This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For a moment, Jacob Hannah saw an unprecedented opportunity to make Appalachia great again. In 2022, the Biden administration earmarked billions of dollars to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities. The objective was to lay down building blocks for the region to transition from extractive industries like coal and timber to a hub for solar and other advanced energy technologies, with a view to long-term economic, climate and social resilience. But on his first day in office, Donald Trump scrapped Biden’s clean energy and environmental programs, which he lambasted as woke, anti-American, liberal hoaxes. “We knew we were living in a historic moment, not just because of the amount of funding, but because the whole region mobilized to meet the moment,” said Hannah, 33. “It was a once-in-a-generation cash injection designed to prioritize extraction-based communities as part of the energy transition, which for the first time in almost a century made Appalachia very competitive. So to have it all taken away is deeply damaging and demoralizing.” Hannah, a fifth-generation Appalachian with a bushy beard and signature wide-brimmed hat, has been crisscrossing the country on a mission to raise philanthropic capital to limit the economic damage caused by the Trump administration taking a chainsaw to Biden-era grants. Hannah runs Coalfield Development, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Huntington, focused on rebuilding Southwest Virginia’s economy and social fabric through workforce training, job creation, and revitalizing abandoned buildings and mines in some of the most forgotten corners of coal country. People shop at the Wild Ramp, a nonprofit local farmers’ market.Michael Swensen/The Guardian Coalfield Development has trained more than 4,000 people—including many formerly incarcerated and/or in addiction recovery—over the past 15 years in everything from solar installation to drywalling and first aid. Yet, historically, federal grants for community regeneration efforts in Appalachia have been mostly top-down, project-based and short-lived. The 2022 cash injection came through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s landmark climate and infrastructure legislation, and was designed to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities over the long haul. > “These are not frivolous things: these are basic services.” It was the largest investment in Appalachia since the 1960s’ “war on poverty” under Lyndon Johnson. In response, Coalfield Development spearheaded a coalition of universities, unions, nonprofits, businesses, and local governments to create collective infrastructure and capacity, enabling coal-affected rural communities across the US access to more than $900 million of the historic IRA investment. Rural communities in Appalachia were on the verge of breaking ground on projects when the grants were paused or terminated by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by the billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk. The wholesale cull included the $3 billion Environmental and Climate Justice Program created in the IRA to tackle the climate crisis and environmental harms at a local level. A few grants have since been reinstated, but are subject to long delays—in part because so many staff at federal agencies were forced out by DOGE. Many remain the subject of litigation. Every single grant Coalfield Development was helping coordinate has been affected in some way. Kalob Smith removes mud from the tracks of an excavator. Michael Swensen/The Guardian The cuts have deepened existing mistrust in government, known colloquially as Appalachian fatalism, yet many of those interviewed by the Guardian blame Washington politics generally rather than Trump. “This party has taken away that funding from Appalachia illegally: That’s the stone-cold fact. But by the time those facts reach communities on the ground, it’s just so muddy. I think some are asking questions about why training is being shut down and why they didn’t get their SNAP [food assistance] benefits, but where they’ll find the answers is the big issue,” said Hannah. Huntington, the second largest city in West Virginia with 45,000 residents, was perhaps a perfect place to build a coalition for the massive IRA investment across coal country. Located on the Ohio river, it was once a major transportation hub for the region’s coalfields, but suffered major economic and social decline as the surrounding mines shut down—and then became an epicenter of the opioid epidemic. It sits at the heart of the Bible belt, which once voted loyally with Democrats but like many blue-collar regions is now part of the loyal MAGA base who believed Trump when he pledged to resuscitate coal country and put America first. Trump has won big in West Virginia in the past three general elections, securing every county in 2024 with an average of 70 percent of the vote—the highest percentage any party has won in the state’s history. His vote share was even larger in rural counties including Clay and Wayne, which Huntington straddles. The Guardian’s visit coincided with the Democrats drubbing the Republicans in several state elections—including the governor’s race in Virginia. It was also five weeks into the government shutdown, just days after the Trump administration announced that millions of Americans would not receive food stamps and Tesla shareholders approved a trillion-dollar pay package for Musk. The damage caused by Trump’s dismantling of Biden-era programs was visible all around Coalfield Development’s redbrick office, which is located in a former manufacturing hub between the rail tracks and the river. Next door, a multimillion-dollar redevelopment of a sprawling industrial site known as the Black Diamond warehouse has stalled—at first due to grant suspensions and more recently due to the federal shutdown slowing down payments. Coalfield Development is still waiting for close to $3 million in overdue reimbursements. An empty lot in Huntington, West Virginia. Michael Swensen/The Guardian The warehouse, which once manufactured military planes, jeeps, and coal trains, is being repurposed as a hub for sustainable industries and training. But all six EPA grants for Reuse Corridor, a new social enterprise to salvage and repurpose mattresses, electronics, and other materials frequently dumped in the Ohio River, were cut, effectively killing the business and with it countless job opportunities. Meanwhile, Solar Holler, a solar developer and installation company with 105 employees across Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Virginia, signed up for a new office in the warehouse as the business had been growing 20 percent to 30 percent annually. But tax incentives for residential solar, which accounted for 70 percent of the company’s business, will be axed at the end of this year thanks to Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget. Commercial tax breaks will end in late 2027. Solar Holler uses panels made in Georgia, yet Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions have caused supply chain delays and pushed up raw material prices across the board, as well as almost doubling the cost of solar energy on the market. The company’s forecast for 2026 is down from 30 percent to “roughly flat.” “The massive increase in costs ends up being passed down to customers,” said Dan Conant, founder and CEO of Solar Holler. “The IRA rollbacks are obviously disappointing but that said, no matter how hard you make it on the ground for people, solar is the cheapest form of power on the planet so it’s going to happen one way or the other.” Appalachian Voices is a nonprofit working with local communities—and in Washington, DC—on securing a just energy transition. In 2023, AV, which is part of the broader coalition with Coalfield Development, was awarded a half-million-dollar EPA grant to help five former coal communities in Virginia increasingly being hit by severe floods thanks to the climate crisis and the environmental legacy of mining. The grant was among those summarily terminated by DOGE. It remains the subject of class-action litigation brought by 350 groups, tribes, and local governments that claim the wholesale termination of the $3 billion environmental justice and climate program is unconstitutional. > “I don’t think people know who or what to trust, because both [political] > parties have failed us in big ways.” In Lee county, where 85 percent of voters opted for Trump and almost half rely on food stamps, AV had earmarked $40,000 for an asbestos survey in Pennington Gap. This was among a stack of grants secured by the community to demolish a derelict supermarket—a concrete, asbestos-ridden eyesore that frequently floods and cuts off neighborhoods from the main town—to create a green space that would mitigate future flooding. For small communities such as Pennington Gap, securing funding for revitalization projects is like a game of Jenga, and removing just one or two pieces can make the whole stack collapse, according to Emma Kelly, AV’s New Economy program manager. “People in Appalachia are used to being let down by the government, but