This story was originally published by Popular Information, a substack publication to which you can subscribe here. In a Saturday morning military raid ordered by President Trump, US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. After Maduro was apprehended and transported to New York to face criminal charges, Trump announced that the United States would “run” Venezuela for the indefinite future. The extraordinary attack, which legal experts said violated US and international law, has set up a potential windfall for a prominent Trump-supporting billionaire, investor Paul Singer. In 2024, Singer, an 81-year-old with a net worth of $6.7 billion, donated $5 million to Make America Great Again Inc., Trump’s Super PAC. He donated tens of millions more in the 2024 cycle to support Trump’s allies, including $37 million to support the election of Republicans to Congress. He also donated an undisclosed amount to fund Trump’s second transition. This past June, when Trump sought funds to bankroll a primary challenger to Thomas Massie (R-KY), who had raised his ire by supporting the release of the Epstein Files, Singer contributed $1 million, the largest contribution. Since Trump was first elected in 2016, Singer has met personally with Trump at least four times. “Paul just left and he’s given us his total support,” Trump declared after meeting with Singer at the White House in February 2017. “I want to thank Paul Singer for being here and for coming up to the office. He was a very strong opponent, and now he’s a very strong ally.” (Singer had initially supported Marco Rubio, who is now Trump’s Secretary of State.) In November 2025, Singer acquired Citgo, the US-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-run oil company. Singer, through his private investment firm, Elliott Investment Management, bought Citgo for $5.9 billion. The sale to Amber Energy, a subsidiary of Elliott Investment Management, was forced by creditors of Venezuela after the country defaulted on its bond payments. Elliott Investment Management is known as a “vulture” fund because it specializes in buying distressed assets at rock bottom prices. Citgo owns three major refineries on the Gulf Coast, 43 oil terminals, and a network of over 4,000 independently owned gas stations. By all accounts, Singer acquired these assets at a major discount. Advisors to the court that oversaw the sale valued Citgo at $13 billion, while Venezuelan officials said the assets were worth as much as $18 billion. Maduro’s government had sought to appeal the court’s approval of Singer’s bid for Citgo. But now that Maduro has been ousted, it seems unlikely that appeal will continue. Singer acquired Citgo at a bargain price in large part due to the embargo, with limited exceptions, on Venezuela oil imports to the United States. Citgo’s refiners are purpose-built to process heavy-grade Venezuelan “sour” crude. As a result, Citgo was forced to source oil from more expensive sources in Canada and Colombia. (Oil produced in the United States is generally light-grade.) This made Citgo’s operations far less profitable. Trump has sought to justify military action against Venezuela as an effort to disrupt narcotics trafficking. But Venezuela produces no fentanyl and is a minor source of cocaine that reaches the United States. Trump also recently pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted of drug trafficking. Further, Trump has long made clear that he was interested in Venezuela for the oil. In remarks to the North Carolina Republican Party in 2023, Trump said that when he left office in 2021, Venezuela was “ready to collapse.” Trump said, had he remained in office, the US “would have taken [Venezuela] over” and “gotten all that oil.” In remarks on Fox News Saturday, Trump made clear that one of the motivations for Saturday’s attack was to increase the production and export of Venezuelan oil. Venezuela has the largest proven reserves of crude oil in the world. Trump said that, moving forward, the US would be “very strongly involved“ with the Venezuelan oil industry. Industry observers anticipate “a rapid rerouting of Venezuelan oil exports, re-establishing the US as the major buyer of the country’s volumes.” Jaime Brito, an oil analyst at OPIS, said access to Venezuelan oil imports “will be a game changer for US Gulf Coast…refiners in terms of profitability.” If that happens, Paul Singer, thanks to a well-timed transaction, will be one of the largest beneficiaries.

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. If you’re reading this, chances are you care a lot about fighting climate change, and that’s great. The climate emergency threatens all of humanity. And although the world has started to make some progress on it, our global response is still extremely lacking. The trouble is, it can be genuinely hard to figure out how to direct your money wisely if you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a glut of environmental organizations out there—but how do you know which are the most impactful? To help, here’s a list of eight of the most high-impact, cost-effective, and evidence-based organizations. We’re not including bigger-name groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, or the Natural Resources Defense Council, because most big organizations are already relatively well-funded. The groups we list below seem to be doing something especially promising in the light of criteria that matter for effectiveness: importance, tractability, and neglectedness. Important targets for change are ones that drive a big portion of global emissions. Tractable problems are ones where we can actually make progress right now. And neglected problems are ones that aren’t already getting a big influx of cash from other sources like the government or philanthropy, and could really use money from smaller donors. Founders Pledge, an organization that guides entrepreneurs committed to donating a portion of their proceeds to effective charities, and Giving Green, a climate charity evaluator, used these criteria to assess climate organizations. Their research informed the list below. As in the Founders Pledge and Giving Green recommendations, we’ve chosen to look at groups focused on mitigation (tackling the root causes of climate change by reducing emissions) rather than adaptation (decreasing the suffering from the impacts of climate change). Both are important, but the focus here is on preventing further catastrophe. And this work is particularly important right now, in a world where “climate attention has collapsed, political support has evaporated, and policy gains are under sustained assault,” Founders Pledge stressed in its assessment of today’s politically charged atmosphere. Just last month, the prominent environmental group 350.org was forced to “temporarily suspend” its US operations because of severe funding challenges, according to a letter obtained by Politico. They are among the many groups in the climate movement now buckling under existential funding cuts. At the same time, Founders Pledge argues that the climate community massively underinvested “outside the progressive bubble,” creating a movement that was not resilient to the shakeup that would come under President Donald Trump. “One of the main ways we were underprepared was the fact that climate philanthropy invested overwhelmingly on one side of the political spectrum,” the organization writes. Now, the experts say, it’s particularly important to invest in nonpartisan organizations dedicated to defending and expanding upon all of the progress made so far. Arguably, the best move is to donate not to an individual charity, but to a fund—like the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund or the Giving Green Fund. Experts at those groups pool together donor money and give it out to the charities they deem most effective, right when extra funding is most needed. That can mean making time-sensitive grants to promote the writing of an important report, or stepping in when a charity becomes acutely funding-constrained. That said, some of us like to be able to decide exactly which charity our money ends up with—maybe because we have especially high confidence in one or two charities relative to the others—rather than letting experts split the cash over a range of different groups. With that in mind, we’re listing below a mix of individual organizations where your money is likely to have an exceptionally positive impact. CLEAN AIR TASK FORCE What it does: The Clean Air Task Force is a US-based nongovernmental organization that has been working to reduce air pollution since its founding in 1996. It led a successful campaign to reduce the pollution caused by coal-fired power plants in the US, helped limit the US power sector’s CO2 emissions, and helped establish regulations of diesel, shipping, and methane emissions. CATF also advocates for the adoption of neglected low- and zero-carbon technologies, from advanced nuclear power to super-hot rock geothermal energy. Why you should consider donating: In addition to its seriously impressive record of success and the high quality of its research, CATF does well on the neglectedness criterion: It often concentrates on targeting emissions sources that are neglected by other environmental organizations, and on scaling up deployment of technologies that are crucial for decarbonization, yet passed over by NGOs and governments. For example, it was one of the first major environmental groups to publicly campaign against overlooked superpollutants like methane. In recent years, CATF has been expanding beyond the US to operate in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. This is crucial: About 35 percent of climate philanthropy goes to the US and about 10 percent to Europe, which together represent only about 15 percent of future emissions, according to Founders Pledge. And this year, CATF has refocused its strategy to zero in on programs with broad nonpartisan political support to ensure those global efforts have staying power. This is part of why Founders Pledge is supporting CATF’s efforts and recommends giving to that organization. CATF is also one of Giving Green’s top picks. You can donate to CATF here. FUTURE CLEANTECH ARCHITECTS What it does: This Germany-based organization aims to promote innovation in Europe’s hard-to-decarbonize sectors by running key programs in, for example, zero-carbon fuels, industry, and carbon removal technologies. Why you should consider donating: You might be wondering if this kind of innovation really meets the “neglectedness” criterion—don’t we already have a lot of innovation? In the US, yes. But in Europe, this kind of organization is much rarer. And according to Founders Pledge, it’s already exceeded expectations at improving the European climate policy response. Most notably, it has helped shape key legislation at the EU level and advised policymakers on how to get the most bang for their buck when supporting research and development for clean energy tech. Giving Green recommends this organization, too. You can donate to Future Cleantech Architects here. GOOD FOOD INSTITUTE What it does: The Good Food Institute works to make alternative proteins (think plant-based burgers) competitive with conventional proteins like beef, which could help reduce livestock consumption. It engages in scientific research, industry partnerships, and government advocacy that improves the odds of alternative proteins going mainstream. Why you should consider donating: Raising animals for meat is responsible for more than 10 percent and perhaps as much as 19 percent of global emissions. These animals belch the superpollutant methane. Plus, we humans tend to deforest a lot of land for them to graze on, even though we all know the world needs more trees, not less. Yet there hasn’t been very much government effort