber, the researcher. “And for him, the modern state of Israel embodies that Biblical vision of nationalism.”   > Hazony “looks to his reading of the Hebrew Bible as a model for nationalism > writ large. And for him, the modern state of Israel embodies that Biblical > vision of nationalism.”   In an interview with journalist Ezra Klein earlier this month, Hazony explained what he saw as a dangerous tendency toward tribalism in the United States. “When people say to me: ‘Yoram, what do you see happening in the United States that’s so troubling and dangerous?’ My answer is: What really worries me is that the United States is moving in the direction of becoming Syria or Iraq, a country in which only brute force will be able to hold it together,” he said. Later in the conversation, he elaborated on that point, expressing his concern over the fact that 15 percent of the US population is now foreign-born. “In general, NatCons think that is the maximum that is possible for the country to take before it literally starts falling apart,” he said. “They really do believe in the possibility of factional and tribal violence.” According to a 2023 Jewish Currents profile, Hazony resides in the East Jerusalem community of Ramot, in Palestinian territory. In the late 1980s, he helped develop Eli, another settlement. Rafi Eis, Chief Operating Officer of the Edmund Burke Foundation and a National Conservatism conference coordinator, is also an executive director at the Herzl Institute. He lives in the settlement of Efrat. (Neither Hazony nor Eis responded to requests for comment for this article.) On X, Hazony posts about ideas of nationalism and the importance of religion to his 102,000 followers. “1. A nation is a people,” he posted on July. “2. A nation is not a territory. 3. The territory takes its name from the people living on it. Not the other way around.” In a January response to a Free Press essay by Olivia Reingold on being half-Jewish, he posted, “There’s no reason to be ashamed of being raised ‘half-Jewish.’ But as Aquinas writes, children should be raised in a single religious tradition. If you want children yourself, you’ll need to be fully a Jew or fully a Christian. Likely the most important decision you’ll ever make.” Some of his posts position his values in opposition to those of Muslims. “There’s no way to protect the free exercise of Judaism alongside the free exercise of exterminationist, supremacist Islam,” he posted in 2023, alongside a video of someone scaling a menorah sculpture with a Palestinian flag. “You’re going to have to choose one or the other. Choose carefully.” In June, he posted, “In Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran, everyone knows flooding European nations with Muslim immigrants will bring about the disintegration of these countries and leave them ripe for foreign exploitation and conquest. Why don’t Europeans know this? Liberalism is a mind job.” The vision of a single religion as the glue that holds a nation-state together is a major theme at this year’s conference. As Hazony explained to Ezra Klein, “the central place of Anglo-Protestantism in America, with a strong Old Testament taste, the English language, the common law.” Those ideas would certainly seem to resonate with conference speaker Nate Fischer, who runs a Christian venture capital firm called New Founding. Fischer’s firm oversees the Highland Rim Project, which seeks to build neighborhoods with Christian values in rural America, what its website describes as “thick communities that are conducive to a natural, human and uniquely American way of life,” places where “your neighbors are people who seek a self-determinative lifestyle and a return to a more natural human way of living for themselves and their families.” Fischer’s National Conservatism talk is titled “Building American Institutions in the Digital Age.” William Wolfe, the former Trump administration official who tweeted approvingly about Vance’s RNC speech, is scheduled to speak on “Recovering the Evangelical Political Voice,” a noteworthy topic given the recent decision by the IRS to allow churches to endorse political candidates. Earlier this week, he posted on X, “We must reignite the Protestant spirit in America.” Another speaker is Doug Wilson, senior pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson, who says he is in favor of repealing the 19th Amendment and instead instituting a household-based voting system, is a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist. At last year’s National Conservatism conference, his speech was one of the most strident, bemoaning the depraved state of American culture, which he blamed on secularism run amok. “If we will not have the Appeal to Heaven flag,” he warned, referring to the Christian nationalist banner that made headlines last year when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s wife, Martha, flew it over the couple’s vacation home, “then we are going to have the tranny flag.” Wilson told me via email that he is looking forward to the conference and  “meeting like-minded folks and networking,” and also representing the “evangelical Protestant voices” that he believes are “underrepresented in the conservative resistance to clown world.” Wilson’s provocative rhetoric has galvanized an influential movement. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends a church in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches denomination, which Wilson founded in Moscow, Idaho. A few days after this year’s conference ends, Wilson will host an event at the new church that his denomination recently planted in Washington, DC. In a recent blog post, Wilson wrote that he believed that this was the right moment to bring his version of Christianity to the nation’s capital. “We believe that there will be many strategic opportunities with numerous evangelicals who will be present both in and around the Trump administration,” he wrote. Hegseth attended the DC church’s first service and later tweeted the church motto, “All of Christ for all of life,” accompanied by a CNN video about Wilson and his DC branch. Vance has connections to this movement, too—he has hobnobbed with alums of the Christian college Wilson founded in Moscow, some of whom are also involved with Fischer’s New Founding project. Though Vance isn’t scheduled to speak at this year’s conference, its militant bent would be familiar to him. In his foreword to Dawn’s Early Light, the November 2024 book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, Vance waxed activist. “We need more than politics that simply removes the bad policies of the past,” he wrote. “We need to rebuild. We need an offensive conservatism, not merely one that tries to prevent the left from doing things we don’t like.”