this time we had the money. It was still taken away, and people feel betrayed.” A Department of Energy grant that the community hoped to use to install rooftop solar on public buildings that would save $400 or so in monthly energy bills—a reliable income source that could be reinvested in sustainability projects such as communal fruit trees and electric bikes—was also cut. “Regardless of who’s in power, there’s a lot of finger-pointing, while life gets worse for the common people and the oligarch class keep winning,” said Orville Overton, 34, a local business owner and member of the residents’ council. “I don’t think people know who or what to trust, because both [political] parties have failed us in big ways.” Hannah, the Coalfield Development CEO, walks towards the Black Diamond warehouse.Michael Swensen/The Guardian About 60 miles east, Dante, a sparsely populated former integrated mining community that was once the second largest in Russell county, suffers frequent power outages—including a four-day blackout during a major flood in July, and nine days after Hurricane Helene in August 2024. Dante’s share of the terminated EPA grant was tagged for a feasibility study on the old railway depot, once the hub of mining operations and the whole town. This is the first step needed to convert the depot into a resilience hub with solar panels and battery storage, a place for residents to charge their phones and keep medication refrigerated during the next blackout. The post office has been closed since July, due to flood damage. The only place still open for business in Dante is the volunteer-run mining museum. Dante is also currently without a fire station, after nearly $400,000 appropriated by Congress to replace the one demolished due to subsidence was rescinded by the Trump administration. “These are not frivolous things; these are basic services. And when you work hard for two or three years to secure federal funds, you expect it to be delivered,” said Lou Ann Wallace, Dante’s representative on the Republican-controlled Russell County Board of Supervisors. “I don’t think the president knew. I’m one of his biggest supporters, but we’re dealing with the ills of industry here, and we’ve got to be able to clean this up so our people in these hollers can have a quality of life.” Trump won 83 percent of the vote in Russell county in 2024 while Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor, secured 81 percent last month. Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said: “President Trump cares about our miners more than any other president in modern history—which is why he has implemented his energy dominance agenda to protect their jobs and revive the mining industry…we can maintain the safety of miners while simultaneously rolling back Joe Biden’s Green New Scam regulations that were killing their jobs.” Across Appalachia, people who believe in Trump will be hit hard by his wholesale cuts to Medicaid, Veterans Affairs, food aid, and education, among other public services. Simultaneously, the region is scrambling to save projects that would improve resilience and bring jobs. It’s a race against the clock, according to Hannah, to find enough money to keep afloat and help people keep faith. “The funding was committed by Congress, so we know the law’s on our side, and that we will eventually win back some of these grants,” Hannah said. “One objective was probably to remove confidence in the system, so we need to outlast what is a game of cashflow and the battle of morale.”

Kamala Harris is back…with a vengeance. The first excerpt of her forthcoming memoir, 107 Days, about her history-making presidential campaign after President Joe Biden dropped out, published on Wednesday morning in The Atlantic. And it is unexpectedly juicy for Harris, who is typically known to equivocate—and who, until now, staunchly defended Biden’s decision to run for a second term. In the excerpt, Harris repeatedly takes Biden and unnamed members of his “inner circle” to task, for what she alleges was their distrust of her ambitions; their failure to support her, and acknowledge her successes, as vice president; and their resistance to her growing popularity as Biden’s declined. “Their thinking was zero-sum,” she writes of Biden’s closest confidantes. “If she’s shining, he’s dimmed.” (The Biden camp does not yet appear to have commented.) Below are some of the juiciest topics she tackles. Biden’s decision to run for president again For the first time, Harris publicly admits that she should have considered telling Biden not to run for a second term: > During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider > not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the > same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again. Later, she characterizes administration officials as being “hypnotized” and reckless for failing to push Biden to drop out earlier, even as outside pressure was mounting: > “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d > all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I > think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a > choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s > ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision. Biden’s age Harris rejects the “narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity,” but concedes that he had gotten “tired”: > Here is the truth as I lived it. Joe Biden was a smart guy with long > experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On > his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising > judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, > Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. Relationship with the White House A vast portion of the excerpt features Harris’s complaints about deep-seated distrust she alleges Biden’s staff harbored towards her: > Because I’d gone after him over busing in the 2019 primary debate, I came into > the White House with what we lawyers call a “rebuttable presumption.” I had to > prove my loyalty, time and time again. > > > > When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to > whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a “DEI hire,” the White House > rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected D.A., top cop in > the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator > representing one in eight Americans. Later, she describes her frustrations with the White House communications team and their failure to adequately fight back against her bad press: > They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the > pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any > defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible. > > […] > > Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative > narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold > was that I had a “chaotic” office and unusually high staff turnover during my > first year…the first year in any White House sees staff churn. Working for the > first woman vice president, my staff had the additional challenge of > confronting gendered stereotypes, a constant battle that could prove > exhausting. > > […] > > And when the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle > seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked > down a little bit more. One example she references: The criticisms over her work tackling the root causes of migration from the Northern Triangle of Central America: > When Republicans mischaracterized my role as “border czar,” no one in the > White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I > had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had > achieved. > > […] > > Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had > proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Even > the breathtaking cruelty of Trump’s family-separation policy hadn’t deterred > the desperate. It was an issue that absolutely demanded bipartisan cooperation > at an impossibly partisan, most uncooperative time. > > > No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with. Harris also writes that Biden’s inner circle resented her growing popularity: > When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him > didn’t like the contrast that was emerging. As one example, she refers to a speech she gave on “the humanitarian crisis in Gaza” in Selma, Alabama in March 2024: > It was a speech that had been vetted and approved by the White House and the > National Security Council. It went viral, and the West Wing was displeased. I > was castigated for, apparently, delivering it too well. > > Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them > grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his > age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a > testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something > happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him. His > team didn’t get it. That’s the last line of the excerpt. It ends abruptly—almost as abruptly as democracy as we know it seems to have ended the day Trump was sworn into his second term. But it’s almost certain that we can expect more tea spillage when the book publishes, on Sept. 23.