to substantially cut agricultural emissions. Giving Green recommends the Good Food Institute because of its potential to help with that, noting that “GFI remains a powerhouse in alternative protein thought leadership and action. It has strong ties to government, industry, and research organizations and continues to achieve impressive wins. We believe donations to GFI can help stimulate systemic change that reduces food system emissions on a global scale.” You can donate to the Good Food Institute here. INNOVATION INITIATIVE AT THE CLEAN ECONOMY PROJECT What it does: When Bill Gates shuttered the policy arm of his climate philanthropy Breakthrough Energy earlier this year, the US lost a unique advocate for innovation at a pivotal moment in the country’s energy transition. Or did it? A group of veteran Breakthrough Energy staff recently launched the Innovation Initiative—part of a new organization called the Clean Economy Project—as part of a push to ensure the US continues on the right path in its energy transition, regardless of which party is in power. Why you should consider donating: This newly formed project may still be in its infancy, but its work builds upon years of deep experience advocating for clean energy innovation across the political spectrum. Founders Pledge helped seed the new organization with an early grant because “we see the Innovation Initiative as the best bet for donors who want to support federal energy innovation policy advocacy at a moment when this ecosystem needs coordination and strategic leadership,” they said, noting that even small-scale support for such efforts can spur massive payoffs in the space: “Relatively modest advocacy investments can influence billions” in federal spending for research and development “that accelerates breakthrough technologies with global spillover effects.” You can learn more about the Innovation Initiative here. To donate, send an email to giving@cleanecon.org, with the subject line “Donating to Innovation Initiative.” DEPLOY/US What it does: This nonpartisan nonprofit works with American conservatives to enact decarbonization policies, with the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. DEPLOY/US partners with philanthropic, business, military, faith, youth, policy, and grassroots organizations to shape a decarbonization strategy and generate policy change. Why you should consider donating: In case you haven’t heard of the eco-right, it’s important to know that there are genuine right-of-center climate groups that want to build support for decarbonization based on conservative principles. These groups have a crucial role to play; they can weaken political polarization around climate and increase Republican support for bold decarbonization policies, which are especially important now, with Republicans in control of the White House and Congress. Right now, these right-of-center groups remain “woefully underfunded compared to both the opportunity and necessity of correcting a large ideological blindspot of the climate movement that has come to bite in 2025,” Founders Pledge writes, adding that DEPLOY/US is uniquely positioned to insulate climate policy against the shifting winds of politics. You can donate to DEPLOY/US here. ENERGY FOR GROWTH HUB What it does: Founded by Todd Moss in 2013, Energy for Growth Hub aims to make electricity reliable and affordable for everyone. The organization hopes to end energy poverty through climate-friendly solutions. Why you should consider donating: While Energy for Growth Hub is not a strictly climate-focused organization—ending energy poverty is its main goal—it’s still a leader in the clean energy space. The organization will use your donation to fund projects that produce insight for companies and policymakers on how to create the energy-rich, climate-friendly future they’re dreaming of. In June, the World Bank announced an end to its ban on funding nuclear power projects after a sustained lobbying effort from Energy for Growth Hub alongside other think tanks and policy wonks. “We all know that Washington is broken. People complain that it’s impossible to get stuff done,” Moss wrote in his Substack in response. “But then, actually quite often, stuff does get done. And sometimes, just sometimes, things happen because people outside government come together to push a new idea inside government.” You can donate to Energy for Growth Hub here. PROJECT INNERSPACE What it does: This US-based nonprofit hopes to unlock the power of heat — geothermal energy—lying beneath the Earth’s surface. Launched in 2022, Project InnerSpace seeks to expand global access and drive down the cost of carbon-free heat and electricity, particularly to populations in the Global South. The organization maps geothermal resources and identifies geothermal projects in need of further funding. Why you should consider donating: Most geothermal power plants are located in places where geothermal energy is close to the Earth’s surface. Project InnerSpace will use your donation to add new data and tools to GeoMap, its signature map of geothermal hot spots, and drive new strategies and projects to fast-track transitions to geothermal energy around the world. The group also began funding community energy projects through its newly launched GeoFund earlier this year, starting with a geothermal-powered food storage facility in Tapri, India, which will offer local farmers more power to preserve their crops. You can donate to Project InnerSpace here. OPPORTUNITY GREEN What it does: Opportunity Green aims to cut aviation and maritime shipping emissions through targeted regulation and policy initiatives. The UK-based nonprofit was founded in 2021, and since then has aimed to encourage private sector adoption of clean energy alternatives. Why you should consider donating: Aviation and maritime shipping are an enormous source of global emissions, but receive little attention because international coordination is difficult around the issue, and there are few low-carbon fleets and fuels readily available. Even so, in a few short years, Opportunity Green has managed to gain significant influence in EU and international policy discussions around shipping emissions, while also helping to bring the perspective of climate-vulnerable countries into the fray. In 2024, the group launched a major legal filing against the EU to challenge its green finance rules. “We think Opportunity Green is a strategic organization with broad expertise across multiple pathways of influence to reduce emissions from aviation and shipping,” Giving Green notes. “We are especially excited about Opportunity Green’s efforts to elevate climate-vulnerable countries in policy discussions.” You can donate to Opportunity Green here. The past several years have seen an explosion of grassroots activism groups focused on climate—from Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future to the Sunrise Movement to Extinction Rebellion. Activism is an important piece of the climate puzzle; it can help change public opinion and policy, including by shifting the Overton window, the range of policies that seem possible. Social change is not an exact science, and the challenges in measuring a social movement’s effectiveness are well documented. While it would be helpful to have more concrete data on the impact of activist groups, it may also be shortsighted to ignore movement-building for that reason. The environmentalist Bill McKibben told Vox that building the climate movement is crucial because, although we’ve already got some good mitigation solutions, we’re not deploying them fast enough. “That’s the ongoing power of the fossil fuel industry at work. The only way to break that power and change the politics of climate is to build a countervailing power,” he said in 2019. “Our job — and it’s the key job — is to change the zeitgeist, people’s sense of what’s normal and natural and obvious. If we do that, all else will follow.” Of course, some activist groups are more effective than others. And it’s worth noting that a group that was highly effective at influencing climate policy during the Biden administration, such as the Sunrise Movement, will not necessarily be as effective today. “Overall, our take on grassroots activism is that it has huge potential to be cost-effective, and we indeed think that grassroots movements like Sunrise have had really meaningful effects in the past,” Dan Stein, the director of Giving Green, told Vox. But, he added, “It takes a unique combination of timing, organization, and connection to policy to have an impactful grassroots movement.” One umbrella charity that’s more bullish on the ongoing impact of activism is the Climate Emergency Fund. It was founded in 2019 with the goal of quickly regranting money to groups engaged in climate protests around the globe. Its founders believe that street protest is crucially important to climate politics and neglected in environmental philanthropy. Grantees include Just Stop Oil, the group that made international headlines for throwing soup on a protected, glassed-in Van Gogh painting, and Extinction Rebellion, an activist movement that uses nonviolent civil disobedience like filling the streets and blocking intersections to demand that governments do more on climate. If you’re skeptical that street protest can make a difference, consider Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s research. She’s found that if you want to achieve systemic social change, you need to mobilize 3.5 percent of the population, a finding that helped inspire Extinction Rebellion. And in 2022, research from the nonprofit Social Change Lab suggested that, in the past, groups like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion may have cost-effectively helped to win policy changes (in the US and UK, respectively) that avert carbon emissions. But the words “in the past” are doing a lot of work here: While early-stage social movement incubation might be cost-effective, it’s unclear whether it’s as cost-effective to give to an activist group once it’s already achieved national attention. The same research notes that in countries with existing high levels of climate concern, broadly trying to increase that concern may be less effective than in previous years; now, it might be more promising to focus on climate advocacy in countries with much lower baseline support for this issue. There are plenty of ways to use your skills to tackle the climate emergency. And many don’t cost a cent. If you’re a writer or artist, you can use your talents to convey a message that will resonate with people. If you’re a religious leader, you can give a sermon about climate and run a collection drive to support one of the groups above. If you’re a teacher, you can discuss this issue with your students, who may influence their parents. If you’re a good talker, you can go out canvassing for a politician you believe will make the right choices on climate. If you’re, well, any human being, you can consume less. You can reduce your energy use, how much stuff you buy, and how much meat you consume. Individual action alone won’t move the needle that much—real change on the part of governments and corporations is key—but your actions can influence others and ripple out to shift social norms, and keep you feeling motivated rather than resigned to climate despair. You can, of course, also volunteer with an activist group and put your body in the street to nonviolently disrupt business as usual and demand change. The point is that activism comes in many forms. It’s worth taking some time to think about which one (or ones) will allow you, with your unique capacities and constraints, to have the biggest positive impact. But at the end of the day, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good: It’s best to pick something that seems doable and get to work.

