Few have felt the whiplash of President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs with China more than American farmers. The US is the world’s largest exporter of agricultural products, from corn to soybeans, wheat, and cotton. And the largest importer of America’s farm products? China. The two countries have engaged in a back-and-forth series of escalating levies since Trump imposed tariffs on the country in April. Those tariffs were then deemed illegal the following month by a US trade court, and the administration is currently appealing that decision. One of the many farmers caught in limbo is Bryant Kagay, who raises cattle and grows soybeans, corn, and wheat. Kagay says he voted for Trump last year even though Trump promised that as president, he would place tariffs on the very products Kagay sells to China. But now, Kagay questions whether the president has a long-term trade strategy and is increasingly concerned about what the market will look like come harvest time this fall. “I like to think that my corn is really good, but as far as the markets are concerned, my corn doesn’t really look any different than anybody else’s,” Kagay says. When a farmer from a country with low or no tariffs can sell corn cheaper than Kagay’s on the global market, he adds, that farmer will win out. As the US and China continue negotiating, Kagay talks with host Al Letson about how tariffs from Trump’s first term affected his farm, why he voted for Trump in 2024 knowing tariffs could jeopardize his business, and why farmers are often hesitant to take government subsidies—yet often accept them anyway. 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. This interview was edited for length and clarity. Al Letson: So tell me about your farm. From what I understand, you weren’t living in this area, you weren’t living in Missouri for a while, and then you and your family came back. Bryant Kagay: Yeah, well, I’m the fourth generation on our family farm. I guess my great-grandfather, he started a very small operation and then my grandfather has grown it, really, mostly in the 60s and 70s and 80s. But yeah, following college, I had a corporate job, lived in several different states, but in 2018 my wife and I decided to come back and work into the farm, more in a management-type role, management trainee, if you will, type role. And I’ve continued to take more responsibility since coming back. How many employees do you have on the farm? Yeah, so it’s myself, my dad, my 87-year-old grandfather is still involved as much as he can be. And then we have two full-time employees and currently one part-time employee. So we’re a fairly small operation as far as manpower goes. What do you produce? So our main products, corn, soybeans, wheat, and then we also have a cattle operation. Many will refer to it as a cow-calf, so we have cows, produce calves from them, but then we also have, often referred to as a beef feedlot or a finishing operation that we feed cattle to get them right up to the point of them going to the meat processor for them to become the finished product. So you’re running a family business that depends on international trade. We’ve been following President Trump’s trade war with China. What would really steep tariffs mean for your farm? I think that what they mean for our farm is, it’s not that different from what they would mean to everybody. We live in a very global economy, a global market. So many of the products that we purchase, both on the farm and within our households and within any business you run, often come from overseas. Those trade networks and industries have been set up, many of them have been in place for decades. Chinese manufacturing, we’ve been making things in China for years and years, and they’ve gotten pretty good at it. They’ve got pretty good systems to get them shipped here. I think steep tariffs will, at least for the foreseeable future, will mostly raise the prices that everyday Americans and farmers spend on the things that they buy. So I think that’s how it affects all Americans. Now, how does it affect me differently? Well, many of the products I sell that get shipped into overseas markets or international markets, now they are looking to buy that commodity from somewhere else. And what I’m selling is a commodity. I like to think that my corn is really good, but as far as the markets are concerned, my corn doesn’t really look any different than anybody else’s. So if mine is now 20% higher or 120% higher, whatever these tariffs are, I’ll buy it somewhere else, because it’s the same stuff. Are you scared that if these tariffs continue that it will basically put you out of business? If China can buy soybeans from Central America at a much cheaper price than what they would buy them from you, how is that going to affect your farm in the long term, especially if these tariffs stay up? For our farm, personally, we try to manage things very financially conservative. So do I feel that a trade war would put us out of business? No, probably not, because if a trade war puts us out of business, it’s going to put a whole lot of other people out of business first, and there are business owners that have probably taken on more risk. And at the end of the day though, if there are, let’s just put it in simple terms, a hundred units of soybeans produced globally and China uses 50 of them, whether they get 50 from the United States or 50 from everywhere else, all the soybeans are probably going to go somewhere and get used. It’s that friction that gets added in the system for tariffs that, well, now instead of sending multiple large container ships to China with soybeans, I’ve got to send a hundred smaller container ships to multiple other countries to make that same sale. So you lose that economic efficiency the more hurdles you put in this trade deal. So what do you think of Trump’s reasons for imposing these tariffs? Well, it depends what day you get. So someday, one day, it may be, “I’m going to impose these tariffs because I want to bring American manufacturing back.” And you think, “Well, I could get behind parts of that in some industries.” But for that to happen, we’ve got to have consistent tariffs for a long time because I’m not going to come build a factory tomorrow, it’s going to take years. There’s whole supply chains that have to be built up around it, and if I’m an investor or a business owner, I don’t want to build a factory when tomorrow he may say, “Well, tariffs are off. We worked out a deal.” On one side, this long-term play that, “I want to get manufacturing and jobs back to the United States.” Which yeah, I think, I don’t know too many of us that would argue with that, but there’s a lot of hurdles to doing that and that’s a long-term play. And then the other side is, “Well, I’m just using it as a bargaining chip. I’m going to get him to the table and get better deals.” And he’s maybe done some of that. I don’t know. I’m not a hundred percent confident that he has a really clear vision for exactly how this plays out. I think, I don’t know, it’s been so uncertain whether, are these short-term, we’re going to try to get short-term deals, or is this a long-term strategic, we’re going to rebuild American manufacturing? And I don’t know where it is because it changes every week. And when we talk about, is it a long-term goal, I’ve done a lot of reporting on manufacturing in the past, and the thing that keeps coming to me is that it may be a long-term goal that is really unrealistic in the sense that I can’t imagine Americans going to work in manufacturing plants where the pay is not going to be the type of pay that… The reason why all the manufacturing is in different parts of the world is because their economies are different and people will go in there and work for a couple dollars an hour, whereas, here in America, people would need government aid to survive off of working in a factory if we were paying the same amount to workers that they do in China. So it doesn’t feel like a realistic goal to me, it feels like manufacturing at that scale is in our past and not really in our future. Yeah, I completely agree. I just think, yeah, if you want to talk automobile manufacturing or some of those higher level, more advanced type manufacturing. Yeah, and maybe there’s a national defense reason we need more computer chip manufacturing in the country, but if you think we’re going to have a Nike sneaker factory in the country, come on. These other countries have been doing this