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to its newsletter. The email came last fall while James Harter was on vacation with his husband in Quebec City, Canada. He was checking his computer in their RV when he read the no-nonsense subject line: Certificate of Pardon. He had no idea just how uncommon that email was—but in the moment, none of that mattered.  “The feelings were basically overjoyed relief,” he told The War Horse. “Just the sense of, maybe I could put what happened to me in my past.”  Nearly 40 years ago, Harter was court-martialed for having consensual sex with another man in his unit. He was convicted under the former Uniform Code of Military Justice Article 125, which forbade sodomy, defined as “unnatural carnal copulation,” and sentenced to a bad conduct discharge from the Army plus six months in two military correctional facilities: one in Germany and one in Kansas. He spent most of his time in isolation, on suicide watch.  “I just couldn’t understand how I’d gotten to this point,” he said, “where I was in prison with murderers because I had sex with someone.”  Last year, however, he finally got a chance at redemption when then-President Joe Biden issued a proclamation to grant a full and unconditional pardon to veterans with court-martial convictions under former Article 125. Harter applied right away.  Receiving the pardon on that early fall day, Harter said, “restored a lot of pride.” Only now does he understand just how unique he is to have received an Article 125 pardon.  More people have walked on the moon.  Documents obtained by The War Horse through Freedom of Information Act requests show that of the tens of thousands of veterans who were separated from the military due to their sexuality over decades, only 21 ended up applying for a pardon—and only four, including Harter, have received one. The numbers sharply contrast with the White House’s estimate that “thousands” of veterans could be eligible when Biden announced a year ago that he was “righting a historic wrong.” So much has changed since then. Both Biden and President Donald Trump have faced intense criticism for handing out controversial pardons.  Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have been erased under the new administration’s zeal to refocus the military on lethality. Thousands of transgender service members are being discharged and banned from serving. And the Pentagon is considering renaming ships, including the USNS Harvey Milk, named for the slain gay rights activist and veteran who was discharged over his sexuality, that don’t fit a “warrior” ethos.  While The War Horse had previously reported on the low number of pardon applications for LGBTQ+ veterans, records disclosed last month by the Office of the US Pardon Attorney are the first to reveal just how few have been granted: two from the Navy, one from the Air Force, and one from the Army. The records provided no other details and don’t explain why other applicants were denied. Harter is the only one of the pardoned veterans who has come forward to share his story. “I never expected to be pardoned,” he said. “But I don’t think it [the court-martial] should have ever happened to start with, so I felt like there was some redemption there.”  Harter was an Army staff sergeant before he was court-martialed. Courtesy James Harter A PALTRY PROMISE?  After the initial excitement over Biden’s Article 125 pardon announcement, it soon became clear to LGBTQ+ veteran advocates that many waiting for relief would be left out.   The pardon’s wording meant that it applied only to veterans who were court-martialed for violations of Article 125, or consensual sodomy, said Dana Montalto, associate director of the Veterans Legal Clinic at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School. “But there were so many other ways that [lesbian, gay, and bisexual] service members were separated or their behaviors criminalized when they were in service, and the pardon didn’t reach those,” Montalto said. “I think it is a step in the right direction for our federal government to be making amends, but it certainly was not a solution to the problem,” she said. LGBTQ+ veterans were often outed by fellow service members or caught up in military witch hunts.  “Additional charges were often weaponized against service members, whether they were true or not,” said Cathy Marcello, deputy director at the Modern Military Association of America, an organization of LGBTQ+ service members. “Circumstances might look very bad on paper, but might not reflect what actually is historically accurate to this person’s conviction.”  LGBTQ+ veterans were also regularly charged with Article 134 (indecent conduct or adultery), Article 92 (failure to obey a direct order), and other transgressions. Any of these additional offenses would make a veteran ineligible for Biden’s pardon.  Last year, The War Horse submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for Defense Department memos or reports to understand why the White House suggested thousands of veterans would benefit from Biden’s pardon. The agency denied the request, however, saying the documents were part of the decision-making process and therefore protected. In May, The War Horse once again tried to contact the Office of the Pardon Attorney and Department of Justice for comment on this issue and received no response.  Advocates say there is another major reason for the low numbers: The burden is entirely on the veteran to apply for clemency and prove that they qualify. Unlike some mass pardons, Biden’s action requires that each veteran fill out a form, which could be daunting or bring up painful emotions.  Peter Perkowski, legal director at Minority Veterans of America, said the administration could have made the process easier. “They could have put the onus on the Defense Department to review all the [Article] 125 convictions and change them if it’s appropriate,” he said, “or they could have sent letters out to people at their last known address.” Ultimately, he said, “there were a lot of things they could have done. They did none of it.” The White House hosted a Pride event on June 26, 2024, hours after Biden’s proclamation announcing pardons for many LGBTQ+ veterans.Abe McNatt DIFFERENT TREATMENT FOR COVID VACCINE REFUSERS  Earlier this year, Trump issued an executive order granting reinstatement eligibility, plus back pay, for more than 8,700 service members discharged solely for refusing a Covid vaccine. In contrast with the LGBTQ+ veterans, the Department of Defense stipulated that all eligible former service members discharged over Covid vaccines should be contacted by mail, email (if possible), and phone and invited to apply for reinstatement. And in May, the president pardoned a former Army officer who was court-martialed for refusing to obey Covid safety rules.   A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from The War Horse.  Perkowski can’t help but feel there is some bigotry at play. “There has been such a swift restorative justice action from the government to purportedly fix the mistakes the Defense Department made with Covid-related discharges,” he said. “Even though ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was repealed 15 years ago, that has never happened for this community.”  And pardons don’t automatically change a veteran’s discharge status, said Christie Bhageloe, director of the Statewide Veterans Project at Florida Legal Services. Even if a veteran gets pardoned, they still have to apply for a discharge upgrade to be eligible for VA and other benefits. The pardon—and a recent class-action lawsuit win—may help, but it isn’t a guarantee. And unlike with the Covid executive order, there are no retroactive benefits.  “Even if everything goes well and you get a pardon and a full discharge upgrade to honorable, it doesn’t bring back your military career,” Bhageloe said. “It doesn’t fix the fact that you were a volunteer for the military during an all-volunteer force and we essentially discarded them.”  The United Kingdom and Canada faced similar reckonings with the treatment of their gay and lesbian military members. But unlike the United States, both countries have made formal, public apologies and started funds for monetary reparations to pay LGBTQ+ service members who lost benefits after being kicked out of the military.   