The second Trump administration has made tearing down parts of the federal government a priority. And some of those efforts have been literal. In October, President Donald Trump ordered the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for the construction of a massive 90,000-square-foot ballroom. He’s also given the White House a gilded makeover, bulldozed the famed Rose Garden, and even has plans for a so-called “Arc de Trump” that mirrors France’s Arc de Triomphe. So what’s behind all of this? Art historian Erin Thompson—author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments—says that whether it’s Romans repurposing idols of leaders who had fallen out of favor or the glorification of Civil War officers in the American South, monuments and public aesthetics aren’t just about the past. They’re about symbolizing power today. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “The aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present,” Thompson says. “It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not.”On this week’s More To The Story, Thompson sits down with host Al Letson to discuss why Trump has decked out the White House in gold (so much gold), the rise and recent fall of Confederate monuments, and whether she thinks the Arc de Trump will ever get built. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: What is an art crime professor? Erin Thompson: Well, someone who’s gone to way too much school. I have a PhD in art history, and was finishing that up and thought, “Oh, I’m never going to get a job as an art historian. I should go to law school,” which I did, and ended up back in academia studying all of the intersections between art and crime. So I studied museum security, forgery, fraud, repatriations of stolen artwork. I could teach you how to steal a masterpiece, but then I would have to catch you. So is it fair to say that The Thomas Crown Affair is one of your favorite movies? No. Least favorite, opposite- Really? … because they make it seem like it’s a big deal to steal things from a museum, but it’s really, really easy to steal things from museums, as the Louvre heist just proved. I was just about to say, I think the thieves at the Louvre would agree with you. It’s hard to get away with stealing things from museums, which is why they got arrested immediately. So how did you move from studying museum pieces and art crime into monuments? Well, so my PhD is in ancient Greek and Roman arts, and when monuments began being protested in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, people were commenting online, “Civilized people don’t take down monuments. This is horrible.” And I was thinking, “Well, studying the ancient world, everything that I study has been at one point torn down and thrown into a pit and then buried for thousands of years.” Actually, as humans, this is what we do. We make monuments and then we tear them down as soon as we decide we want to honor somebody else. So I thought I could maybe add some perspective. And then having my skills in researching fraud, I started to realize that so many of the most controversial monuments in the U.S. were essentially fundraising scams where a bunch of money was embezzled from people who wanted to support racism, essentially, by putting up giant monuments to white supremacy. So I thought, maybe that’s some interesting information for our current debates. They got got, as they should. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. As somebody who grew up in the South, I would just say as a young Black man growing up in the shadow of these monuments, watching them go down felt like finally, finally this country was recognizing me in some small way. And I was completely unsurprised at the uproar from a lot of people who wanted to keep these monuments up. But when you dig into why these monuments were placed down, a lot of them were done just … Especially when we’re talking about Civil War monuments in the South and in other places, they were primarily put there to silence or to intimidate the Black population in a said area. Yeah, I call them victory monuments. They’re not about the defeat of the Confederates, they’re about the victory of Jim Crow and other means of reclaiming political and economic power for the white population of the South. Yeah. And so talk to me a little bit about the monuments themselves and how a lot of those were scams. I had never heard of that before. So for example, just outside of Atlanta in Stone Mountain, Georgia is the world’s largest Confederate monument, a gigantic carving into the side of a cliff of Lee and Jackson and Jefferson Davis. And that was launched in 1914 by a sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, working with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The Klan enthusiastically embraced the project. They stacked the board. They took a bunch of the donations. Essentially, no progress was made for years and years and years until the 1950s when as a sign of resistance to Brown v. Board, the state of Georgia took over the monument and finally finished it. So it wasn’t finished until the 1970s. And to me, the makers said it should be a shrine to the South. It’s more like a shrine to a scam. The Klan leaders who led the project even fired Borglum at a certain point because they thought he was taking too much money. But he landed on his feet because he persuaded some Dakota businessmen to sponsor him to carve what turned into Mount Rushmore. So he defected from glorifying the Confederacy to carve a monument to the Union. So he didn’t really care about the glory of the Confederacy, he just wanted to make some money. So in the United States, how have monuments historically been funded? Well, the American government, both state and federal has always been a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to putting up public art. So most monuments that we see were actually privately fundraised, planned, and then donated to local governments. So they’re not really public art. They were put up by small groups for reasons. If you look, for example, at the Confederate monument that used to be in Birmingham, Alabama, this is a little weird that Birmingham had a Confederate monument in the first place because they were founded as a city well after the close of the Civil War. And the monument went up in two parts, both of which were in response to interracial unionization efforts. So the leaders, the owners and managers of the mines, when the miners were threatening to strike said, “No, no, no, no, no, no. We need to remind our white workers that they have to keep maintaining the segregation that their fathers or grandfathers fought for, so let’s put up this Civil War Monument.” So monuments don’t tell you very detailed versions of history, but also even thinking about history is kind of leading you on the wrong track when you look at, well, who is actually paying for these monuments top people put up and what did they actually want from them? So tell me, just pulling back a little bit, what’s the relationship between monuments and society? Monuments are our visions of the future. We put up a monument when we want people to aspire to that condition. We put up monuments to honor people to inspire people to follow their examples. So that sounds good and cheerful, right? It’s nothing wrong with having models and aspirations, but you have to think about, well, monuments are expensive. So who has the money to pay for them? Who has the political power to put them in place permanently? And you’ll often see that monuments are used to try and shape a community into a different form than it currently has. I live in New York City, for example, and almost all of the monuments put up until the last few decades are of white men. And what kind of message does that send to this incredibly diverse community of who deserves honor? And you said earlier that throughout time we have erected monuments and taken them down. Can you talk that cycle through with me? Yeah. Well, take the Romans, for example. Roman emperors would win a victory at war and put up a big victory monument, a triumphal arch or portraits of themselves. And then after the emperor died, the Senate would vote and decide, was this a good one or a bad one? Do we want to decide officially that they have become a deity and are to be honored forever, or do we want to forget their memory? And it was about a third, a third, a third. A third was no vote, a third were deities, a third were their memories were subjected to what we call damnatio memoriae. And if that happened to you, they would chisel the face off your statues and carve on your successor. The Romans were thrifty that way. They reused sculptures- Wow. So they recycled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Or they would break things up or melt it down and make it into a new statue. So this was a pretty common strategy of, just like we do it in a much more peaceable form, when a new president is elected, you take down the photo of the current president from the post office and put up the successor, etc, etc. So in the ancient world they had a more intense version of this, but you can think about the tearing down of statues of Saddam after his fall or the removal of statues of Lenin across the Soviet satellite states. This is something that we do when there are changes in power, and usually we don’t notice it because it’s more peaceful. There’s an official removal of the signs of the previous regime and a substitution with the others. So what was special and different about the summer of 2020 was the change came from below. It was unofficial. We mostly saw people not tearing down monuments with their bare hands, that’s obviously hard to do, but modifying monuments by adding paints, signage, projections, etc. And that’s exactly like what you looked at in Smashing Statues is the shift that, to me, in a lot of ways had been a long time coming. There had been movements here and there that were kind of under the radar for most people. But then after George Floyd, it’s like it got an injection of adrenaline, and suddenly all over the country you start seeing this stuff happening. Yeah, and I think people lost patience. What wasn’t obvious to a lot of observers was that changing a monument or even questioning a monument is illegal in most of the U.S., or there’s just no process to do so. So I interviewed for the book Mike Forcia, an indigenous activist in Minnesota, and he had been trying for his entire adult life to get the state legislator to ask why is there a statue of Columbus in one of the cities with the largest concentrations of an urban indigenous population in the world? And all of his petitions were just thrown away. So he eventually had to commit civil disobedience, I would describe it, by pulling down the statue. There’s no other way to have that conversation. Let me ask you, just to go back a little bit, how do these monuments shape and perceive history? Because you saying that this is what we’ve always done and the Romans would switch out faces and statues, that’s totally new to me. And so as somebody who grew up with Confederate statues