for decades. They’re good at it. They’ve got systems set up, they’ve got the people to work there. I don’t know any of my neighbors who want to go sit at a sewing machine and make t-shirts all day. That’s not what this country’s going to do. It’s probably not realistic. Yeah. So all that being said, in 2024 you voted for Trump knowing that this may be what he would do. How did you come to the decision to vote for him? That is a very good question, and it was something that I struggled with, to be a hundred percent honest, I was not thrilled with either candidate. I’m a little bit embarrassed that on the global stage, these are the best two candidates that we could come up with out of this great country. I was very uncomfortable with the Harris campaign on some social issues, some other things. I was very uncomfortable with the Trump campaign on a lot of, I guess, his personal character issues that I am very uncomfortable with. I don’t think it represents our country very well, what we stand for very well. Ultimately, because you look at what a president can do, I felt like his policies long-term were probably more in line with what I wanted, but this was not something that I was really sold on either way. So I did know that these trade wars were possibly coming. I also felt that his business experience, I guess I felt, much like he says, some of the time that he would use these type of things as a bargaining token, but at the end of the day, I do feel he’s got a decent business acumen and would recognize that, yeah, we’re not going to bring a bunch of manufacturing back to this country. Maybe we should use our power on the global stage to get some better trade deals. I was hopeful that amidst all the rhetoric and all the talk that he would use them maybe more wisely than I feel he has to this point. Let me run down some numbers for you here to… Because I want to focus up that you said that he’s got a good business acumen. In 1991, his casino, the Taj Mahal, bankrupt. In 1992, Trump Plaza Hotel, bankrupt. Castle Hotel Casino, ’92, bankrupt. Trump Hotels, Casino and Resorts in 2004, bankrupt. Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009, bankrupt. I could go on, there’s more. I would say that the way we have talked about Trump, both in the media… Because I believe that the reality show that he was on where he’s got that great saying, “You’re fired.” It’s myth building. It makes this idea that he is a really great business man, but the truth of the matter is that when you look into his business deals, I mean he had a college that the government had to sanction and shut down because it was ultimately deemed, and I may be putting it in colloquial terms, but it was ultimately deemed a scam. So I mean, how do you feel about that when you think about it, looking at it from this vantage point? Yeah, maybe I should have rephrased my previous statement as he has given us this idea that he has a lot of business acumen. I’ve always questioned whether he really does or not, because I see those things that you’ve mentioned. Apparently he’s been pretty good at running failed businesses and enriching himself, which that is what pointed to a lot of the character issue that I had voting for him to begin with. I mean, that’s one of the character issues. I still think it’s no secret. I live in a very red area and the people I talk to, I think there’s still some that they still are very confident that he has this really good plan that this is all going to work out for the better. And I guess I don’t necessarily… I don’t have that much confidence. I think he’s doing a lot of running his mouth without much of a plan, and maybe it’ll end up okay in the end if he throws his power around enough. But I’m a little more skeptical. So Bryant, your farm has been in your family for a very long time. How have you seen farming change over the years? There have been a lot of changes in agriculture over the long term. When I think about my great-grandfather, he would’ve started with some horse-drawn equipment, likely moved into tractors pretty quickly thereafter, but nothing on the scale of what we use today. There’s a lot of technology that we use to try to make sure every product we use gets put in the right place at the right time, and we are just better at conserving land and water resources as well. I’ve done a lot of reporting with farmers in the past, and the one thing that I think our listeners may not understand or know, is really like the economics of farming. So I’m just curious if you can break down for my listeners, what’s your income like and how do you get that income? Do you get a big check from delivering cows to market? How does all that work? I think from the outside people see, we deliver a lot of high value products, whether it’s right now cattle are at record highs. The checks we receive from selling cattle are very high. The checks we receive from selling grain can be very big. To the average American, that’s a lot of money. The issue is that we have so many expenses tied to producing that crop that really very little of it is profit. As far as the money, when I had a corporate job, I had a paycheck every two weeks. I had so much money that went into my bank account and that was very reliable and consistent. With this, it’s a lot more inconsistent and you find the business can pay for a lot of our living expenses. So my out-of-pocket expenses are less, but I don’t take just regular paychecks. Mostly what we do is we take our profits and invest those back into the business through land and equipment that it’s like this business has it’s built in 401(K) that you’re investing in assets all the time and eventually you hope to get a pretty big asset base, but you don’t do it through collecting a lot of cash in your bank account. It goes elsewhere. When it comes to competition, it seems to me that you are dealing with different factors than your dad had, than your grandfather, than your grandfather had. And I’m thinking of specifically with the rise of big agriculture and these big company farms that I would imagine make it hard to compete because of the resources that they have. Yeah, I think what’s often referred to as corporate farms probably get a lot of bad press. I think there can be some confusion in just because you’re a really large farming operation doesn’t mean it’s not still family owned and operated, but it may not still have that same family feel that I feel our operation does. As you get bigger, you do have to put some corporate structure, mid-level managers, a lot more process and procedure in place. We have seen over the past 10 years, especially some of the very biggest producers have continued to grow, and I think the economics have worked out for them to do that. And they’ve really built systems and as equipment gets bigger, they’re just able to cover a lot more acres. I think for our operation, we decided that our way to improve and build for the future was not necessarily to try to achieve scale at all costs, but to try to focus more on a more diverse operation and also just to produce, let’s say, higher quality over quantity, let’s put it that way. Yeah. So take me back to 2018 when President Trump imposed tariffs on China. This is right around the time when you are starting to come back to the farm. How’d that affect you and your family? Yeah, so that was an interesting year. We had a pretty severe drought that first summer I came back and then trade war with China on top of that. So it was a pretty rough year that first year, but I guess I was still getting my feet under me. So maybe I didn’t fully grasp, I just thought that was normal, but that first trade war, it did severely affect the price of soybeans, primarily because China is such a huge buyer of US soybeans. We produce a lot of soybeans, and when your largest customer, the harder you make that to do trade with them, that directly affects our bottom line. And then on top of that, they come through with these direct payments from the government that I think are a touchy subject amongst farmers. I’m not going to tell you we turned ours away. You feel like it’s a competitive market. You can’t reject it on principle, but at the same time, I don’t think any of us feel like that’s how we want markets to operate. We try to be self-sufficient and run our business in a way that can be profitable and let me do that. I don’t need the government to come in and write me a check to make sure I stay in business. Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask you is why do you think it’s a touchy subject? Well, I think if you ask many people, in the parts of the country I live, about welfare programs, SNAP, they might look at those with a negative light. This idea that, “Hey, I work really hard to support myself. I don’t need the federal government coming in and doing that for me.” And then all of a sudden I’m a farmer and I’m taking this check from the government because government-induced tariffs reduce the value of my product. At the same time, I don’t know any farmer who turned theirs away who said, “Well, I don’t believe in it, so I’m not going to accept it.” We all took it, but I ultimately think it’s really those programs aren’t administered very well on who actually needs them the worst. And also if you give all a certain number of farmers in the same area, a whole bunch of money, it’s no different than the COVID payments that drove a lot of inflation. You can’t just hand out a bunch of money and not have other effects in the economy. And I think we saw that as well through that. So there’s a lot of debate about whether those payments actually helped or hurt, and I’ll let economists argue over that. The thing that stands out for me when I think about those payments is that when Trump did it, the left complained. And when Biden did it, the right complained. To me, what it tells me is that America has turned politics into sports. Maybe neither party is functioning or serving Americans particularly well, but because of team loyalty, people just go with it and sometimes they vote not for their interests, but for the team that they represent, their home team, the thing that they feel strongly about. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of reasons that our political system has drifted this way. I live in a congressional, like a house district that there’s virtually zero chance that it would ever flip to blue. So I think our incumbent, as long as he continues to say and do right-leaning things, he’s never going to be challenged. And he’s never going to be held to account for how much he actually accomplishes because, “Hey, he’s on my team, so I’m not going to go against something that my team wants.” But it’s something that American politics really has to figure out. I think we continue to go through these cycles where really nothing really happens. And I just think with this many smart people, we have to be able to come together and come up with solutions that maybe the edges of both sides are not thrilled with, but ultimately move our country forward. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to get there, but I too am very frustrated with this polarized, “I pick my team. The other team can do nothing right and my team can do nothing wrong.” Because we just know that’s just not how it works, and it’s just not true. I’m not confident enough in my own abilities, knowledge, biases, to think that I have all the solutions to make all this better. I know we need both sides to be able to come together, but our political system, our primaries, there’s so many reasons why that doesn’t happen. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to break, but you just see these presidential elections that are so evenly split, so much urban rules, so much class-based voting, and it’s not good for our country, and we do need some leaders who can really bridge that and try to bring people together for a greater good. You just gave a great campaign speech. I’m just saying. You are looking for an answer and I think you might be it. I’m just saying. Bryant Kagay, thank you so much for talking to me, and thank you for being open, man. You just have a good conversation. I am going to be thinking about this conversation for days to come. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I enjoy it. I try to be open and honest and I appreciate those kind words. I try to be a reasonable voice amidst all the polarization, so thank you.

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.

The American people have spoken. Donald Trump is the 47th president of the United States. At noon Monday, Trump himself spoke, swearing—not especially credibly—that he would “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” A lot of other Americans spoke to get us here, too. More than four years ago, at the very same Capitol where Trump was just sworn in, his supporters spoke. “Hang Mike Pence,” they said. Just three weeks later, Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, spoke, journeying to Mar-a-Lago to talk directly to the disgraced former president and to pose obsequiously for the cameras. Sen. Mitch McConnell spoke after Trump’s second impeachment trial, declaring that Trump’s actions had been a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.” But the Senate minority leader kept speaking. He insisted that the Senate no longer had any power to convict Trump or to bar him from once again seeking office. Forty-two of McConnell’s Republican colleagues spoke in agreement, voting to acquit Trump and to allow his political career to continue. Trump, of course, never stopped speaking, and he soon announced another run for president. Then, in quick succession, the prosecutors all spoke. Merrick Garland announced he was appointing Jack Smith, who produced two speaking indictments against the former president. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg spoke, charging Trump with 34 felonies that may, or may not, have actually been felonies. “This office upholds our solemn responsibility to ensure everyone stands equal before the law,” Bragg declared. In Georgia, Fulton County DA Fani Willis spoke, charging Trump and his cronies in a 98-page RICO indictment. The Colorado Supreme Court spoke, declaring Trump ineligible to run for president. The US Supreme Court spoke, and—unanimously—said the Colorado court was wrong. So then Republican primary voters spoke, choosing Trump as their nominee. New York judges and juries spoke—declaring Trump liable of sexual abuse, defamation, and fraud, and convicting him in Bragg’s criminal hush-money case—but voters seemed not to be listening. In Georgia, a judge spoke, blasting that state’s prosecutors’ “tremendous lapse in judgment” and “odor of mendacity” in a ruling that would ultimately derail Trump’s trial there. SCOTUS spoke once again, awarding Trump broad immunity and sending Smith back to the drawing board. In Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon spoke, announcing that Smith’s appointment was, somehow, invalid from the very beginning. In the meantime, another special counsel, Rob Hur, had spoken, explaining that he wasn’t going to charge Joe Biden with crimes because, in part, Biden seemed to be “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden’s supporters very much did not want to listen to that—at least until Biden himself spoke at a debate and removed all doubt. Kamala Harris spoke, and briefly restored joy. But she’d spoken before, telling voters that “Bidenomics is working.” Voters disagreed, and they disagreed even more when Harris said there was “not a thing that comes to mind” that she would have done differently than Biden. Even as Biden seemed to slowly disappear, he, too, kept speaking—at times in ways that were nearly impossible to comprehend. “We gotta lock him up,” Biden said about Trump. “Politically lock him up. Lock him out.” Days later, Biden called some number of Trump’s supporters “garbage.” Then Biden’s staff spoke about apostrophes, while Trump rode around in a garbage truck. On Election Day, the voters finally spoke, and a plurality said that Trump should return to the White House. Most notably, the people of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona all spoke, supporting the former president whom they’d rejected four years earlier. Smith spoke again, conceding that his cases against Trump were officially over. In New York, Bragg—along with Judge Juan Merchan—pushed on, but there was little left for them to say. With SCOTUS’s blessing, Trump’s hush-money sentencing went forward. Sort of. Merchan granted the incoming president an “unconditional discharge,” allowing him to return to the White House with no criminal punishment whatsoever. Which brings us back to Inauguration Day. “The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” Trump said to applause, shortly after taking the oath. “The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end.” We’ll soon discover whether he was speaking truthfully.