More than three decades after being court-martialed, Harter said he feels disconnected from other veterans because of his experience. Courtesy James Harter PARDONS AS A POLITICAL TOOL  Over the last year, both Biden and Trump were busy wielding their clemency powers, from Biden granting his son Hunter a pardon to Trump clearing political allies and contributors, including tax evaders and January 6 protesters.  “I think the difference is my pardon was done for a crime that no longer exists,” Harter said. “For crimes that still exist, there should be some other extenuating circumstance that justifies a pardon. Not just a political favor.” Eligible veterans are still able to apply for the Article 125 pardon on the Office of the Pardon Attorney’s website. A Department of Justice spokesperson failed to provide The War Horse with an update on the pardon numbers since the office responded May 1 to our original request. Advocates say Trump’s decision to ban transgender troops from the military may make more LGBTQ+ veterans hesitant to apply for a pardon.   “Over time, more people might apply,” Montalto said, “but I would imagine some people who might have considered applying no longer wish to do so.” For others, it doesn’t matter who the president is, said Perkowski—the loss of trust is irreparable. “They do not trust the government, regardless of who is in charge, to do the right thing for them,” he said. Even after Harter left the military, his conviction followed him. He had to explain it during every employment background check, and he believes the experience escalated his downward spiral into drug and alcohol addiction. Plus, he lost access to all VA health care benefits and education benefits that he was getting through his service and had to finish working his way through college on his own. He feels disconnected from other veterans, despite having served for eight years in the late 1980s—two as a tank crewman and six as a field artillery repair specialist—and earning an Army Commendation Medal.  Although he’s now been sober for 35 years and recently retired from his job as a travel nurse, “these charges have haunted me,” he said.  His journey to clear his name is still not complete.  Even though Harter now has his pardon, he still had to separately apply to get his bad conduct discharge changed to an honorable discharge.  He was told the process could take up to 18 months. Five months after he sent his application, he’s still waiting. The pardon may help his cause, advocates said, but there is no guarantee that his discharge will be upgraded. Nearly four decades later, it’s one last hurdle. Getting his discharge record restored, he said, would “help me return to that sense of pride.” This War Horse investigation was reported by Leah Rosenbaum, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHERE TO FIND HELP FILING FOR A PARDON OR DISCHARGE UPGRADE Veterans who believe they might qualify to receive a pardon for Article 125 offenses can request a pardon on the Office of the Pardon Attorney’s website at this link: justice.gov/pardon/apply-clemency.  If you’re not sure if you qualify, these legal clinics offer free help for LGBTQ+ veterans seeking pardons, discharge upgrades, and other services: * National Veterans Legal Services Program (National) * The Veterans Consortium (National) * Florida Veterans Justice Project (Florida only) * Swords to Plowshares (Northern California only) * Harvard Veterans Law Unit (Greater Boston area prioritized) * Yale Veterans Legal Services Clinic (Connecticut only) Or go to statesidelegal.org/stateside-map, enter your state, and click “Law School Programs” under “Organization Type” to find a free program near you.  Even veterans with a bad conduct or dishonorable discharge rating may still be eligible for VA benefits by filling out a Character of Discharge Determination form. Learn more here. 

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.

The Trump administration is investigating whether former President Joe Biden was so enfeebled that his advisers secretly ran the country on his behalf. House Republicans and Trump’s obsequious new pardon attorney are likewise probing whether Biden’s aides issued pardons without his knowledge. “Although the authority to take these executive actions, along with many others, is constitutionally committed to the President,” stated Trump’s executive order initiating the investigation, “there are serious doubts as to the decision making process and even the degree of Biden’s awareness of these actions.” If Biden wasn’t aware of them, the order states, the actions may be void. > Trump’s indifference to the job is the modern incarnation of a problem that > defenders of a strong presidency have always ignored. The country is only starting to understand the extent of Biden’s decline, with the truth somewhere between the fully-capable Biden his White House insisted on and the Weekend at Bernie’s presidency Trump has conjured. But the ongoing investigations by Trump and his allies must inevitably reckon with a separate but important question: What exactly is the job of the president, and how much incapacitation or delegation is too much? It is ironic that these questions are being pressed so forcefully by Trump, who himself is uninterested in much of the work of governing. The irony deepens when you consider that Trump and his administration are seizing power under the theory of the “unitary executive,” the idea that a single person, the president, embodies the entire executive branch and must have the power to hire, fire, and direct executive agencies as he desires. This theory so clearly animates the Trump administration that it is infused in the text of the executive order on the Biden investigation, especially in a section that makes an issue of Biden’s use of an autopen. The president, it states, “as the unitary head of the executive branch, holds tremendous power and responsibility through his signature… The Nation is governed through Presidential signatures.” That is not how American government is supposed to operate, but, as Trump’s own executive order concedes, the fantasy of unchecked presidential power only works if the president is actually in charge. The Supreme Court, now dominated by proponents of a unitary executive, is seizing on Trump’s illegal power grabs to further etch the theory into Constitutional law. From allowing Trump’s illegal firings of independent commissioners to take effect to greenlighting the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to troves of Social Security data in likely violation of the law, the court’s GOP-appointed majority is a embracing a vision of executive authority that overrides Congress’s laws and grows the powers of the White House. At the very moment that the country is grappling with whether the last president was significantly diminished, followed by a president with a clear disdain for much of the job, the courts continue to hand the office increasingly king-like powers on the theory that the president alone must run the show.  “The overall problem is that the unitary executive theory is a fiction,” says Christine Chabot of Marquette University Law School. “Unitary executive theory seems to think that, at its extreme, the president is in control of all policy decisions made in the executive branch. And that’s just an impossibility. It has been since day one. George Washington could never have controlled all the executive branch decisions that were being made when he was president, and it’s even more true now.” During Trump’s first term, it was well known that the president didn’t like to read, thus limiting his intake of memos and policy briefs. This time around, Trump’s disengagement may be worse. In May, Politico reported that Trump had only sat for 12 briefings with intelligence officials since his inauguration, a dangerous abdication compounded by the fact that he doesn’t appear to read the intelligence briefs that are produced for him five days a week.  