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial. As the nation celebrates its 249th birthday, it’s hard not to wonder about the future of the American experiment. Two-and-a-half centuries ago, a collection of disparate colonies overcame regional differences to forge a nation. Sure, on slavery, the most divisive issue of the time, they punted. And the mighty rhetoric of freedom and liberty was deployed to the advantage of wealthy male landowners. Nevertheless, despite their differences, they banded together beneath a banner of ideals for a common cause. These days, the people in charge do not seem keen on bolstering our communality. President Trump and his MAGA cult are propelled more by animus and retribution—let’s crush the libs!—than by a desire to strengthen the bonds among the diverse citizens of this large nation. In a highly symbolic act that did not receive sufficient attention, Trump declined to attend the funeral of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, who had been assassinated by a Trump supporter who opposed abortion rights and gay rights. The day of that memorial ceremony, Trump golfed with Republican leaders and posted on social media, “WHY ARE THE DEMOCRATS ALWAYS ROOTING AGAINST AMERICA???” Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance spends much of his time snarkily trolling progressives and Democrats on social media. This pair evinces absolutely no interest in bridging gaps, healing wounds—much less in serving as role models of comity and decency. At every opportunity, they choose bombast and insult over discourse and debate. They seek to divide and conquer, and they define their politics by identifying and pummeling enemies. In one conversation I had with Barack Obama when he was president, he remarked, “I am the president of all Americans, including those who did not vote for me. I have to consider what’s best for them, even the ones who don’t like me.” That’s not how Trump and Vance see it. Trump has no recognition of the public interest, only his own self-interest. Which is how we ended up with the atrocious legislation passed by congressional Republicans this week. As we have heard repeatedly, it gives to the wealthy (handing them huge tax breaks) and robs from the poor (stripping millions of Americans of their health care coverage and slashing food assistance for children). Even Republicans who initially opposed these draconian provisions—including those who represent huge numbers of Medicaid recipients, as well as other constituents who will be severely harmed by this legislation—allowed themselves to be bullied by Trump and his MAGA henchmen into voting for it. The measure is estimated to expand the deficit by $3.3 trillion or so over 10 years (and maybe more). It will pour $100 billion into ICE and border enforcement, bolstering the burgeoning police state that the Trump administration is creating to deport law-abiding and hard-working residents. (For comparison’s sake, the annual FBI budget is $11.4 billion.) > The message to many Americans is this: We will pick your pocket to deport > people who work the jobs you’d rather not. Besides breathtaking cruelty, this bill features an absurd internal logic. Trump claimed that undocumented immigrants must be rounded up for the sake of American prosperity. Yet to pay for this operation, he and his Republican minions will decrease after-tax income for some Americans within the lower 20 percent and snatch health insurance from millions—and cause fiscal instability. Moreover, expelling millions of migrants will likely trigger a labor shortage that will spur a rise in prices. The message to many Americans is this: We will pick your pocket to deport people who work the jobs you’d rather not. In a much-noticed social media post, Vance declared that the impact of the cuts in Medicaid and nutrition assistance of the bill were “immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.” As if persecuting immigrants will offset the human suffering this bill yields. Try telling that to a parent whose child goes hungry or an adult child whose parent loses his or her care for dementia. Or a low-income family that will have to get by with several hundred dollars less a year. The gleeful malice of the past few months has been nauseating. Trump, Elon Musk, and their crew relished demolishing USAID, not pausing for a nanosecond to consider the dire consequences. A new study concludes that from 2001 to 2021 USAID programs prevented 92 million deaths in 133 nations. This included 25 million deaths caused by HIV/AIDS, 11 million from diarrhea diseases, 8 million from malaria, and 5 million from tuberculosis. The study forecasts that the annihilation of USAID will lead to 14 million deaths in the next five years. Yet Trump, Musk, and others have cheered the demise of this agency. How can plutocrats be so mean? The USAID budget last year was a mere 0.3 percent of the total federal budget. Down the line, Trump and his MAGA band have expressed little concern or empathy for those clobbered by their vengeful policies. They are smashing the scientific research infrastructure of the nation and assaulting universities. They are demonizing public servants. They are eviscerating laws that protect our water and air—the common resources we share—and sacrificing our children’s future by unplugging