When the longtime state representative serving her district in north-central New Mexico retired in early 2020, science educator Anita Gonzales wondered who would replace him. Then she asked herself, “Why not me?”  Although she’d occasionally visited the state Capitol in Santa Fe to lobby for issues that mattered to STEM students and teachers, Gonzales didn’t feel as though she had the background for politics, especially as the working mother of a then-8-year-old son. But the Democratic caucus in the legislature was changing—recruiting more women and people from the working class. “I could see a possibility of me serving,” Gonzales recalls, “because there were people who looked like me.”  That first race was a heartbreaker. Gonzales didn’t know the logistics of running a campaign—how to find a campaign manager or increase her name recognition—and lost her primary to a local rancher by a mere 62 votes. But she didn’t give up. This past November, in her third race to represent her hometown district of Las Vegas, New Mexico, she won a two-year House of Representatives term. “Seeing my name on a ballot with Kamala Harris—it was definitely a moment for me,” Gonzales says. “It was a very overwhelming feeling to be part of a movement historically.” In a mostly bleak election for American women and their rights, New Mexico was an unexpected bright spot. Even as Harris lost her historic bid for the White House, voters in the state elected 60 women to fill the legislature’s 112 seats, giving New Mexico the largest female legislative majority in US history. With the addition of 11 seats, women now make up nearly two-thirds of the state House of Representatives and just over a third of the Senate. Three out of four Democrats elected to the House on November 5 were women. The strong showing was more than just a balm for Democrats’ shattered spirits; it could have very real consequences for reproductive rights far beyond the state’s borders. In recent years, New Mexico has become a progressive stronghold, particularly for abortion and gender-affirming health care in the Southwest since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That role as a reproductive haven is likely to be even more important as Donald Trump assumes the presidency for a second time.  > The strong showing was more than just a balm for Democrats’ shattered spirits; > it could have very real consequences for reproductive rights far beyond the > state’s borders. Female legislators already have made enormous gains by putting progressive ideas into policy in the state. Since 2018, when New Mexico first elected a female majority to the House, legislators have implemented near-universal free child care, paid sick leave, free school meals, and medical aid in dying. They also codified the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions into state law so those protections will stand if the act is gutted at the federal level—as Trump allies have vowed to do—offered a child tax credit, raised teacher salaries 20 percent, and repealed the state’s pre-Roe abortion ban.  In the legislative session that begins Tuesday, lawmakers are expected to take up paid family medical leave, increased funding for early childhood education, and Medicaid reimbursements for birth centers and behavioral health care—as well as deflecting whatever attacks the new Trump administration throws at them. “There’s a chance for me to help protect my girls from legislators and from laws that want to control their bodies,” says Sarah Silva, a longtime community organizer and first-time candidate who was elected to represent the Las Cruces area in the House. “There’s an opportunity for me to protect immigrant families here on the border. There’s an opportunity for me to make sure that families have every opportunity to get their needs met.”  More than that, the decadelong effort to transform New Mexico’s legislature—and the impact that transformation has had on the state’s political priorities— holds important lessons for national Democrats demoralized by the 2024 results. “What you pay attention to grows,” Silva says, “and the [New Mexico] Democratic Party paid attention to investing in and developing women, and women of color, to lead. And now, here are the fruits of that.”  The remaking of the New Mexico Legislature began with a sobering defeat. Almost exactly 10 years before voters rejected Harris—on November 4, 2014—the Democratic Party lost control of New Mexico’s House for the first time in 60 years. In an election that saw Republicans take control of a record two-thirds of state legislative bodies nationwide, New Mexico’s GOP picked up five seats to secure a 37–33 majority in the House. (The state Senate, where no members were up for reelection, remained under Democratic control). Republican Susana Martinez was also reelected as governor after one of the most negative ad campaigns of the election cycle. In the aftermath of that debacle, Democrats elected a new leader to represent the party in the House, Rep. Brian Egolf of Santa Fe, a father of two daughters who had successfully sponsored legislation to prohibit sex-based wage discrimination. In the days after the election, he started looking for a chief of staff. “I asked all of the people that I trusted most in politics,” he recalls, and one name kept coming up: Reena Szczepanski, the executive director of a training program for Democratic women interested in running for office, Emerge New Mexico. “She was my first hire,” he says. A former drug policy advocate with two small children of her own, Szczepanski—like her new boss—believed that the key to Democrats retaking the House was to recruit candidates who reflected the experiences of the people they represented—and understood their real-world struggles. “You didn’t see a lot of working parents” in the legislature, Szczepanski recalls. “You didn’t see a lot of folks that worked regular 9-to-5 jobs.” In the preceding years, the proportion of women serving in the House had hovered around a third; in the Senate, it was even lower. The best way to rebuild Democrats’ majority, she and Egolf figured, was to “do it with women and people of color at the forefront.” Not long after assuming his new role, Egolf invited leaders from New Mexico’s progressive nonprofits and labor unions, as well as campaign managers and consultants, to his office. “I asked them to, for the first time in the history of our state, cooperate on candidate recruitment,” he recalls. That meant unions supporting a nonprofit’s candidate in one district and nonprofits lending their support to the unions in another. > “You didn’t see a lot of working parents” in the legislature. “You didn’t see > a lot of folks that worked regular 9-to-5 jobs.” Then, he and Szczepanski embarked on “a really intentional effort to find candidates in all [the state’s] competitive districts,” Szczepanski says. “And one of the reasons that that was a successful effort was because of Emerge.” Emerge New Mexico is