There are many such signs of Trump’s detachment. In an ABC interview marking the first 100 days of his second term, Trump deferred the question of whether immigrants he has condemned to a notorious El Salvadoran prison were owed due process, saying, “They get whatever my lawyers say.” Of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man his administration mistakenly sent there, Trump appeared to believe his own administration’s false propaganda that Abrego Garcia had tattooed the transnational gang name “M-S-1-3” on his knuckles. The episode raised the question of whether Trump is informed by his aides or deceived by them. > Musk’s role suggests Trump is not fully in charge—not because he is incapable > of leading, but because he just doesn’t want to.  Then there is Elon Musk. In the first months of this administration, the president outsourced to the world’s richest man the project of dismantling his own government. He did this, reportedly, without keeping tabs on the operation and possibly misunderstanding its mission. Of Musk’s promise to cut $1 trillion in spending, Trump recently wondered, “Was it all bullshit?”  According to an astonishing Wall Street Journal report, Musk “often surprised senior administration officials with his decisions” and “made dramatic government cuts without consulting others, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.” Trump’s top aides learned second-hand what DOGE was doing, and Musk made “cuts at the Health and Human Services Department that some in the West Wing disagreed with.” There is surely an element of political opportunism in these leaks, distancing Trump from Musk’s most unpopular actions as he slinks away from Washington. But they are also an extraordinary account of a president who is not fully in charge—not because he is incapable of leading, but because he just doesn’t want to. Related THE LEGAL THEORY BEHIND TRUMP’S POWER GRABS The idea of an incapacitated or uninterested president whose administration is surreptitiously run by his aides gnaws at the logic of the unitary executive theory. The theory rests on the thin reed of two clauses in Article II of the Constitution, which vest executive power in the president and charge the president with ensuring the laws are faithfully executed. To add meat to these bones, Chief Justice John Roberts, whose judicial opinions have given constitutional life to the unitary executive theory, has also adopted a long-running argument that endowing the president with more power over the executive branch leads to more democratic accountability. This is the constitutionalization of the general idea that, as President Harry Truman put it, the buck stops at the Resolute Desk. If every member of the executive branch operates according to the president’s will and at the president’s pleasure, then voters know who to blame when something goes wrong. The executive power “acquires its legitimacy and accountability to the public through ‘a clear and effective chain of command’ down from the President, on whom all the people vote,” Roberts wrote in 2021. “The functional argument is its democratic responsiveness,” explains New York University law professor Noah Rosenblum. “That requires some amount, at least theoretically, of presidential involvement, engagement, invigilation…that’s supposed to go along with a sense that the president is genuinely seeing what’s going on.” Roberts himself has flicked at the necessity of an active executive. The founders, he wrote in his 2024 decision granting presidents broad criminal immunity, envisioned a “‘vigorous’ and ‘energetic’ Executive… for a ‘feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government.’” While Alexander Hamilton, whom Roberts quotes in that passage, wrote those words to argue for a single president over an executive branch run by multiple people, the need for a sole point of authority—much less an energetic one—is theoretically incompatible with a tired president whose aides run the show. Roberts’ further justified presidential immunity as a critical condition for the president to execute his duties “fearlessly.” The further you get from a vigorous president making all the decisions, the less important immunity theoretically is. On the other hand, the legal justification for the president’s powers—those all-important lines from Article II—requires neither an energetic president, nor does it frown upon inordinate amounts of delegation. The theory “is about the original meaning of the Constitution,” originalist scholar Michael Rappaport of San Diego University School of Law wrote in an email. “It does not mean that it is good policy,” though he says he believes it is. While “abuses of the presidency by presidential staff and infirm presidents are problematic and in many cases illegal,” he added, “illegal actions by some is not necessarily a reason to depart from the constitutional rule.” > The need for a sole point of authority is theoretically incompatible with a > president whose aides run the show.  Because it is impossible for one person to make every decision, “there is a more realistic version of the accountability idea of the unitary executive theory, where the President is in control at least of the larger, more important decisions,” says Chabot. “The problem is the Constitution doesn’t have great accountability mechanisms” after a president’s abdication goes beyond that point and the president is too checked out. Given their professed belief in democratic accountability, Roberts and fellow backers of the unitary executive theory might argue that the antidote to a president who won’t or can’t keep up with the job is small-d democracy itself; that the people might see an enfeebled president and so elect someone else. This is, in fact, what doomed Biden’s shot at a second term. But the mechanisms for democratic accountability are inadequate. The president can win with a minority of the popular vote, as happened in 2000 and 2016, while a second-term president will never face voters again. The Supreme Court’s own disdain for voting rights legislation, its approval of widespread gerrymandering, and its gutting of campaign finance regulations, belies the increasingly empty promise of democratic course correction. Thus, Roberts and the Republican legal movement envision an engaged president, but don’t actually provide an off-ramp when we don’t get one. Jeremy Rabkin, professor emeritus at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, doesn’t believe that Biden’s or Trump’s incompetencies raise fundamental questions about unitary executive theory. Rabkin wonders whether Biden was fit enough for the job even in his earliest months as president based on the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan and its aftermath. “But I don’t see any remedy for this—apart from expecting journalists to highlight the problem and move public opinion to demand some change at the very top,” he wrote in an email. “It wouldn’t be sensible to say, ‘The President should not be in charge of the military, because he might be too gaga to give sound directives to them.'” In other words, the constitutional grant of ultimate responsibility in the president should not be turned off just because some presidents rely too heavily on their staff. Unitary executive theory is built around the platonic ideal of a president—active and engaged at every level: responsive to the people, and naturally lawful. But presidents are not always vigorous, and they cannot possibly be on top of everything happening in the executive branch. Nor are they immune from the allure of criminal conduct—it’s no accident that the modern unitary executive theory was first cooked up by President Richard Nixon’s lawyers to shut down the Watergate investigation. “These guys profess to worship the founders of the Constitution, and yet the very premise of that document was that we have to design something for fallible people who are not perfect, and who get old and die and lose their energy,” says Rosenblum. “If men were angels, none of this would be necessary.” > The Republican legal movement envisions an engaged president, but doesn’t > provide an off-ramp when we don’t get one. While the unitary executive theory operates under the presumption of an ideal president, it incentivizes a far worse, even criminal, version. It assigns the president powers that Congress cannot touch, transforming our system of government from a power-sharing arrangement between all three branches to one in which the president will usually win out over the other two. In doing so, it promises democratic accountability in theory, but removes the Constitution’s central accountability mechanisms. By reinventing the presidency as an Oval Office king, the theory also recreates one of monarchy’s pathetic incarnations: a hapless king whose close ministers rule the realm. It’s not hard to imagine this situation. Again take Musk, whose hatchet job across the federal government breached authorities reserved for the cabinet secretaries. The Supreme Court is blessing Musk’s actions, even as reporting makes clear Trump wasn’t even aware of some of what he was doing. This is, of course, the exact situation Republicans contend occurred under Biden.  “This is a larger topic, one we all need to reckon with when it comes to the American presidency today,” Jake Tapper, who co-wrote a recent book that reported on how Biden’s aides concealed his decline, told the New Yorker last month, “and the degree to which one person is bestowed with so much power, and surrounded by individuals whose own power depends on that person maintaining power, regardless of whether or not it’s good for the White House, the party, or the country.” That a president might become senile, incapacitated, or simply uninterested in the job is not an unforeseeable problem for the unitary executive theory. In fact, it is baked into its history from the very beginning. The unitary executive theory claims its legal roots and historical tradition from a 1926 Supreme Court decision called Myers v. United States. The case arose when Frank Myers, a postmaster in Oregon, sued for back pay after he was illegally removed from his post during President Woodrow Wilson’s administration. But Chief Justice William Taft, a former president himself, wrote a decision that blessed the firing, seizing on the case to create a more powerful executive. Republican lawyers resurrected the case in the 1980s when they invented the unitary executive theory. It’s endorsement of the president’s broad removal power continues to lay the theory’s legal foundations, from Justice Anonin Scalia to Roberts. But this case undergirding the idea of an all-powerful president most likely came about because of an incapacitated one. The origins of the Myers case, and exactly why Myers was removed in an illegal manner, are mysterious. At the time, by law, presidents could only remove postmasters by having the Senate confirm a new one. But Myers was fired without Wilson nominating any replacement. As Rosenblum and Andrea Katz, a professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, detailed in a 2023 law review article, the likeliest explanation is that Myers was fired by Wilson’s underlings while the president was convalescing. Wilson suffered a severe stroke in October 1919, and in the months that followed his wife, Edith, took charge of the White House. While Wilson’s doctor, a close friend, fended off inquiries about the absent president’s health, Edith and his closest advisers functionally ran the country. “In the period surrounding the Myers affair, Wilson was rarely lucid and was prone to impulsive action and erratic, unmoored thinking,” Katz and Rosenblum write. It was the first lady who decided what was brought to the president’s attention, screening out all but the most pressing issues. At the time of Myers’ firing, Wilson’s limited faculties were focused on the League of Nations. It seems unlikely that the question of who should take a new patronage job in the Postal Service would have reached his bedside. > As Reagan lawyers, Justices Roberts and Alito helped increase his powers just > as he was shrinking from the job. “This would explain why Wilson did not seek to remove Myers by nominating a replacement: He was in no position to nominate one,” Katz and Rosenblum write, theorizing that “Myers’s removal may have been the accidental improvisation of a group of presidential advisers acting without a plan.” So with the Meyers decision, the Supreme Court authorized the presidential removal of an officer that Wilson himself may never have actually removed. But on a deeper level, the irony of the case is that it provided the basis for a fundamental shift toward a president-controlled government based on the possibly falsified actions of an incapacitated president’s aides. The question of Biden’s ability to run the government and Trump’s apparent indifference to the job do not reflect a new challenge to the unitary executive theory—they are simply the modern incarnations of a problem that defenders of a strong presidency have conveniently ignored from the beginning. The historical ironies don’t end there. Some sixty years after Wilson’s incapacitation, it was lawyers for President Ronald Reagan who first used Myers to push the bounds of presidential power and piece together the legal skeleton of the unitary executive theory. Scalia, a Reagan appointee, joined the Supreme Court in 1986 and, just two years later, penned a landmark dissent that conservative law professors used as the backbone of their new unitary executive theory. All this was happening at a time when Reagan, the oldest president until Trump and Biden, may have been suffering from early symptoms of Alzheimer’s. At the very least, perhaps like Biden, age was taking its toll while on the job. President Ronald Reagan at the 1986 briefing announcing the Supreme Court nomination of Antonin Scalia (left).Ron Edmonds/AP There is an unsettled debate about when Reagan’s Alzheimer’s symptoms began, and whether it diminished his ability as president. Journalist Lesley Stahl has written about an Oval Office meeting she had with Reagan in 1986, where she found a frail and silent man with a vacant stare. She was mentally preparing a broadcast to tell the country that the president was senile when Reagan seemed to “recover,” leaving her to decide she “couldn’t report on my observations.” Stahl later came to the conclusion that Reagan’s wife and aides were covering up his decline. Columnist Max Boot, who published an authoritative Reagan biography last year, said he had not encountered evidence of Alzheimer’s symptoms while he was president, but that his advanced age—Reagan left office at 77—meant that aides were running the show. “A lot of the administration decisions were being made by [National Security Adviser] Colin Powell, [Defense Secretary] Frank Carlucci, and [Secretary of State] George Schultz,” Boot told the Washington Post, “who were just meeting among themselves and presenting the president with fait accomplis.”  The Iran-Contra Affair, in which the Reagan White House’s National Security Council smuggled arms to Iran and used the proceeds to illegally fund the Contra uprising in Nicaragua, provides more evidence of the problematic combination of a declining president and an empowered executive. Reagan’s aides essentially turned the NSC, a presidential advisory council, into an extra-legal arms dealing operation, professing that executive power exempted them from Congress’ dictates—yet they did so in the name of a president who wasn’t fully aware of the scheme. Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, who started out as young Reagan administration lawyers, helped to increase Reagan’s powers just as the president himself was shrinking from the job. Today, they are implementing unitary executive theory on the court. The question of how to square an all-powerful president with the reality of an absent one is particularly salient as the two oldest presidents ever collide with the Supreme Court’s still-unfolding decision to turn this theory of expansive presidential powers into our new system of government. The justices themselves could conceivably be asked to reconcile the mess they’ve made. As Trump-backed investigations into Biden and his inner circle unfold, it’s possible that the Trump administration might declare certain of his actions or pardons void, or even seek to prosecute former Biden aides, on the theory that they criminally usurped the power of the president—whether the evidence warrants it or not. Such actions would inevitably end up in federal court, possibly the highest court. But at the end of the day, in any review of Biden-era decisions, it would be unlikely that the justices would pull back on the unitary executive theory. The theory might envision a perfect president, but come what may, it entrusts the nation to imperfect ones.