programs that address climate change. All while recklessly vilifying their fellow Americans who disagree with these moves as enemies of the nation. Hatred is the currency of their realm—and crypto is the currency of their corruption. This is a far cry from the originators of the union who were forced to overcome differences to achieve independence and place America, with all its ills, on the path to becoming one of the most dynamic forces in human history. So on July 4, 2025, we can celebrate the imperfect start of our national enterprise, despite the dark turn it has taken. As we do so—and as we contend with the discouraging and disturbing developments of the moment—we ought to keep in mind a fundamental fact: There are more of us than them. More Americans reject the cruelty of Trump’s mass deportation crusade than accept it. More Americans oppose the profoundly unfair billionaires-enriching-Medicaid-slashing-deficit-busting tax-and-spending mega-bill than embrace it. More Americans disdain the Trump presidency than hail it. The question at hand, all these years after Thomas Jefferson provided the original pitch deck for American democracy, is whether the majority can triumph. Can it overcome institutional barriers, disinformation, and distraction and find a path toward responsible governance that addresses the shared interests and values of the citizenry? We all may have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But it demands great work—eternal vigilance, you might say—to protect that right so we all can put it to good use. Enjoy your burgers, hot dogs, tofu sausages, and ice cream.

President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday that he does not plan to call Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) in the wake of this weekend’s horrific political violence, in which a man assassinated a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband and wounded another Democratic state lawmaker and his wife. “I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out,” Trump said, in response to a question from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins about whether he had called the governor. “I’m not calling. Why would I call him? I could call him, say, ‘Hi. How you doing?’ The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess. So, you know, I could be nice and call, but why waste time?” > COLLINS: Have you called Tim Walz yet? > > TRUMP: I don't really call him. He appointed this guy to a position. I think > the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I'm not calling him … he's a > mess. pic.twitter.com/81o4oSqyR7 > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2025 In a statement provided to Mother Jones on Tuesday afternoon, a spokesperson for Walz said the governor “wishes that President Trump would be a President for all Americans, but this tragedy isn’t about Trump or Walz. It’s about the Hortman family, the Hoffman family, and the State of Minnesota, and the Governor remains focused on helping all three heal.” Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Though the remarks were roundly condemned as cruel, for Trump, they were not unusual. As I previously wrote, the president has a long history of making tragedies worse, including by making crude comments and boosting false or disproven conspiracy theories in the aftermath of devastating events. But his latest comments are particularly rich given that, during his Republican National Convention speech last summer, he called for unity: > Just like our ancestors, we must now come together, rise above past > differences. Any disagreements have to be put aside, and go forward united as > one people, one nation, pledging allegiance to one great, beautiful — I think > it’s so beautiful — American flag. Trump’s refusal to call Walz stands in stark contrast to the Democratic response after the two assassination attempts against Trump last summer, when Democrats condemned the violence. The Biden campaign also pulled political ads against Trump, with leaders on both sides of the aisle calling for unity. (Though that did not stop some Trump acolytes from baselessly blaming the violence on Democrats.) While Trump did publicly condemn the violence in Minnesota, writing in a Truth Social post on Saturday, in part, that “Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America,” it is common for presidents to call state leaders following such crises. According to reports, Vice President JD Vance and former President Joe Biden called Walz following the Saturday attacks. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is similarly under fire after posting a series of baseless posts on his personal X account this weekend, blaming the murders on the left. In one Sunday post, he wrote, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.” In another, he wrote, “Nightmare on Waltz street,” alongside photos of the alleged shooter. “My guess: He’s not MAGA,” Lee wrote in another post of the suspected shooter, who is a registered Republican, according to public records. (Friends have told reporters Boelter was, in fact, a supporter of Trump.) But just a few hours later, on his official account, Lee appeared to change his tune: “These hateful attacks have no place in Utah, Minnesota, or anywhere in America. Please join me in condemning this senseless violence, and praying for the victims and their families.” But for some of his colleagues, it was too late. Sen. Tina Smith told the Washington Post that she sought out Lee at the Senate on Monday to talk to him about his earlier posts, telling the newspaper, “It was a terrible thing to do, and I wanted him to know how I felt about it—how devastating it was to see.” Lee has said Hortman was a personal friend. The insults and mockery trickled throughout the GOP. Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.) wrote on X, “Good job, stupid,” in response to a post from Walz, and, “You appointed the crazy zealot that murdered her to one of your boards, you clown,” over a post from Walz honoring former state House Speaker Melissa Hortman, who was murdered alongside her husband, Mark. The suspected shooter, Vance Boelter, was reportedly appointed to a 41-member state economic board by a prior Democratic governor in 2016, and later reappointed by Walz; Democratic state Senator John Hoffman, who Boelter allegedly shot alongside Hoffman’s wife, Yvette, reportedly served on the board at the same time as Boelter. (In an earlier post, Van Orden wrote that he condemned “all acts of political violence and intimidation.”) Spokespeople for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) did not immediately respond to requests for comment about whether they condemn their members’ comments.

Trump has made it official: He and Elon Musk are (probably) never getting back together. In an interview with NBC News on Saturday, the president was uncharacteristically restrained when asked if he had any desire to repair the relationship with the ex-DOGE head following Musk’s meltdown on X this week. Asked if he wanted to repair his relationship with Musk, Trump answered simply: “no.” The blowout was caused by a series of posts on X. Musk railed against Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and his tariffs, which Musk claimed will cause a recession in the second half of this year. Musk also alleged Trump is in the Epstein files (that post has since been deleted). When NBC asked if Trump thought his relationship with Musk was over, Trump reportedly replied: “I would assume so, yeah.” “I’m too busy doing other things” to talk to Musk, Trump told NBC, adding, “I have no intention of speaking to him.” “I think it’s a very bad thing, because he’s very disrespectful,” Trump added of Musk’s statements. “You could not disrespect the office of the President.” Trump also told NBC that Musk’s since-deleted claim that he was involved with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation of minors was false and “old news,” and that he had not given his prior threat to cancel Musk’s companies’ government contracts any further thought. He said he believes Musk is “so depressed and so heartbroken” and that his opposition to the reconciliation bill was ultimately “a big favor” because it “brought out the strengths of the bill.” But Trump does not appear to be fully confident that Musk will not affect the bill. If Musk funded Democrats to run against Republicans who vote to pass the bill, “he’ll have to pay the consequences for that,” Trump told NBC. He added that they would be “very serious” but did not provide further details. Musk does not appear to have specifically suggested he plans to fund Democrats for this purpose, but he has urged voters to “fire all politicians who betrayed the American people” in the next election. As I reported last week, Musk told CBS Sunday Morning that bill “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” adding, “I actually thought that, when this ‘big, beautiful bill’ came along, it’d be like, everything he’s done on DOGE gets wiped out in the first year.” (The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the bill would add $3.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, which would essentially cancel out DOGE’s purported government savings of $175 billion.) The personal attacks he launched against Trump on X just a few days later came as a stark reversal for Musk, who said in the CBS interview that while he did not agree with everything the administration did, he did not want to create “a bone of contention” by publicly feuding with officials. Trump’s glib assessment of the death of what was probably the world’s most powerful—and insufferable—bromance runs counter to the hopes of other top Republicans who are hoping the men will reconcile. On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told host Jonathan Karl that he hopes “these two titans can reconcile.” “I think the president’s head is in the right place…he can’t get caught up in a Twitter war,” Johnson added. “I think all this will resolve. There’s a lot of emotion involved in it, but it’s in the interest of the country for everybody to work together and I’m going to continue to try to be a peacemaker in all this.” > Speaker Mike Johnson on the Trump-Musk feud: “Hopefully these two titans can > reconcile. I think the president’s head is in the right place … There’s a lot > of emotion involved in it, but it’s in the interest of the country for > everybody to work together.” https://t.co/YiL5SRNqtS > pic.twitter.com/uNlPrMi7ih > > — This Week (@ThisWeekABC) June 8, 2025 And in a Friday appearance on comedian Theo Von’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance said Musk’s comments attacking Trump were “a huge mistake” but said that he hoped Musk would come crawling back to Trump’s corner. “I hope that eventually Elon kind of comes back into the fold,” Vance said. “Maybe that’s not possible now, because he’s gone so nuclear, but I hope it is.” “Cool,” Musk responded to a clip of Vance’s comments posted on X. > billionaire w/ @JDVance pic.twitter.com/l5eM9a6p5u > > — Theo Von (@TheoVon) June 7, 2025