part of a national training program for Democratic female candidates that got its start in San Francisco in the early 2000s and Harris’ first run for office. Running for district attorney against a male incumbent backed by the city’s powerful Democratic machine, Harris relied on a network of accomplished and well-connected friends who were passionate, and practical, about helping women get elected. After she won, those same supporters took the lessons of her campaign and designed an intensive program aimed at giving women—particularly women of color—the nitty-gritty political skills, resources, and networks to run successful campaigns. Emerge soon expanded into Arizona, then Nevada and New Mexico, and eventually into 27 states. Interest exploded in 2016 after Hillary Clinton’s run for president—and perhaps even more so after her defeat. “We had women who woke up the next day and said, Okay, if not Hillary, then who? It has to be me, I have to be the one stepping up,” says Emerge’s current president, A’shanti F. Gholar. “And we got inundated with women who were wanting to make change.”  Today, Emerge is credited with helping to create female legislative majorities in Arizona and Nevada as well as New Mexico and to narrow the gender gap in Maine, Oregon, and California. In November, the organization had a 68 percent nationwide win rate among its “New American Majority” candidates: women who are racially diverse, young, unmarried, and/or queer. “These are people who look like America,” Gholar says, “and keeping that in mind when they’re doing their work is why they’re so successful, because women’s issues are communities’ issues.”  Szczepanski went through the Emerge New Mexico program in 2008 and became its executive director a couple of years later. When she began searching for candidates in competitive districts, she drew in part from her list of Emerge alumnae: a retired teacher, a single mom and Air Force veteran, a physical therapist raising a child with autism, a community organizer and daughter of immigrants, young people, parents, and grandparents. Those recruiting efforts quickly paid off. In 2016, two years after losing control to the GOP, Democrats retook the New Mexico House by a 38–32 majority, with female candidates accounting for six new seats (including five who had been trained by Emerge). In 2018, a majority of Democrats elected to the state’s House were women; two years later, women won an outright majority in the chamber. Most of them went through the Emerge program; in this year’s legislative session, three-fourths of the Democratic women serving in New Mexico’s House—a quarter of all lawmakers—are Emerge graduates. These include newcomer Gonzales and Szczepanski herself, who won Egolf’s seat when he retired in 2022 and was recently chosen to serve as House majority leader. The state Senate, too, has seen more women elected each year—in 2024, twice as many as in 2014—though change in that chamber has been slower. Emerge has contributed to impressive gains for women in statewide and federal offices as well, including ex-US Rep. Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, and state Supreme Court Chief Justice C. Shannon Bacon. The number of women elected by New Mexico Republicans, however, has remained stagnant—though for the first time, a woman, Rep. Gail Armstrong, will serve as the party’s House leader. That disparity compared with Democratic women reflects national trends, says Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. She notes that while female candidates are approaching parity with men in the Democratic Party nationwide, they make up a far smaller proportion of GOP candidates—in part because of an aversion to targeted training programs like Emerge. “Republicans just don’t have the same infrastructure built to both recruit and then support women specifically,” Dittmar says. Anita Gonzales with her now-13-year-old sonDoug Cavanaugh In New Mexico, female lawmakers quickly proved that they were more than performative symbols of diversity. As their numbers grew, “you started to see the legislative process change dramatically,” Egolf says, as well as shifts in the broader legislative culture, with lawmakers cracking down on issues like sexual harassment. Democrats began chalking up victories on issues that had long defied progress—for example, moving the state from 49th in the nation in child poverty in 2018 to 17th by 2024. And when it became clear that Roe v. Wade would be overturned, lawmakers took decisive action, repealing the state’s pre-Roe abortion ban and then passing a shield law to protect physicians from investigations by other states. Another sweeping statute—co-sponsored by Szczepanski during her first term in the House—prevents New Mexico cities and counties from enacting abortion bans. Protecting reproductive and gender rights is an even more urgent priority as Republicans take over the White House and Congress. But the GOP’s inroads among Hispanics, especially men, in the November election has put Democrats on alert: They also need to prioritize broader issues affecting working-class voters. In the historically Hispanic land-grant communities of northern New Mexico, House Speaker Javier Martínez says, the margins of victory for Democrats were the narrowest he’s ever seen. “We have to keep our commitment and our focus on ensuring that we are delivering for people in ways that are meaningful,” Martínez says. > As the number of women grew, “you started to see the legislative process > change dramatically,” as well as shifts in the broader legislative culture, > with lawmakers cracking down on issues like sexual harassment. Democrats note one major barrier still discouraging women and other diverse candidates from serving in the statehouse: New Mexico remains the only unsalaried legislature in the nation. Lawmakers are reimbursed only for their mileage and expenses during the legislative session (though this year, for the first time, they will have paid district aides). When she decided to run for office, Anita Gonzales had to come to terms with the fact that she might not ever be paid for the work—a difficult reality to face as a working mother. “If I don’t get to possibly benefit from future changes [around salary], hopefully, someone else will,” she says. In the meantime, “I think it’s important to have a legislature that reflects our state, and that includes the working class.” Among the issues Gonzales is eager to tackle on behalf of women and working-class families more broadly: expanding the health care workforce in her rural corner of the state, improving public infrastructure, and increasing access to firefighters in a region that suffered the largest wildfire in state history. “I really thought this was the time we would have our first female president,” Gonzales says. But even with Harris’ loss, she adds, she feels inspired by the fights—and, she hopes, victories—ahead. “I’m excited at the opportunity to bring meaningful change.”