“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.

On Tuesday, former President Joe Biden gave his first speech following the end of his presidency in January, at the Chicago national conference of Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled. “Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity,” Biden said in a speech that ran just under 30 minutes. “That means making sure that more than 60 million Americans who live with disabilities are treated with dignity. That is who we are as Americans.” His successor may disagree. In addition to current President Donald Trump’s ableist comments—including ones about his own disabled grand-nephew—his Project 2025-inspired dismantling of the Department of Education, and the recent shutdown of the Administration for Community Living by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., greatly harm disabled people. “Fewer than 100 days into this new administration, they have done so much damage and destruction,” Biden said. “It is kind of breathtaking it could happen that soon.” Biden also noted his role as a co-sponsor of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act in the Senate, calling it “one of the most consequential civil rights laws in American history.” Moreover, the federal Social Security program has been under attack since Trump’s return to office. As former Social Security Administrator Martin O’Malley, who introduced Biden, said at the event, the Trump administration is spreading misinformation about undocumented people draining Social Security funds, along with false claims about dead people on the agency’s rolls. That hunt for benefits fraud, which audits suggest is quite rare, puts Americans’ well-being—including that of many disabled people—in jeopardy. “Social Security is more than a government program,” Biden said. “It’s a sacred promise.” Biden sees that promise at risk, he elaborated, not just from spurious fraud claims but other Trump White House actions—like mass firings at the already understaffed agency, and service cuts leading to growing lines and access burdens at the Social Security Administration’s remaining offices. Biden also criticized the disruptions led by Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” which he said had led to “a lot of needless pain and sleepless nights” for the millions of people, including disabled people, who depend on Social Security.

President Donald Trump has a new hobbyhorse: That his predecessor, President Joe Biden, didn’t legally grant pardons to people Trump wants to harass because the pardons were signed with an autopen, a device for replicating a signature, rather than by hand. > Trump has identified some signature requirement as the one rule presidents > must obey. “The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” he ranted on Truth Social just after midnight on Monday. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!” This argument is hilarious. Trump and his MAGA allies have embraced a lawless approach to the presidency. Trump’s executive orders, actions, and legal filings all point to an understanding of the president as far more powerful than previously understood, with king-like powers over the entire executive branch. The president, they argue, is unbound by rules over firing officials or the civil service, by criminal laws, by the legal interpretations of other agencies (including the Justice Department), by Congress’ power of the purse, and it would seem—in multiple cases—unbound by court orders. But in Trump’s midnight rage-posting, he has identified some signature requirement as the one rule presidents must abide by. The logic is absurd. Last summer, the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within their core powers, including the pardon power. Now, a president can literally trade a pardon for a bribe. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent, “Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune.” According to Trump’s new rubric, she omitted the golden rule that the pardon had to be signed by hand. Then, feel free to bribe away. According to Trump, he can appoint the world’s richest man to dismantle federal agencies, halt payments, cancel contracts, and enrich himself—all outside the purview of Congress. It’s an extraordinary assertion of executive branch power—the power to delegate, in effect, all the executive’s power, and then Congress’ to boot. But what he cannot delegate is the signing of his signature to an autopen? Usually the Trump administration is all about automation. They are reportedly using artificial intelligence to scan the social media posts of visa-holders and flag for deportation anyone it judges has made pro-Hamas or pro-terrorist comments. This dragnet is certain to ensnare people who merely criticized Israel’s tactics against Gaza or the United States’ support of that war—and that indeed may be the entire point. In other words, they are outsourcing a crackdown on free speech to AI. It’s not the administration’s only use of AI. According to multiple reports, AI is being deployed across the federal government to reduce the workforce and transform federal agencies into an AI-run bureaucracy. So not only has Trump outsourced his job to Musk, but Musk is now outsourcing his—and most other federal employees’—to a chatbot. Whether a job exists or a deportation is ordered or your data remains private will now depend on an algorithm and the few DOGE employees who utilize it. But outsource to an autopen? That’s a bridge too far. Trump, of course, isn’t preoccupied just with the autopen but with what he claims it means: That Biden was too senile to govern, and the automatic signature is proof that someone else was calling the shots. It is obviously proof of no such thing. Conversely, signing by hand is no indication that Trump has read all of the dozens of executive orders he has issued since January 20. (We’ve all claimed to have read the fine print, haven’t we?) But Trump, in his zeal to delegate vast authority to Musk and AI, obviously is authorizing things he doesn’t know about or cannot foresee—like the time his administration fired the team working to stop a bird flu pandemic and then scrambled to hire them all back. > Usually the Trump administration is all about automation. But outsource to an > autopen? That’s too far. There are practical concerns with the no-autopen rule. What if a president is away from his desk when a pardon must be issued in order to avert, say, a wrongful execution? What if he injures his hands and cannot sign? Does he lose the pardon power? The pardon power has been set out by the Supreme Court as one of the president’s “core powers” that cannot be proscribed—yet somehow, according to Trump’s logic, this power can be entirely undone by use of an autopen? To Trump’s credit, it doesn’t appear that he came up with this legal strategy. Instead, it seems to have emerged from the Heritage Foundation in an attempt to poke legal holes in Biden’s executive actions. Trump, according to remarks on Sunday, is so desirous to prosecute people Biden pardoned in the waning days of his administration—like former Rep. Liz Cheney, who co-led the January 6 Committee—that he intends to ask the courts to throw out Biden’s pardons on the strength of his autopen argument. “It’s not my decision; that’ll be up to a court,” he said. “But I would say that they’re null and void.” Perhaps Trump is imagining that Chief Justice John Roberts, the author of the decision granting presidential immunity, will finally draw a line on executive authority. Do what you want, Roberts might decree, but you have to sign the document by hand. Even for this Supreme Court, that level of absurdity is certainly too much.