around or Confederate names always around, I think it’s shaped the way I view the world. And also as they were coming down, not knowing that in the long arc of history that this is what we always do, it challenged the perceptions, I think of a lot of people. Monuments are inherently simple. You can’t tell a full historical story in a couple figures in bronze. So I think they communicate very simple messages of this is the type of person that we honor. And they speak directly to our lizard brain, the part of us that sees something, “Oh, something big and shiny and higher than me is something worthy of respect.” So you can’t tell them a nuanced story in a monument, and that is used as a strength. I also think it’s a strength that they become boring. They fade into the background of our lived landscape, and then we don’t question their messages if we just think of the monument as something, oh, we’re going to tell each other, “Meet at the foot of this guy for our ultimate Frisbee game,” or something. So it is these moments of disruption that let us think, “This is supposed to stand for who we are as a people. Do we really want that guy up on the horse telling us who we are?” In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and these statues and monuments are coming down or they’re being defaced, my little sister lives in Richmond, Virginia and I went to visit her. And I’ve been to Richmond several times. And I think I’d seen pictures of the monuments in Richmond being graffiti on them, but I had not seen them in real life up close. And it was kind of stunning to me. Also, what was stunning about it, because in Richmond, if you’ve never been to Richmond, Richmond has like this … I don’t know what street it is, but this long row- Monument Avenue. Monument Avenue, thank you. Has Monument Avenue with all of these different monuments. After George Floyd, they were spray painted, and people were gathering around these monuments in a way that I’d never seen before. I think those monuments went up to create a certain type of community. Monument Avenue was designed as a wealthy neighborhood, and how do you prevent the quote, unquote, “wrong type of people” from moving into your nice neighborhood? Well, put up some nice monuments celebrating Civil War generals. So it’s not- You tell them they’re not welcome. Yeah, exactly. So it’s a community created by exclusion, is what these monuments were put up for. And we actually see that again and again. In Charlottesville as well, the sculpture of Robert E. Lee that was recently melted down was put up to mark the exclusion of people from a neighborhood that had formerly been a neighborhood of Black housing and businesses, which they were condemned by eminent domain and turned into a cultural and park space that was intended to be whites only in the 1920s. So monuments are a powerful course for creating community. But you’re absolutely right that the removal can be a powerful force for creating community as well. And what saddens me is if you go to Richmond today, some of the bases of those monuments are still there. The Civil War monuments have been removed from Monument Avenue, but all of the graffiti has been scrubbed off. There’s no more people gathering there. It looks just like a traffic median again. And that’s true of almost everywhere in the U.S. The authorities are always a bit nervous about this type of spontaneous use of public space, I would say. Yeah. Listeners to this podcast have heard me say this 101 times because it’s my thing, but I just believe that America is a pendulum, that it swings hard one way and then it comes right back and swings the other way. Which means that in the long-term, America sees progress in inches, but the swings are where you can see exactly where the country is right now. And so I think if we look at what happened after George Floyd died, that was a hard swing the other way. I’m curious if what we see right now coming from the Trump administration, and not just like in military, he’s reverting the names or changing the names of military bases back to people whose names have been taken off these military bases, all of that type of stuff, but also he’s planning to put an Arc de Trump in D.C., the East Wing Ballroom, all of that stuff, do you feel like that is the opposite swing of what we saw during George Floyd’s death? Oh, yeah. And even literally, recently the Trump administration said that they were going to reverse removal of statues. So they re-erected a Confederate general statute in D.C., and they’ve said that they’re going to put up the Arlington Confederate Monument, which would cost millions and millions and millions of dollars to put up. So we will see if that actually happens. But just declaring that you’re going to do it is enough of a propaganda victory, I think, in this situation. Right. It might seem silly or not worthy of attention to look into the Trump administration’s aesthetic decisions, all of the gold ornamentations smeared all over the Oval Office and ballrooms and Arc de Trumps, and etc, but the aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present. It’s a way to rally people’s energies. It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not. I think he hasn’t really changed Washington in the way that he’s told his base he’s going to change. The elite are still in control of political power and wealth, but he is literally changing the White House by tearing part of it down. And you can channel people’s attention into rooting for that type of change instead of actual change. And the style choices that he’s making are very congruent with his political message, in that he’s appealing to a vision of the past, which is greater than the present. But in both his political message and his aesthetic style, this vision of the past, you can’t pinpoint it. It’s not an actual time. It’s a fuzzy, hand-wavy, things were prettier and nicer than. And so you can’t fact-check that type of vision. You can’t see if we’ve actually gotten closer to it. And so putting up a gilded tchotchke counts as progress towards that, and he can claim the credit, which he’s happy to do. Yeah. And I think that’s intentional, because if you can’t land on the specific time period, you can’t be held accountable for how that time period played out for the disenfranchised. Or for the powerful of that time period. Right. Right, exactly. Appealing to making the White House look like Versailles. We all know what happened to the French kings, but apparently we’re not paying much attention. And there’s another current right tendency to appeal to the glory of Caesar. Everybody wants to be like Julius Caesar when that’s really not a good life choice, if you want to end up like him. I think the other thing when I think about Trump’s aesthetic, so I grew up in the South but I am originally from New Jersey, and I remember Trump when I was really young, primarily because my dad was from Pleasantville, New Jersey, which is right outside of Atlantic City. And so there were conversations that I didn’t understand as a kid, and Trump was a part of those because he had his casinos and all of that type of stuff. And I just remember being a little kid and seeing a commercial for, I guess either it was Trump’s properties or it was a casino or whatever. And I just remember looking at it on the TV and seeing gold everywhere. That was his thing, gold. And the older I get, the more I realize that the way Trump sees gold and all the fittings that he has around, really is like him surrounding himself what he perceives of as wealth, and what people who don’t have wealth perceive of as wealth. But the actual uber-rich, usually from what I’ve seen, do not decorate their houses in all gold, do not flaunt. Their wealth is present but quiet, whereas Trump’s wealth is present but loud. And that speaks to a lot of people who do not have the wealth. And in a sense, him putting gold around the White House is a secret, in my opinion, aspirational message to poor folks who do not have that, “One day you can have.” I don’t know, it’s just like a theory that I’ve been cooking in my head since I was a little kid. I think absolutely. We have the proverb, “All that glitters is not gold” because people keep needing to be reminded. And yeah, again, in our primitive lizard brains, we think shiny equals good and I want that, and we don’t look below the surface. And I think that Trump’s focus on glitzing up the White House, on making these new constructions now in his second term is not accidental, because you often see populist leaders focusing on aesthetic projects towards the end of their political life. In Hitler’s last days in the bunker, he was still pouring over models for a museum that he was building in his hometown of Linz, in which he was planning to put all of the masterpieces seized from victims of the Holocaust from other museums across Europe. It was going to have 22 miles of galleries, all stuffed full of the artistic wealth of the world. And I think there’s a comfort in this idea. Like, if I make something spectacular and beautiful enough, all of the cruelty that went into making it will be justified. I will be forgiven. So when I’m feeling depressed about the world, I think maybe this focus on the gold now is such an obsession because he recognizes that he’s on his way out. What does it mean to a society that some of the tech leaders are now turning their attention towards building statues? You were just talking about how leaders when they’re beginning their twilight are … I guess they’re thinking about their legacy, and so they’re putting up these monuments and doing other things. But what does it mean for us when we have these tech bros that are doing it now? Well, we’ve always seen this. Think about the Pantheon in Rome, that big circular temple. Across the front of it, you can still see the shapes of the letters that it used to have that was erected not by an emperor, but by a wealthy Roman who was doing so in service of the imperial cause. So big donors making big, splashy public projects have always been realizing that this is a good way to get in with the regime to shape things, to get loyalty from the public to their point of view as well. So today you look at people’s reactions to Elon Musk is very similar, I think to what you were talking about, the idea of, “I can also have this splashy level of wealth maybe someday, so I will follow somebody who I could see as a model of getting wealth, rather than someone who is actually going to do anything that’s actually good for me.” Do you think that the Arc de Trump will ever be built? That’s the thing about these Trumpian aesthetic actions, you can just put out the promise, you can release a picture of the renderings and claim victory, even though you haven’t actually done anything. I very much doubt that this arch is going to go up for a huge variety of reasons, but if it would go up, I don’t understand how it can be justified to spend that much money. When on the one hand you’re saying we are trying to cut government expenditure, there’s no justification for having tens of millions probably going on an arch to yourself.