Jack Smith‘s final report on Donald’s Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election doesn’t contain much new information, but what timing it has. Released around 1 a.m. Tuesday—less than a week before Trump’s inauguration—the document takes aim at Trump’s and his lawyers’ contention that the end of Smith’s prosecution amounts to the “complete exoneration” of the president-elect. “That is false,” Smith writes in a letter included with report, pointing out that the cases against Trump were dismissed not because he was acquitted, but simply because he won an election. Smith makes it as clear as he can that the sole reason he dropped the January 6 case—along with the separate case regarding Trump’s attempts to hang on to classified documents he removed from the White House—was a Justice Department policy that bars prosecuting a sitting president. “The Department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a President is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution,” the special counsel, who resigned last week, wrote in the concluding lines of the report. “Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency, the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.” It’s normal for federal prosecutors to determine they can convict people they charge; they rarely bring cases they expect to lose. But this is the first time that prosecutors have asserted, just days before inauguration, that they would have been able to convict the incoming president of felonies. Trump clearly hopes that his return to power marks the end of January 6 as a blight on his record. He even seems to view his reelection as validating his lies about his 2020 defeat. Smith’s report reads like an attempt to ensure that Trump, despite avoiding criminal conviction in the matter, will never be free of responsibility for causing a violent attack on Congress in an attempt to illegally retain power. Even in a footnote explaining why he decided not to charge Trump with violating an anti-riot law or conspiring to impeded or injure an officer of the United States, Smith states: “The Office also had strong evidence that the violence that occurred on January 6 was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, and that he and his co-conspirators leveraged it to carry out their conspiracies.” The report also suggests that Smith was eyeing criminal charges against some of the six co-conspirators mentioned, but not named, in Smith’s August 2023 indictment of Trump. “The Office’s investigation uncovered evidence that some individuals shared criminal culpability with Mr. Trump,” the document says. It also notes that the investigation found one of the conspirators “may have committed” unrelated crimes, which it referred to a US attorney’s office. While not named by Smith, the alleged co-conspirators are identifiable. They include Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer; Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official; and former Trump lawyers John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, and Sidney Powell. Media reports have also identified Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn as another uncharged co-conspirator. All have denied wrongdoing in the case. It’s not clear which of these individuals Smith considered charging or which he believes may have committed unrelated crimes. Smith wrote that his report “should not be read to allege that any particular person other than Mr. Trump committed a crime, nor should it be read to exonerate any particular person.” Trump responded to the report in series of posts early Tuesday morning that called the findings “fake” and attacked Smith. “Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” Trump wrote in one of his early morning posts. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!” It’s possible to argue that it’s unfair for Smith to insist he would have convicted Trump at trial, when he was unable to actually get either case before a jury. That complaint would be stronger if Trump had not worked so openly and aggressively to delay his trials until he could avoid them entirely by winning the election. Still, Smith’s report, in asserting Trump’s guilt, highlights the epic failure by the federal justice system to resolve the issue of Trump’s criminal responsibility for subverting the 2020 election before the next one was held. Critics can fault Attorney General Merrick Garland’s slow start on a high-level January 6 investigation, the partisan Supreme Court’s wish to create a presidential immunity doctrine that served Trump’s interests, or the ease with which rich defendants can slow cases. In any event, the system failed. The result is a tragedy for American politics.

Samuel Anthony turns his phone camera around to show me the view from his family home in Sierra Leone. He steps out to a veranda overlooking a carpet of lush green trees dotted with houses that merge with the ocean in the distance.  “This is how the majority of people live in Sierra Leone,” Anthony tells me, pointing nearby to “pan body” single structures made of zinc. “In America, we call them camper homes.” The landscape, we both agree, is breathtaking. “But that doesn’t help you financially,” he says.  > When his mother passed away in 2021, Samuel Anthony couldn’t be there for the > funeral. Anthony may have been born in West Africa, but the United States is what he knows. Now 52, he left Sierra Leone in 1978 at the age of six with his older sister to join their parents who had crossed the Atlantic looking for better education. He grew up in Washington, DC, in the 1980s, around the city’s then–red light district of 14th street—a world away from where he finds himself more than four decades later.  In 2019, during the first Trump administration, Anthony was one of almost 360,000 immigrants deported that year. He had a decades-old drug conviction. Five years later, the president-elect is set to return to the White House vowing to supercharge mass deportation by the millions. “When people have killed and murdered,” Trump told NBC News of his mass deportation plans, “when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here.” Trump touts his deportation agenda as necessary to root out violent criminals. But chances are those targeted by the Trump administration will be people like Anthony, long-time residents who have some type of criminal record and baggage from an imperfect American life. (In fact, recent US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data shows the most common offenses committed by immigrants on the agency’s radar are traffic-related.) “I didn’t come to America in hopes of becoming a drug dealer and being a bad person,” he says. “Just life, elements of things, not understanding myself put me in a negative spiral. My life spiraled out of control and I was never able to get back on the right track.” Days before Trump’s inauguration, Anthony fears he might not have a chance to come back. “I never wanted to be here,” Anthony says. “I never looked like this would be my final resting spot in my life.”  