Earlier this week, Moscow, Idaho, pastor Doug Wilson made a big announcement: In July, his church will be opening a branch in Washington, DC, just blocks away from the US Capitol building. In a blog post, Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, wrote that he believed that the moment was right to bring his version of Christianity to the nation’s capital. “We believe that there will be many strategic opportunities with numerous evangelicals who will be present both in and around the Trump administration,” he wrote. In a metropolitan area that includes more than 8,000 places of worship, what is it that Wilson hopes to provide? First, a bit of biographical information: Wilson, who is in his early 70s, is the head pastor of the flagship church of the denomination that he helped found, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). Wilson is also the unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros, members of a network of mostly millennial, highly opinionated, ultra-conservative men, many of whom also proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their particular tributary of Reformed Protestant Christianity is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law. In Moscow, Wilson has been famous for decades: He helped to establish a college, a printing press, and a classical Christian school. More recently, he’s garnered national attention, largely by being extremely online. He blogs, he posts on social media, and he makes slickly produced YouTube videos. Last year, an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson raised his profile higher still. As I wrote last year, even in the TheoBros fraternity, Wilson stands out as a firebrand: He has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” called the trope of the dominant man and a submissive woman “an erotic necessity,” and opined that women never should have been given the right to vote. When I asked him about his most provocative statements, he compared himself to a chef who cooks with jalapeño peppers: “Some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapeños, and put them on one Ritz cracker,” he told me. In order to understand more about what it means to plant a church, as much for political as religious reasons, I turned to Rev. Rob Schenck, a former evangelical leader who was once a key figure in the anti-abortion movement and brought his ministry to Washington in 1994. He noted similarities between Wilson’s new church and his own past efforts to infuse the Capital with evangelical Christianity. Even Wilson’s reference to DC as “Babylon,” a depraved city in the Bible, was one he used when describing and fundraising for his work. “The narrative is, ‘we are sending God-fearing people into a godless culture,'” Schenck said, “and redeeming that culture, or reclaiming, it for godly values.’” Yet there was a key difference between Wilson’s foray into DC and his own. In 1994, when Schenck planted the National Community Church, also on Capitol Hill, he faced an uphill battle. Bill Clinton was president, and evangelicals were relegated to the fringes in Washington. Today, Christian nationalists occupy considerable power and influence—think House Speaker Mike Johnson and Project 2025 architect and OMB Director Russ Vought. “The government ranks from high to low are populated by many more evangelicals,” Schenck said, referring to the change since he moved to the city. “And among them, some of the most activist-oriented are the reformed. It’s a distinctly different atmosphere.” Indeed, powerful people in the Trump administration have close ties to Wilson and the TheoBros. Although he is a Catholic, Vice President JD Vance is connected to them through Chris Buskirk, who sits on the board of a TheoBro magazine and cofounded a powerful Republican donor network. Vance once posed for a photo with several prominent TheoBros, and last year, he spoke at the National Conservatism conference, where Wilson was a fellow speaker.   US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also has connections to Wilson. He attends a Nashville church in Wilson’s denomination. Last year, the magazine Nashville Christian Family ran a profile of Hegseth, in which he mentioned being a member of a “Bible and book study” that focused on the book My Life for Yours by Doug Wilson. Wilson’s new church is set to open in July, with pastors flying in from various places to take turns delivering sermons in hopes of capturing the attention of powerful DC Christians. “These believers are obviously culturally engaged already,” he wrote on his blog, “but we happen to believe that every form of cultural engagement needs to have a solid theological foundation,” without which, “cultural engagement tends to morph into something that resembles wind surfing on the various breezes of doctrine that tend to blow through evangelicalism. We don’t want anything like that.” In a podcast appearance this week, Joe Rigney, an associate pastor at Wilson’s church, went into more detail. He explained that he worried about a kind of complacency in the Trump administration, about administration officials who might rest on their laurels, saying to themselves, “‘We’re not going to trans the kids—the boss is all in on that.’ And they’re like, ‘Look, we’re doing it!'” But Rigney wants the new church to push them further. “I need a minister there who’s going to say, ‘Obergefell [the 2015 Supreme Court case that made gay marriage legal] is next. We’re coming for that.'” he said. “You calibrate the Christians in DC by the word of God—and not by whatever the present administration can tolerate.”