Jin Kang, the CEO of a telecom and IT company, was talking to stock analysts this past spring, when he was asked about the company’s prospects for winning government contracts. Kang said his firm, WidePoint, had technology that could help the Department of Homeland Security track down cellphones given to immigrants who had been released on bail, pending deportation hearings. All the company needed was a foot in the door. “So we’ve been trying to get access to Tom Homan and the folks over at DHS at the secretary level,” Kang said. “I think we’ve gotten some…traction, but it’s too early to tell, but we are knocking on the doors of the various political operatives so that they could get us in the door to talk about the potential savings that we could provide.”  Kang’s statement stands out because Homan, prior to joining the second Trump administration as its “border czar,” ran a consulting firm that helped companies pursue government contracts. It does not appear that WidePoint was a Homan client, but other current contractors were. Homan has vowed, as federal ethics guidance advises, to stay out of federal procurement decisions. > “We are knocking on the doors of the various political operatives so that they > could get us in the door.” Kang’s claim is even more striking in light of news reports that Homan was recorded last year accepting $50,000 in a Cava bag from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen paying for help winning government contracts in a second Trump administration. Homan has said he did nothing illegal and has stated that he “didn’t take $50,000 from anybody.” Trump’s Justice Department ultimately dropped the matter after investigators, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.” The White House has called the FBI probe “a blatantly political investigation” by the Biden administration. Kang’s WidePoint, which won a DHS cellphone contract in the last months of President Donald Trump’s first term and is angling to win another worth up to $3 billion, is just one of several companies that have reportedly tried to enlist Homan’s help in drumming up federal contracts. In June, Homan met with companies seeking contracts to build new immigration detention facilities, Bloomberg reported. Many of those contracts are being awarded by the US military, and Homan, according to the report, “was then expected to discuss the matter with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.”  In addition, a review by Mother Jones and the Project On Government Oversight shows that a number of Homan’s former clients from his time in the private sector have been awarded lucrative border and immigration-related contracts during the second Trump administration. Those projects include constructing private prisons, sprawling migrant detention camps, and a section of border wall. It is not clear whether Homan has played any role in helping his former clients land these deals—the White House says he has no involvement in the “actual awarding” of contracts. Regardless, the pattern highlights what critics call the legalized corruption of Washington. While Homan denies taking a bag of cash to rig a contract, he openly ran a business in which he traded on his years of government work and high-level contacts to help clients who paid him prosper in the procurement process. Now that he is back in government, even the impression that he can influence federal contract awards creates the appearance of corruption, ethics experts argue. Among would-be contractors, “the perception is that Homan can put in a good word—whether compensated or not compensated in cash, with or without a bag man—and in some sense, the damage is done,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies government ethics. Homan’s perceived influence, even after the alleged bag incident, sends “the message…that this is not disqualifying and people who want some portion of the trough that is DHS at this point can look to Homan, among others, for assistance,” Clark said. Homan referred questions to White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, who dismissed concerns. “As the Border Czar, Tom Homan occasionally meets with a variety of people to learn about new developments and capabilities to serve the needs of the American people – in doing so he continues to adhere to the federal ethics and [conflict] of interests rules,” Jackson said. “Tom has no involvement in the actual awarding of a government contract. Tom is a career law enforcement officer and lifelong public servant, with the utmost integrity, who is doing a phenomenal job on behalf of President Trump and the country.”  A White House official also said Homan “has not had any conversations, nor been involved in any conversations,” with WidePoint or any of the other companies discussed in this article “regarding contracts or business interests.” The official said Homan, a White House employee, has “no role in deciding or awarding contracts for DHS.” Homan was well-situated to capitalize on his insights and government connections. He spent three decades working for the US Border Patrol and in 2013 was appointed to a high-ranking position with ICE by President Barack Obama—a post in which Homan pioneered the idea of using family separations as a tool to discourage illegal immigration. Homan stayed on into the first Trump administration, but left his role as acting ICE director in June 2018—soon after the public outcry over family separations reached a fever pitch. > Homan’s consulting company boasted that it has “a proven track record of > opening doors.” Apparently, he already had been planning a leap to the private sector. In May 2018—just days after he announced that he would leave the administration—the state of Virginia approved paperwork incorporating a new business he founded, called Homeland Strategic Consulting. He spent the rest of Trump’s first term and the Biden years transforming himself from a lifetime government official into an advocate with insider perspectives and connections to the powerful for the many business interests trying to score government deals. As of last December, the website of Homan’s consulting company boasted that the firm has “a proven track record of opening doors and bringing successful relationships to our clients, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts to private companies.”  In 2021, Homan’s firm registered to lobby in Texas for Fisher Sand & Gravel, a North Dakota-based construction company that was seeking work building portions of border wall. Texas records show Fisher paid Homeland Strategic Consulting up to $186,000.  Fisher is a controversial company. In 2019, it built short sections of border wall in Texas and New Mexico. The work was financed by “We Build the Wall,” an effort involving Steve Bannon in which organizers crowdsourced private donations to fence off the country from Mexico. In 2020, We Build the Wall founder Brian Kolfage, Bannon, and two other men were charged with defrauding donors by misappropriating money they raised. While the other three defendants were convicted and jailed, Bannon escaped federal prosecution when Trump pardoned him hours before leaving office in 2021. Bannon pleaded guilty in February to defrauding donors in a similar case brought by Manhattan’s district attorney. The sections of wall Fisher did complete have been lambasted as poorly built. In 2022, Fisher reached an undisclosed agreement with the Justice Department to settle a lawsuit over the project. Fisher has also repeatedly been sued by environmental groups. But Fisher, whose CEO Tommy Fisher has supported many GOP lawmakers, has tapped Trump world support to continue landing contracts. Last year, with Homan’s help, the company scored a $225 million contract from Texas to build a new section of border wall there. And in June 2025, this erstwhile Homan client won a $309 million contract from Customs and Border Protection to build a 27-mile section of wall in Arizona’s Santa Cruz County. The company did not respond to inquiries. Fisher isn’t the only former Homan client continuing to seek federal contracts that intersect with Homan’s White House portfolio. USA Up Star, a company that specializes in quickly constructing temporary buildings in response to emergencies, is a former client of Homan’s that donated $100,000 to the Trump-Vance inauguration committee in January and $15,000 in June 2024 to a pro-Trump super-PAC called Right for America. A Federal Election Committee database does not show any other corporate contributions from that company, though its owner and president, Klay South, previously donated to PACs supporting Ron DeSantis. In the months before the 2024 election, according to Bloomberg, “USA Up Star executives had regular calls and meetings with Homan to explore an expansion into immigration detention.” The construction company, Bloomberg reported, was pitching “a sprawling tent camp in El Paso, Texas, where people would be held in pens and surveilled from overhead by guards in wooden structures.” This September, the US Navy awarded a massive border security and immigration enforcement contract to dozens of companies, including USA Up Star. The deal could ultimately be worth up to $20 billion for each contractor over several years, according to a government press release. The contract includes work providing “safe and secure confinement for aliens in the administrative custody of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” per contracting records, as well as less controversial work, such as providing support in response to natural disasters. In response to written questions, South declined to comment. He also wrote: “Get Fucked.” Another past Homan client is SE&M Solutions, a Pennsylvania-based consulting firm that, like Homan’s former consultancy, helps other companies win government contracts. SE&M’s CEO is Charles Sowell, who also serves as chairman of the board of the Border911 Foundation, a border security-focused nonprofit founded and led by Homan. According to Sowell’s bio, he served in the Navy for 27 years, managed a Texas-based federal facility for unaccompanied migrant children in 2021, and attended the Border Patrol Industry Academy. USA Up Star is also an SE&M client, per reporting from ProPublica. SE&M’s website has touted “access to senior leaders in government.” In August, according to Bloomberg, two SE&M clients met with Mark Hall, a top adviser to Homan who works in the administration. Hall is a former longtime Border Patrol agent who also served as a Border911 Foundation board member. (Another former board member is Rodney Scott, the head of Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency for the Border Patrol.) SE&M Solutions and Border911 did not respond to requests for comment. And then there’s GEO Group, a private prison behemoth that runs a sprawling network of immigrant detention centers. ICE’s largest contractor, GEO Group also offers related services such as transporting detainees and tracking immigrants who are not detained. Homan reported on his financial disclosure form that he had worked as a consultant for GEO’s health care arm during the prior year. GEO Group donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inauguration. That’s in addition to 2024 contributions from GEO’s political action committee, senior executives, and a GEO subsidiary totaling more than $1 million to Trump-aligned political entities, according to a Project On Government Oversight review of Federal Election Commission records. GEO has seen its fortunes rise this year as the current administration has set new records for the number of people held in immigration detention, recently hitting 66,000. The population of detainees is up nearly 70 percent since Trump’s inauguration—the vast majority have no criminal convictions. Since Inauguration Day, ICE has awarded GEO new detention contracts collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year.  “This represents the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our Company’s history,” George Zoley, GEO Group’s executive chairman, said in a November statement.  GEO did not respond to a request for comment. But it has been vocal about benefiting from the Trump administration’s immigration policies. “As a long-standing support services provider for ICE with a 40-year-long track record, we believe we are uniquely positioned to assist the agency to meet its objectives,” Zoley said over the summer. This story was reported with the Project On Government Oversight. Samantha Michaels contributed reporting.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over President Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on almost every nation on earth, in ever-changing amounts, whenever he feels like it. Legally, this is a case about any number of complicated questions and legal doctrines, including the president’s ability to declare emergencies under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, the court’s novel major questions doctrine, its dormant non-delegation doctrine, the proper venue for challenging the tariffs, and the proper statutory interpretation of IEEPA. > “This is not just a battle over tariffs.” It’s a battle over just who is in > charge of the GOP. But these questions will almost certainly be window-dressing on a decision driven by how Chief Justice John Roberts and the other five Republican appointees navigate between the two stakeholders in this case: the powerful billionaires and business interests behind the challenge to the tariffs and Trump’s desire to transform the economy into an arm of his personalist rule. “This is not just a battle over tariffs,” explains Evan Bernick of the Northern Illinois University College of Law. “It is a battle between competing political economies within the American right. And how it works out will speak to just who ultimately has hegemony, who… is shaping the law of the United States.” While Bernick expects the businesses and states challenging the tariffs to prevail, “if they do not,” he says, “that tells me things about the relative power of these competing factions that I did not previously know.” In February and again in April, Trump cited IEEPA when imposing his sweeping—and sometimes very high—tariffs, some of which he went on to pause. While the Constitution grants Congress the power to impose tariffs, Trump claimed his actions were a legitimate use of that 1977 law, which gives presidents power to respond to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad, even though IEEPA doesn’t specifically name tariffs as an available tool. The court is hearing two consolidated cases brought by multiple small businesses. Some of the companies’ challenges were brought with support from ideologically conservative and libertarian nonprofits funded by wealthy Republican-allied donors, most notably the Koch network. For decades, the Kochs and their fellow-traveling tycoons, along with the religious right, channeled millions of dollars into a project to capture the Supreme Court, successfully creating a loyal 6-3 conservative majority. Beginning in 2005 with Roberts’ nomination, the Federalist Society vetted Republican nominees and their allies helped win their confirmations with lots of money. As Lisa Graves, who leads the judicial watchdog group True North Research and has published a new book on Roberts, recently told me, “Roberts is really the beneficiary of the first billionaire-backed campaign to capture the US Supreme Court.” He’s spent the last 20 years implementing their agenda.  The Roberts Court consistently rules for the interests of this small set of billionaire political donors, whose money flowed to the Federalist Society and other activist groups that helped each of the Republican-appointed justices reach the high court. Further, under Roberts, these members of the court have increased the political power of the GOP and its wealthiest patrons. For example, the court has been dismantling the Voting Rights Act to the benefit of the GOP, a project they will likely finish in the next few months. It has also cut the power of labor unions, and, by overturning the long-held practice of courts deferring to agency expertise, declared open season on federal regulations that industry dislikes. In its stead, the justices invented the major questions doctrine to justify striking down executive regulations the court decides are “major” and that don’t have clear authorization from Congress, and created increasingly radical interpretations of the unitary executive theory that have weakened agency independence so that partisan politics can destroy industry regulation.  This clear preference for moneyed interests was detailed by employment lawyer Scott Budow in a 2021 law review article on how the Roberts Court has changed labor and employment law. He discussed 15 cases in which the justices cast a collective 134 votes. “There is no unifying judicial philosophy—such as originalism or textualism—that neatly explains why conservative justices would reliably vote in one manner and liberal justices in the opposite manner for these cases,” he concluded. “Yet, if all one knew was that conservative justices favor employers and liberal justices favor workers, that person would have correctly predicted 132 of the 134 votes cast.” That is 98.5 percent of the time. “Trying to interpret or anticipate what’s going to happen in cases involving Trump inside the four corners of legal reasoning will fail, and hasn’t really explained almost anything the Robert’s court [has done] for the last 20 years,” says Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO. “Instead, if you step back and think about the interests that elevated the six of them to the court, then that is really very clarifying.”  > This case has big business going up against the president. In their 2022 book The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and attorney Jennifer Mueller breakdown not only the story of how a small handful of rightwing families and groups channeled millions to put allies on the court, but how they also fund an array of legal outfits to bring cases and file amicus briefs—filings that help to signal to the justices which way their benefactors hope they will rule. As Whitehouse and Mueller write, between 2014 and 2020, 16 rightwing foundations gave nearly $69 million to 11 groups that filed amicus curiae briefs urging the court to hobble the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which guards against predatory financial industry practices, as well as more than $33 million to the Federalist Society. These groups include the Washington Legal Fund, the Pacific Legal Foundation, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, and the Liberty Justice Center—all of which have used Koch money to challenge labor unions and weaken government regulations. Repeatedly, the GOP wing of the court has handed these organizations, and their donors, major victories. Those same four legal groups that worked so hard to disempower unions and destroy the regulatory state are now before the court with a new request: stop Trump’s arbitrary tariffs. They have a strong case, at least under the Roberts court’s precedents—after all, the justices have created a brand new doctrine, the major questions doctrine, and used it to strike down regulations without clear statutory authorization that industry doesn’t like. Tariffs on nearly every nation are by every measure “major” actions that can make or break businesses and reshape both the US and world economies.  But unlike in other major questions doctrine cases, when industry was pitted against Democratic priorities like environmental regulations or student debt relief programs that the six conservative justices struck down, this case has the business community going up against the president. Trump, too, has been on a winning streak before the six GOP justices, who have repeatedly used their emergency or shadow docket to greenlight the president’s agenda, from slashing the federal bureaucracy to detaining suspected immigrants based on the color of their skin. As of last month, Trump had won some 21 emergency appeals to the court. The Republican wing even restricted lower courts’ authority to grant relief from Trump’s policies. The logical conclusion is that the justices are either on board with Trump’s authoritarian project, protective of his political coalition, or possibly also afraid to cross him for fear he disobeys their orders. Perhaps it is a combination of these factors, but the result is a court that contorts itself—or remains completely silent—in order to repeatedly rule in Trump’s favor. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent in August, analogizing her colleagues jurisprudence to a make-believe game from Calvin and Hobbes: “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.” But this time, the administration is up against the court’s other preferred client, and one of their winning streaks must come to an end. One view of what’s coming starts with the solid premise that while ultrawealthy business interests don’t agree with all of Trump’s agenda, they prefer him to a Democrat. If we presume that Roberts and the court’s other Federalist Society recruits similarly view Trump as an essential—even if often misguided—element of their project, then they will try to limit his tariffs without strongly rebuking him. “I think the calculus that they’re going through is basically, ‘Would trying to stop him there lead to electoral defeat, or not? Is it too damaging to them?’” says Podhorzer, who also expects the court “at a minimum” will “do something that trims or constrains” Trump’s claimed tariff powers. “It’s important to look at whatever they end up doing as a reflection of where that business community is right now,” he adds. A decisive victory for Trump might signal that big business will tolerate a tariff regime in which they write multi-million dollar checks to Trump’s ballroom project in exchange for waivers—although they don’t seem to be there yet because, after all, they did help bring this challenge in the first place. A big Trump win could also signal that the justices themselves sense a fundamental shift in where power lies on the right, from the moneyed interests that created the court to the openly authoritarian MAGA movement. Legally, there are a lot of ways the justices could resolve this case. But it will be more illuminating to think of the Republican wing not as judges weighing arguments but as mediators seeking a compromise between two competing factions of the same team.