Anthony’s childhood years as a new immigrant in Washington, DC, weren’t easy. In his mind, he was American. The world told him otherwise. “It wasn’t a period of what we call Kumbaya,” Anthony says, “everybody holding hands and singing a song. It was a very hostile era in America, just like we’re going through now with immigration.” He remembers being bullied in school and struggling to fit in or make friends. “I wanted to be a part of American society,” he recalls. He felt at home and yet denied acceptance. “All I know is these American cities,” he says. “All I know is Washington, DC.” When Anthony was about seven years old, he was sexually abused by a doctor. It wasn’t until later in life that he realized how what happened had affected him. “I have a difficult time trusting people,” he told me. At the height of the drug era in the US capital, Anthony got involved with drugs. He started carrying weight-loss pills for other people and later began to sell crack cocaine and use PCP. His addiction led him to drop out of college. > “I’ve just been falling and falling inside the pit and never seem to get the > right footing.” Anthony had a couple of run-ins with the police. In 1991, after intervening in a fight, he was badly beaten and taken to the hospital, where the police searched him and found drugs. Five years later, Anthony was arrested and pleaded guilty to drug offenses. He was sentenced to almost 20 years. At the 15-year mark, after Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act to address racial disparities, he was released early. Upon his release, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) picked Anthony up and transferred him to a detention center. He didn’t know his drug conviction would impact his immigration status, but he lost the green card he had gotten in 1989, and was put in deportation proceedings. Because the US government couldn’t obtain his travel documents from Sierra Leone, they couldn’t deport him. Instead, ICE determined Anthony wasn’t a threat or a flight risk and released him in 2012 under an order of supervision that required him to report to the agency regularly. Anthony started rebuilding his life. He obtained a commercial driver’s license and began working for a trucking company while also driving for Uber and Lyft. He bought a house and reconnected with family, including his daughter Samantha whose childhood he had missed while in prison. He also started a mentoring program to help formerly incarcerated people. After Trump took office, in 2017, Anthony’s order of supervision became stricter. He was made to wear an ankle bracelet and had more regular check-ins with immigration. One day in July 2019, Anthony went in for what he thought was just another routine ICE appointment. But instead of letting him go, Anthony says the agents put him in a conference room, threw him on a table, and arrested him. He was blindsided. Sarah Gilman, co-founder of the Rapid Defense Network, a legal nonprofit focused on detention and deportation defense that has joined forces with the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, unsuccessfully tried to halt Anthony’s deportation in the courts, arguing it was illegal among other reasons because he had a pending case for a U visa—a special protection for undocumented victims of crimes who cooperate with law enforcement. (The Trump administration dropped a guidance encouraging ICE to not deport U visa applicants.) “Historically, people like Samuel who have criminal convictions,” Gilman says, “even though they serve their time and they’ve [been] quote-unquote rehabilitated…they are often unusually subject to double punishment.” She adds: “What happened during Trump 1.0 was that everybody became a bad immigrant.” ICE kept Anthony detained until December 2019. Then, they put him on a plane to Morocco and from there to Sierra Leone. He landed in the middle of the night and all he could see was darkness. Anthony remembers wishing he could walk into the ocean and never come back out. “That’s what’s been happening for the last 22 years of my life,” he says. “I’ve just been falling and falling inside the pit and never seem to get the right footing.” In Sierra Leone, Anthony has struggled with depression and health problems, including bouts of malaria, stomach issues, and weight loss. His status as a deportee who doesn’t speak the local dialect makes finding a job hard and leaves him prey to extortion. When his mother passed away in 2021, he couldn’t be there for the funeral. “It was heart-wrenching for my mother,” Anthony’s older sister Samilia says “to the point that I think it contributed to her depression and ultimate passing.” She hopes her brother’s story can make people reconsider how they view the immigration system. “It’s just not right,” Samilia says, “even if you have committed a crime, you’ve paid your dues. If America didn’t want those people, then maybe they should just send them home directly instead of having them be incarcerated for 15 years and then after that send them to nothing.” Anthony’s lawyers have requested that ICE joins in a motion to re-open his deportation case and dismiss it so that he can have his legal permanent resident status restored. In an October letter in support of Anthony’s petition addressed to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the acting director of ICE, former Attorney General Eric Holder wrote he should not have to “be held hostage to the federal government’s unpredictable shifts in immigration policy.” Anthony is also applying for humanitarian parole to try and return to the United States while the Biden administration is still in office, but time is against him. “If Samuel does not come home before Trump comes into power,” Gilman says, “he will never come home over the next four years. And I don’t know if Samuel will survive in Sierra Leone.” Anthony has no idea how to start over almost 4,500 miles away from the only place he has ever called home. “Here, I don’t feel [a] sense of peace,” he says. “I feel chaos. I see confusion. I see pain. I see myself broken. It’s not easy.”