The White House has dropped a new trolling tactic—and many Catholics are not laughing. Less than two weeks after the death of Pope Francis, on Friday, the White House reposted on X a seemingly AI-generated meme that Trump shared on Truth Social of himself as the pope. In the eyes of many Catholics, Trump, who was raised Presbyterian and more recently said he’s a non-denominational Christian, has committed a grave act of blasphemy by posting the image. “There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr. President,” the New York State Catholic Conference, a policy and lobbying organization, posted on X. “We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us.” Dennis Poust, executive director of the Conference, told the New York Times the post was “disrespectful,” adding, “It’s never appropriate to ridicule or mock the papacy.” When reporters asked about the image, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, replied, “I hope he didn’t have anything to do with that,” referring to the creation of the image. (It was not immediately clear who made the image.) Dolan added, “It wasn’t good.” > Responding to general questions before Mass at his titular church this morning > in Rome, Cardinal Dolan spoke about President Trump‘s post on social media > dressed as a pope. @thegnewsroom pic.twitter.com/sF1zshVTP3 > > — Mary Shovlain (@maryshovlain) May 4, 2025 Michael Steele, former Republican National Committee chairman and a devout Catholic, wrote on X that the post “affirms how unserious and incapable he is. At 78 he remains a 10yo child, emotionally scarred and broken while desperate to prove he could be somebody. His problem: he can’t grow up to prove it.” Anthony Scaramucci, former White House Communications Director during Trump’s first term, who is also Catholic, wrote over the White House’s X post: “You are trolling and trying to trigger all of us. Especially us Catholics. But the arrogance and general stupidity and the disgrace that you represent will blow back on all of you.” Scaramucci followed up Saturday night with another post: “The dope of dopes not a pope.” Major Catholic organizations including the US Conference for Catholic Bishops, Catholic Charities, and Catholic Relief Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday morning. The Vatican also did not immediately respond. The post came a few days after Trump told reporters at the White House, “I’d like to be pope. That would be my No. 1 choice.” But he appeared to acknowledge he was joking, subsequently saying, “No, I don’t know, I have no preference,” adding, “I must say we have a cardinal that happens to be out of a place called New York who’s very good, so we’ll see what happens,” referring to Dolan. > Trump: "I'd like to be Pope. That would be my number one choice." > pic.twitter.com/VHB5VPdoV9 > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 29, 2025 As I previously wrote, a quick look at Trump’s biography shows he does not belong amongst the most revered figures of Catholicism, despite Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) claims otherwise: The man supports the death penalty; has (at least) five kids by three different women; and has been found liable for sexual assault, which he also famously bragged about on tape. The Bible explicitly prohibits all of these actions. Others in Trump’s orbit, though, appeared to further Trump’s idea, or at least dismiss it as a joke. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), wrote on X: “This would truly be a dark horse candidate, but I would ask the papal conclave and Catholic faithful to keep an open mind about this possibility!” Juanita Broaddrick, who accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault and supported Trump despite his own history, shared a 40-second long AI-generated video purporting to show Trump as pope. “Trump’s latest Epic troll is making the left insane,” she wrote. Several X users demanded answers from Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic who met with the pope just a day before his death. “As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen,” he wrote on X Saturday. A few days prior, Vance also joked about Secretary of State Marco Rubio taking on “pope” as his fifth title. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told some reporters that Trump “has been a staunch champion for Catholics and religious liberty.” The papal conclave to decide the next pope will begin on May 7. Given the requirements—which include being a baptized Catholic and an ordained bishop—you can be sure that Trump will not win this election.