It is apparently not enough for America’s anti-tax crusaders that Congress just passed one of the most expensive and regressive tax bills in our history. The Washington Post reports that Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and other conservative groups are now urging the Trump administration to change how investment profits are taxed—unilaterally, if need be—in a way that would overwhelmingly favor the wealthiest Americans. Sound familiar? Namely, they want to index capital gains to inflation. Suppose I bought $100,000 worth of Apple stock on July 10, 2020 and kept it. Today, I could sell that stock for $170,383—a tidy $70,383 profit. That’s a 74 percent overall return and an average annual return of 11.7 percent. Pretty good, right? Not good enough for Norquist et al. These players want to let me adjust the “cost basis”—the price I originally paid for the stock—for inflation. Using this inflation calculator, I could then tell the IRS that my initial $100k investment was in fact a $120,407 investment, and so my profit for tax purposes is only $40,976. This is insane—for several reasons. First, read the room. Congress just passed a megabill whose benefits are deeply skewed in favor of the wealthy. Its tax provisions and spending cuts, taken together, will result in a 4 percent increase in average after-tax income for the richest 1 percent of American households and a nearly 4 percent decrease for the poorest 20 percent, based on the Yale Budget Lab’s analysis. This is very, very unpopular. The bill will at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt—more like $5 trillion if expiring provisions are extended in the coming years. And indexing capital gains to inflation, according to 2018 estimates from the Tax Policy Center and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, would add yet another $100 billion to $200 billion to the tab—with the richest 1 percent reaping 86 percent of the benefits. > “I don’t think reducing [capital gains rates further] will change investor > behavior,” says billionaire Mark Cuban. Norquist told the Washington Post he recently spoke with President Donald Trump and recommended the president implement the change with an executive order. Indexing capital gains to inflation was considered during Trump’s first term, the Post‘s Jeff Stein reports, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin felt Congress should handle it—current secretary Scott Bessent may prove more complaint. “I said something like, ‘Mr. President, after we do the bill, we will need more economic growth,” Norquist told Stein. “The Big Beautiful Bill is very pro-growth, but with this, we can have even more growth.’” In reality, not one of the Republican tax packages enacted since Ronald Reagan became president has lived up to its sponsors’ economic promises. “The economy may well enjoy a sugar-high the next couple of years, as borrowing stimulates near-term consumption,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in a statement after Congress passed the “One Bie Beautiful Bill” on July 3. “But a sugar-high won’t be sustained, it will do real damage, and often what comes next is the crash.” As for the notion of indexing fueling “more growth,” the billionaire investor Mark Cuban told me in an email that he thinks the current tax rates on capital gains are fair, and “I don’t think reducing it will change investor behavior.” Yet the fairness of those rates—and their justification—is the subject of fierce debate. Suppose I’m a wealthy investor and I sell assets I’ve held for at least 12 months—stocks, bonds, real estate, or even, say, a stud racehorse—netting my family $1,000,000 in profits. The federal tax on those capital gains ranges from zero for the first $94,000 to 20 percent for the portion that exceeds $583,750. Because my spouse and I have income of more than $250,000, we also have to pay a 3.8 percent “net investment income tax.” This all adds up to an effective tax rate of about 19 percent. But tax rates for wage income are much higher. A couple reporting $1,000,000 in salary income pays an effective rate of about 30 percent. That’s a huge difference, and part of why families whose money comes from primarily from asset growth have amassed wealth so much faster than working families have. It no lefty exaggeration to say America’s economic system is rigged against workers and in favor of investors. It’s right there in the tax code. > “This kind of proposal will only widen the economic inequality we’re facing.” So how do conservative policy wonks justify the low capital gains rates? A key argument, interestingly, is that inflation eats away at the value of long-term gains. One “solution” would be to index the gains to inflation, notes the libertarian Cato Institute, “but most countries instead roughly compensate” by offering reduced tax rates for investors. And now the anti-taxers want to have it both ways. Investors enjoy other economic advantages, too. Notably, their gains are counted as income only when the assets are sold. In practice, this allows people with a large portfolio of appreciated assets to borrow against their holdings at single-digit interest rates and live off those loans instead of selling assets and paying a double-digit tax. As ProPublica discovered, many of America’s wealthiest families have been doing precisely that. (As a result, from 2014 to 2018, Jeff Bezos paid an effective income tax rate of less than 1 percent.) Or say you have a $100 investment that grows by 10 percent a year during a period of 2 percent annual inflation. The first year’s profit, after inflation, is $8. “But I don’t pay tax on that $8 until I sell, which may be decades later,” says Bob Lord a former tax attorney and associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. “I’m basically getting a free ride on the appreciation of that $8 portion of my investment.” Doesn’t that benefit, he asks, more than offset any detriment from inflation? And also, isn’t investing supposed to contain an element of risk management? Isn’t the ability to beat inflation part of what separates a savvy investor from a useless one? Indexing for inflation, combined with favorable tax capital gains rates and an exemption for unrealized gains—doesn’t that basically reduce investing to shooting fish in a barrel? It is worth noting, too, that most Americans work for a paycheck, and the ones who make their living via investing are by and large quite wealthy. More than half of Americans now own some stock, but not much. As of January 2024, per Federal Reserve data, 93 percent of US stock holdings were owned by the most affluent 10 percent of the population, and the richest 1 percent owned more than half of all public equities—not to mention private equities. Indexing gains to inflation “would really codify the notion that income taxes are only for people who work for a living,” says Morris Pearl, a former managing director at BlackRock and current chairman of the board of Patriotic Millionaires, a nonprofit that advocates for higher taxes on the rich. If the Trump administration were to attempt the change Norquist recommended—unilaterally or otherwise—its not even clear how it would work. You would presumably need to make changes on both the profit and loss sides of a balance sheet. Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, has concluded that indexing is complex and unlikely to generate significant economic impact, and is therefore “more trouble than it’s worth.” “Indexing has been rejected in the past to avoid opening new tax shelters,” says Steven Rosenthal, a Washington tax policy expert and former legislation counsel for the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “If investors were permitted to index their assets, but not required to index their liabilities, debt-financed investments would explode. Investors could exclude profits and deduct interest. But indexing both assets and liabilities is a mess, which I, as a congressional staffer, discovered when we tried to draft it.” “This kind of proposal will only widen the economic inequality we’re facing,” adds Patriotic Millionaires’ Pearl. “It’s absurd that all I would need to do is buy property that I can rent out, and make a lot of money, and never have to pay taxes again!”

This story was originally published by Popular Information, a substack publication to which you can subscribe here. The Federal Communications Commission will no longer enforce a rule capping the price of prison phone calls, according to an announcement made Monday by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. The move suspends a 2024 FCC decision that capped the price of in-state phone calls at 6 cents minute for prisons and large jails and 7 cents per minute for medium-sized jails. Before the decision, a 15-minute phone call could cost as much as $11.35 at large jails in some states. Under the 2024 rules, those same phone calls would cost 90 cents. This week’s FCC announcement states that the suspension of the 2024 rules will apply until April 1, 2027. But it also says that the FCC will use that time to consider making permanent changes to the rule. Carr claims that the 2024 rules, which started going into effect on January 1 on a staggered basis, are “leading to negative, unintended consequences.” > The current system incentivizes prison operators to award contracts to > companies that charge exorbitant fees. The 2024 FCC decision followed the passage of the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022, which gave the FCC authority to regulate the price of in-state phone calls from prisons and jails. The legislation was named after Martha Wright-Reed, who spent two decades fighting for lower prices for prison phone calls as she struggled to afford spending over $100 per month to call her incarcerated grandson. At times, Wright-Reed had to skip medication payments and even cut back on groceries in order to afford the calls. In 2000, Wright-Reed sued CoreCivic, a private prison operator, arguing that the company’s exclusive contracts resulted in excessively high prices. Monday’s statement was blasted by FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, who argued that not enforcing the 2024 rules violates the Martha Wright-Reed Act, as the law directed the FCC to “implement the statutory provisions not earlier than 18 months and not later than 24 months after the date of its enactment.” Gomez said that the FCC is making the “indefensible decision to ignore both the law and the will of Congress.” Incarcerated people have said that the high cost forces them to choose between spending money on phone calls or purchasing personal hygiene items, or even shoes. One mother told CBS News in 2020 that she and her husband spent “$14,268 over the past two years” so that their incarcerated son could make phone calls. On top of the exorbitant per-minute rates, incarcerated people are charged additional fees, including as much as $4 to connect the call, which could be charged multiple times if the call drops. In 2024, the FCC estimated that capping the price of phone and video calls “would save incarcerated people and their families, friends and legal teams about $386 million.” The Prison Policy Initiative estimated that the industry costs families of incarcerated people “nearly $1 billion a year.” Studies have shown that visitation and phone calls from family decrease the chances that an incarcerated person will commit another crime. So why is the FCC suddenly suspending the lowered price caps for prison phone calls? Follow the money. The high cost of prison phone calls is a cash windfall for the private prison industry, which spent vast sums to help elect Trump president. The companies that provide prison telephone services offer kickbacks, known as “commissions,” to prison operators to secure lucrative contracts. This means up to 50 percent of the money incarcerated people spend on telephone calls is routed back to the company or government that operates the prison. This system incentivizes prison operators to award contracts to companies that charge exorbitant fees, creating a larger pool of money for kickbacks. For private prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic, kickbacks from telephone service providers are a lucrative revenue stream. How much money do these companies make from commissions? The industry no longer discloses those figures. But in 2012, according to SEC filings, the GEO Group made over $600,000 in site commissions from phone services. That figure is likely much higher today. The FCC rule on phone rates would have ended this practice, banning kickbacks for prison operators. But, like the caps on phone charges, the kickback ban is now on hold. During the 2024 campaign, GEO Group, through its PAC, was the first company to make the maximum contribution to Trump’s campaign. The same day, two top GEO Group executives, CEO Brian Evans and board chairman George Zoley, each donated $11,600 to the Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee. Later, a GEO Group subsidiary, GEO Acquisition II, donated $1 million to Make America Great Again PAC, a pro-Trump super PAC. GEO Group used the subsidiary to evade a federal law that prohibits government contractors from making political donations. After Trump won, GEO Group and CoreCivic each donated $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration committee. Both Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, and Attorney General Pam Bondi have previously been on the payroll of GEO Group. According to his federal financial disclosures, Homan received consulting fees from GEO Group in 2023 and 2024. Homan was not required to disclose the exact amount he was paid by the GEO Group, except that it was more than $5,000. Bondi worked as a lobbyist for GEO Group in 2019. In the order delaying the rule, the FCC explicitly cited the “financial burdens” imposed on prison operators through inhibiting their ability to collect commissions. The FCC claims that, without the ability to receive commissions or charge high prices, many facilities would stop allowing incarcerated people to make phone calls. This conclusion is largely based on claims made to the FCC by the corporations profiting from the existing system.