Four years to the day that Donald Trump incited a violent attack on the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, Congress certified his Electoral College victory as the 47th president of the United States. As required of her role presiding over the Senate, Vice President Kamala Harris oversaw the ceremony, which marked her own defeat. In doing so—and in a process rife with irony—Harris was addressed as “Madam President,” referring to her role as president of the Senate, as the electoral results of each state were announced. The final tally: 312 to 226. In a video posted to X Monday morning, Harris drew an implicit contrast to Trump’s approach to his election loss: “This duty is a sacred obligation—one I will uphold guided by love of country, loyalty to our Constitution, and unwavering faith in the American people.” Some Republicans appeared less high-minded, instead peddling revisionist history and suggestions that the label of “insurrection” to describe Jan. 6 was overblown. In an especially absurd example, Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) falsely claimed in a post on X that the insurrectionists were made up of “thousands of peaceful grandmothers” who took “a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building.” Adding to the misinformation was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.,) who told a reporter: “January 6th was not an insurrection. I’m completely sick and tired and fed up of the Democrats’ narrative, the media narrative, and it’s a total lie.” As my colleague Mark Follman has chronicled, January 6, 2021, was indeed a heavily armed insurrection that saw 140 police officers injured, the deaths of four participants, and five police officers who had been at the Capitol. More than 1,200 people have been charged for their actions on Jan. 6, according to the Department of Justice—and Trump has promised to pardon them. Democrats on Monday went to great lengths to emphasize that they were doing what Trump and his allies did not: accepting an election loss and facilitating a peaceful transition of power. They also reminded Americans of what actually happened on Jan. 6. “Today, Congress will do its constitutional duty once again to certify the election results—a great contrast from Republicans who sought to deny the election 4 years ago,” Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) wrote on X Monday morning. Several Democratic members of Congress also shared photos of their destroyed offices and damage sustained to the Capitol four years ago. “The horrific videos and images from the January 6th insurrection against our Capitol reaffirm as much as ever: The power of the people must always matter more than the people in power,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) wrote, alongside photos of broken glass and overturned furniture. > 4 years ago. > > The horrific videos and images from the January 6th insurrection against our > Capitol reaffirm as much as ever: The power of the people must always matter > more than the people in power. pic.twitter.com/awY7Md49NI > > — Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) January 6, 2025 Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) shared a photo of what he said was Capitol Police barricading his office doors and windows “to protect my staff and I from the violent mob that was just outside my window.” In an op-ed published in the Washington Post on Sunday, President Biden warned of the importance of preserving the facts of the “assault” of January 6 for the history books: “An unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite—even erase—the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand. This is not what happened…We cannot allow the truth to be lost.” Biden also called for “remembering Jan. 6, 2021, every year. To remember it as a day when our democracy was put to the test and prevailed. To remember that democracy—even in America—is never guaranteed.” Of course, such warnings to remember what happened on January 6 were absent from Trump’s communications. Early Monday morning, he wrote on Truth Social: “CONGRESS CERTIFIES OUR GREAT ELECTION VICTORY TODAY — A BIG MOMENT IN HISTORY. MAGA!”

The next ranking member of the House Oversight Committee will reportedly be nine-term Democrat Gerry Connolly of Virginia. Connolly, 74, beat out his competitor, 35-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), 131-84 at a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, the Associated Press reports. The current Oversight ranking member, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), is vacating the post to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) as ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, as my colleague Pema Levy reported last month. The Oversight Committee—which is now controlled by Republicans and chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.)—played a key role in holding President-elect Donald Trump and members of his administration accountable during his first term. The news comes as Democrats have been grappling with how to move forward in the face of their losses of both the White House and the Senate last month, and their failure to recapture the House. While some pundits, and Democrats themselves, have called for a generational change in leadership—and some younger Democrats have indeed managed to oust their elders from committee leadership roles—that did not seem to have been enough of a concern to propel AOC to victory here. Lawmakers told Axios that while Connolly—who revealed last month he was recently diagnosed with esophagus cancer—campaigned on his experience, AOC emphasized her far-reaching platform and her role as an effective communicator for the party. “Tried my best,” AOC wrote in a post on Bluesky after the vote. “Sorry I couldn’t pull it through everyone—we live to fight another day.” “I think my colleagues were measuring their votes by who’s got experience, who is seasoned, who can be trusted, who’s capable and who’s got a record of productivity and I think that prevailed,” Connolly reportedly told journalists after the vote. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) told Axios she was “disappointed” by the outcome, adding, “I know Gerry will do a great job. But there’s no substitute for having someone in that position that literally has millions of Americans following her [on social media].” (AOC has 12.8 million followers on X and 8.1 million on Instagram; Connolly has just over 87,000 followers on both platforms combined.) “I think that the seniority issue in this building gets in the way,” Balint added. “Our people back home, they don’t care about seniority.”

After being released from prison in October, Steve Bannon seemingly did everything in his power to get Donald Trump back in the White House. Now he appears interested in helping the president-elect remain in the Oval Office—even beyond what is constitutionally allowed. At an event hosted by the New York Young Republican Club on Sunday, Bannon reportedly floated the idea of a third Trump term, which if attempted, would be in direct violation of the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution. But to Bannon, that seems to be a mere technicality to overcome. “I don’t know, maybe we do it again in ’28. Are you guys down for that?” Bannon asked the crowd which cheered in response. “Trump ’28!” According to Bannon, GOP lawyer and Trump defender Mike Davis had told him that because the Constitution “doesn’t actually say ‘consecutive,'” Trump may be able to run for a third term. > BREAKING: Steve Bannon calls for Trump 2028 pic.twitter.com/bcPHFsNobu > > — RSBN (@RSBNetwork) December 16, 2024 It may be tempting to dismiss such remarks as Bannon being Bannon. But Trump himself has also pointed to the possibility of staying in power beyond another four years. At a July event hosted by the conservative political nonprofit Turning Point Action, Trump told the Christian audience that if he won reelection, “you won’t have to vote anymore,” as my colleague Arianna Coghill covered at the time. A few days later, he declined to walk back or clarify those comments, even doubling down on them in an interview with Fox News. Bannon also has a record of accurately characterizing Trump’s moves. As I reported last month, just after Trump’s reelection, Bannon on his War Room podcast promoted a social media post from right-wing podcast host Matt Walsh that said, “Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol.” After reading the post on air, Bannon chuckled, saying, “Fabulous. We might have to put that everywhere.” Trump would eventually confirm as much. In an interview with Time Magazine published just last week, Trump told the magazine, “I don’t disagree with everything in Project 2025, but I disagree with some things.” Spokespeople for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions on Monday afternoon about whether Bannon speaks for Trump or whether the president-elect will commit to vacating office at the end of his next term in accordance with the Constitution. Davis, the lawyer Bannon claimed proposed the idea that a third Trump term was possible, tried to dismiss the comments as a joke. “Steve Bannon is obviously trolling,” he wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Only Obama gets a third term, with his puppet Biden.”