Steve Deace, the host of an eponymous show on the rightwing platform Blaze Media, has built a brand around his brash and provocative personality. Deace has entertained his 52,000 YouTube viewers and 274,000 X followers by calling for violence against drag queens and LGBTQ people and ranting that the Democratic party is controlled by Satan. Those comments fit right in with those of the some of the guests his show hosts, who regularly dabble in antisemitism and argue that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. But just this week, Deace’s track record of extremist rhetoric and guests did not stop Vice President JD Vance from posing for a photo with him. The circumstances of the picture were unclear; Deace posted it on X with the comment, “Had to make a quick stop by the West Wing this morning.” > Deace‘s track record of extremist rhetoric did not stop the vice president. The extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch has helpfully rounded up some of Deace’s most colorful and violent statements from his last decade-plus of broadcasting. In February, he announced his intention to “punch Pride Month right in the balls. Hard.” In 2023, he called for the execution of drag queens, saying “pedo-groomers should be executed, by the way. After a fair trial, of course.” In 2022, he called the Democratic Party “a demonic construct, a satanically-influenced entity, and a death cult” and asserted that Democrats were “voting for dudes teabagging their hairy sacks on children at public libraries and public schools.” In 2020, he said, “I want to see antifa members hanging from gallows in Trump ties. That’s what I would like to see.” Deace’s regular guests include the TheoBros, members of a network of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their tributary of Reformed Protestant Christianity is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law. Joel Webbon, a Texas TheoBro pastor who believes the 19th amendment should be repealed and regularly posts about his conviction that Judaism is evil, has appeared on Deace’s show several times. In a March episode, Webbon explained that his antisemitic statements were justified because the Bible called for “hating the enemies of God.” He added, “I do not hate Jews, I wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity.” In an August 2024 episode, Webbon told Deace that he was an abortion “abolitionist,” which is to say that abortion should be penalized as murder. Another regular guest is Doug Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho, pastor and the patriarch of the TheoBro movement. In the past, Wilson has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence” and called male dominance over women “an erotic necessity.” On a Deace episode last July, Wilson mourned the loss of unapologetically Christian nations, including the United States. In January, Wilson told Deace he believed that senators questioning US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth were putting him in the “longhouse,” a reference to a rightwing internet meme about how modern social norms emasculate men. “The only thing worse than the patriarchy will be the matriarchy, I can promise you that!” quipped Deace. Wilson giggled appreciatively. (Hegseth, too, has strong ties to the TheoBros world.) The photo with Deace isn’t the first time Vance has dipped a toe into the world of the TheoBros. As I wrote last year: > Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris > Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher of TheoBro online > magazine American Reformer. (The publication’s cofounder, Nate Fischer, later > clarified to Mother Jones that Buskirk’s listing in the filing had been a > clerical error, and that he was actually a board member of American Reformer.) > In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful > Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon > Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? > None other than JD Vance. Cohn also surfaced this photo of Vance posing with a bunch of TheoBros in 2023. Vance isn’t the only politician hobnobbing with Deace. Last month, Deace devoted an entire episode of his show to an interview with TheoBro and Republican Oklahoma State Senator Dusty Deevers, who has said he believes America should be a Christian nation and wants to end no-fault divorce. Deevers told Deace that he hoped more Christians would soon be in public office, explaining that politicians “can actually be strong convictional Christians,” Deevers went on, who “lead according to the scriptures, and not be in violation of God’s word, and actually stand before him on Judgment Day and [have] him still say, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.'”