In the 1932 presidential election, Franklin Delano Roosevelt wiped the floor with his Republican rival, Herbert Hoover. He won the Electoral College 472-59, and bested the incumbent with 57 percent of the popular vote. It was a decisive rout at a time of crises—a devastating depression, soaring inequality, rising fascism in Europe—and FDR embraced it, launching his New Deal. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” he declared in his inaugural address. “The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action.” President Donald Trump, who is doing his best to undo what remains of FDR’s legacy, made similar claims in January—and in his address to Congress on Tuesday—of his own, narrow, victory, itself a response to crises ranging from real (inflation, war) to entirely fabricated (an immigrant crime wave, the Big Steal). “My recent election,” Trump remarked during his inaugural address, “is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and, indeed, their freedom.”  He was hardly the only one invoking the m-word. “Trump is back with a big agenda, a mandate—and an axe to grind,” noted a Politico headline. Management and Budget officials justified their freeze on federal grants and loans based on “the will of the American people,” who had given Trump a “mandate to increase the impact of every federal taxpayer dollar.” Elon Musk, who has glommed onto Trump like a ravenous limpet, told White House reporters that “you couldn’t ask for a stronger mandate” to eviscerate the administrative state: “The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get.” Did they really? In his speech on Tuesday, Trump claimed—absurdly—that the November election “was a mandate like has not been seen in many decades.” In fact, Trump won less than half of the popular vote—which, given the turnout, amounts to less than one-third of registered voters. His margin of victory was the tightest since 2000, the fourth tightest since 1940. Subsequent polling showed solid majorities opposing his tariff plans, birthright citizenship ban, withdrawal from the Paris climate deal, January 6 pardons, and the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. (People hated that.) Even Trump’s own supporters deemed it unacceptable for him to impose loyalty tests on federal workers (58 percent) or to pardon friends or supporters convicted of crimes (57 percent). And this polling came before Trump unleashed Musk and his post-pubescent underlings on federal agencies like a swarm of diseased locusts. “In the US, usually claiming a mandate is done when a victory has been particularly large,” Terry Royed, a political scientist at the University of Alabama and co-editor of the 2019 book, Party Mandates and Democracy, told me via email. “Trump’s popular vote margin was not large.” And when you consider his Electoral College margin and House and Senate swings, “Trump didn’t do super-well there, either,” he added. > FDR claimed mandates, too. But unlike Trump, he was reelected by a wide margin > and his policies were very popular. Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Richard Nixon in 1972. Ronald Reagan in 1984. Those were big, decisive victories. But mandates? Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari, who scrutinized more than 1,500 presidential communications for her 2014 book, Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate, questions the entire premise. Take 1964, she says: “Some people were voting affirmatively for LBJ’s agenda, but what really fractured the Republican coalition and led to that landslide was the fear of [Barry] Goldwater and the unpopularity of the things he was saying. And even there, there’s a lot to choose from.” Azari views mandates as merely a “construction”—an idea that has been used by monarchs, dictators, and (small d) democrats alike to justify their power since at least as far back as imperial China, when dynastic kings asserted a “mandate of Heaven”—a divine right to rule. The Western notion of a mandat—as a command or judicial order—came about amid 16th century upheaval in Europe, as Reformation figures began challenging the hegemony of the Catholic Church. Before then, “authority and inequality were linked; men of wealth and noble birth were also in charge of exercising the functions of government. The vast bulk of the population was politically irrelevant,” the late German-American sociologist Reinhard Bendix—who was expelled from secondary school in 1933 for refusing to give the Nazi salute—wrote in his 1978 book, Kings or People. “After 1500, the rigid bond between authority and inequality loosened.” The first American president to use the mandate concept as a power flex, Azari says, was Andrew Jackson, a Trump favorite. Elected in 1832, Jackson set out to destroy the nation’s fledgling central bank, she wrote, “rationalizing his actions by claiming the president enjoys a special popular endorsement.” Eighty years later came President Woodrow Wilson, whose racist segregation of the federal workforce is echoed in Trump’s DEI purges—and who, in 1908, wrote of a victorious presidential contender, “Let him once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him.”  Presidents of both parties, including Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, have since touted their electoral results to advance their agendas. But Trump and his minions have taken the claim to outlandish extremes, as if winning an election can empower a president to defy democratic norms, federal law, and the Constitution itself. As if the people had elected a king. (Trump has even hinted of his own mandate from Heaven, declaring, of his fortuitous turn away from the assassin’s bullet, “I was saved by God to make America great again.”) Mandates are typically invoked, Azari has observed, when a president is on the defensive or when he seeks to vastly expand his powers. Both apply to Trump—whose approval ratings in reputable polls have never exceeded 49 percent—but also, interestingly, to FDR, who, frustrated by a conservative Supreme Court striking down some of his New Deal policies, declared his 1936 re-election results a mandate “to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself.” The following year, he backed a bill, which failed, that would have let him add six new justices to the court. (Trump’s toadies are calling for the impeachment of judges who rule against his executive actions.) Some within Trump’s brain trust are openly supportive of his authoritarian ambitions, viewing the dismantling of government as a counterrevolution against an antidemocratic bureaucracy. “We are living under FDR’s personal monarchy 80 years later—without FDR,” the billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen said on a podcast in December. Andreessen was paraphrasing his “good friend” Curtis Yarvin, a self-styled political philosopher of the tech right who has lamented America’s “kinglessness.” Now, he added, “you need another FDR-like figure but in reverse…somebody who is actually willing to come in and take the thing by the throat.”  But voters, for the most part, did not sign on to wipe out FDR’s accomplishments. Indeed, unlike Trump, FDR was reelected by a lot. He won 60 percent of the vote, and took every state except Maine and Vermont. Mandates may not be real, Azari emphasizes, but margins matter. “There was a lot of popular support for the New Deal,” she told me. “There’s not necessarily a lot of popular support for undercutting the New Deal, undercutting [Johnson’s] Great Society, and doing so in a way that has no procedural legitimacy.”  Will of the people? Hardly. Trump eked out a comeback win and kept himself out of prison—no more, no less.