For a couple weeks, I’ve been getting negative campaign mailers for a New York City council district I don’t live in. I’m not really sure why. Maybe there was a data-entry error. Maybe someone’s used an outdated map. Maybe someone hates me.  They’re the sort of mailers you tend to get if you live in a major city these days. Paid for by an innocuous-sounding group called New Yorkers for a Better Future, they attack the incumbent council member—a Democratic-Socialist—for supporting drug injection sites and decriminalizing prostitution, and backing calls to defund the police. The incumbent “doesn’t care about our community,” the flyer reads. And there, at the bottom, is a legally required disclosure of one of the PAC’s largest donors: William A. Ackman.  You know, Bill. The Trump-backing, DEI-bashing, billionaire hedge-funder who does not live in this immigrant-heavy, largely Asian and Latino outer-borough district either—despite all that language about “our community.” He purchased a posh Upper West Side penthouse a few years back. And, from what I can tell, he spends a lot of time in the Hamptons. If X were a real place, he’d probably live there. But he still funneled $250,000 toward this group. And that disconnect makes him a perfect symbol for this week’s elections in America’s biggest blue city. In a lot of ways, as I’ve reported, the city’s Democratic primary elections are the first big test of the party’s post-November reset. The choice in the mayoral race between former governor Andrew Cuomo and a succession of challengers led by assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, is, in part, about what exactly you think Democrats have been getting wrong in the places they govern. But it’s also about money. Mamdani had a lot of it—almost $9 million, with most of it coming from public matching funds. But Cuomo’s super-PAC, Fix the City, raked in nearly three times what the assembly member could spend—with big checks from corporations and billionaires. Those funds have filled mailboxes and saturated the airwaves in the election’s final weeks. There’s a funny little wrinkle to all this spending, though. You sometimes hear people say that politicians should have to dress up like NASCAR drivers, in outfits emblazoned with the logos of their corporate benefactors. Well, New York City kind of does that. Every piece of literature or advertising from a political action committee has to include the names of the three largest donors to the group. Has this dampened the influence of money in politics within the five boroughs? It doesn’t really look like it. Still, every piece of Cuomo literature voters got from Fix The City had to include the disclaimer that it was paid for by DoorDash ($1 million), along with Ackman ($500,000), and former mayor Michael Bloomberg ($8.3 million).  There were more interesting names if you scratched the surface. Media mogul Barry Diller and Netflix chairman Reed Hastings gave a quarter of a million. Home Depot co-founder and Republican mega-donor Ken Langone gave $100,000. Pro-Trump hedge-funder Dan Loeb gave $350,000. James and Kathryn Murdoch offered $50,000 apiece. So did Stephen Ross, who lives in the borough of West Palm Beach, Florida and owns the Miami Dolphins. Alice Walton, of the Bentonville, Arkansas Waltons, pitched in with a humble offering of $100,000. Both Greenwich, Connecticut’s Jeff Wilpon, and the man he sold the New York Mets to—Stamford’s Steve Cohen—were good for $25,000. Another pro-Cuomo PAC, Sensible City, received a big check from Trump-backing hedge-funder Ken Griffin, who lives in Miami by way of Chicago. If Mamdani’s campaign is trying to demonstrate the power of organizing and viral campaigning, Cuomo’s is just a big blunt object—one that tells a different story about how politics and power work. These donors from the worlds of real estate, finance, media, and “philanthropy” each have their own peculiar politics. But faced with the prospect of a progressive or leftist mayor, the things that unite them have proven stronger than the things that divide them. Across different backgrounds and zip codes (if not tax brackets) they came together in an inspiring show of class solidarity. In one attack ad paid for by Fix the City, which the PAC paid $220,000 to run, a voter stands on a subway platform rattling off Mamdani’s promises of “free everything.” “Who’s gonna pay for all that,” he asks. “The tooth fairy?” But it wasn’t such a mystery after all. Mamdani was proposing for the city’s wealthiest residents to foot the bill. The advertisements asked who would be paying for everything. And there, in the list of donors at the end, they answered the question too.

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration Last week, the US Department of the Interior announced that it would speed up the approval process for certain fossil fuel projects, proclaiming that environmental analyses that previously would have taken years must now be taken down to, at maximum, a month. While the new procedures are seemingly a gift to the industry, this may actually be terrible news for pipeline developers, drillers, and miners. “If I were a developer of any of these projects, I would look at this order and smack my forehead,” says Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, the United States’ biggest environmental nonprofit law organization. “I don’t want my project to be authorized pursuant to these laughable procedures. It won’t hold up in court.” > “Virtually anything they do under these new legal procedures will be ripe for > a legal challenge.” The new procedures use President Donald Trump’s “national energy emergency,” proclaimed in an executive order in the first week of his presidency, to shorten timelines for federal reviews, including environmental reviews and reviews attached to cultural landmarks. Reviews that take into account a project’s impact on the environment are particularly truncated under this new policy. Processes that would normally take a year, the Department of the Interior says, must now be completed within just two weeks, while those reviews that might last longer than a year must now be done in under a month. Experts say, however, that the new timelines are so short that they almost certainly run afoul of the bedrock laws involved: the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. Mass, ongoing layoffs inside the federal government—including at Interior, where the Washington Post reported that a quarter of the agency’s staff may eventually be cut—means that there may soon be far too few staff to handle reviews that would be near impossible to fulfill even in normal circumstances. This leaves any projects that try to break ground under the new timelines open to very easy legal challenges—something that Sankar says is “low-hanging fruit” for people who are impacted by a project and who want to take a developer to court. “The people who wrote NEPA and the Endangered Species Act meant for the public to be involved, meant for real expertise to be applied, and meant for these to be meaningful ways to protect the environment and biodiversity,” Sankar says. “To shorten these periods to where you can barely get a letter from point A to point B in that time means that they’re not trying to comply at all. The good news is that it’s all so manifestly illegal that virtually anything they do under these new legal procedures will be ripe for a legal challenge.” These fast-forwarded processes are tied to a part of NEPA that states that agencies can bypass environmental reviews in case of an emergency. Ryan Hathaway, who worked on NEPA-related issues within Interior for more than a decade, says that this emergency justification has been used in the past for concrete events that pose an immediate threat to health and public safety, like wildfires or floods, with specific actions that needed to be taken—rather than a vague and open-ended energy “emergency.” > “There cannot be ‘US energy dominance’ and $50-per-barrel oil; those two > statements are contradictory.” “Lawyers are going to have a field day with this,” says Hathaway, who now works as a director at Lawyers for Good Government, a legal nonprofit dedicated to progressive advocacy. It’s clear these new rules are exclusively a gift to extractive industries like drilling and mining. Solar and wind projects—which the administration has repeatedly attacked, withdrawing leases for offshore wind and ordering a construction halt on projects already underway—are notably absent from the list of projects allowed to undergo accelerated timelines. But ironically, these orders are only contributing to an increasingly uncertain environment for fossil fuel producers under the new Trump administration. Even before the chaos caused by Liberation Day, Big Oil faced a potential reckoning with the president it helped elect. While the shale oil boom of the early 2010s rewarded executives for increased production, that strategy led to too much supply, leading prices per barrel to drop during the first Trump administration. After prices bottomed out during the pandemic, investors became more careful about unrestrained production. “It’s not government regulation that’s limiting the production growth rate in the United States. It’s Wall Street,” says Clayton Seigle, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC. The industry was given a boost in the early 2020s with the worldwide energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but investors kept a cautious eye on prices. Despite President Joe Biden’s climate focus, the US oil and gas industry became the world’s biggest crude oil producer in 2023, and reached a record high of producing 13.4 million barrels per day late last year. The challenge under the Trump administration would become balancing profitability with the president’s goal of unleashing “energy dominance.” Trump, after all, has stated that he wants oil to drop to $50 a barrel—a price far too low to be profitable for the industry. Each quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas publishes a regional report on the state of the oil and gas industry in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, which includes anonymous survey responses from executives. The vitriol towards the White House in these comments from the first survey of this year, published in late March, shocked analysts. “The key word to describe 2025 so far is ‘uncertainty’ and as a public company, our investors hate uncertainty,” one anonymous executive said. “This uncertainty is being caused by the conflicting messages coming from the new administration. There cannot be ‘US energy dominance’ and $50 per barrel oil; those two statements are contradictory.” “’Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry,” another wrote. Trump has continued to hand out questionable gifts to industry. On Thursday, Interior announced that it had changed some policies around offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that could, according to the agency, increase production in the Gulf by up to 100,000 barrels a day. Meanwhile, Interior is also reportedly assembling a list of fossil fuel deposits on public lands that it plans to open up for production. Like the accelerated timelines for environmental permitting, these gifts come with significant strings attached. While the Gulf order will help companies currently producing to up their productivity, they’re unlikely to lure new customers to the region: Offshore drilling is expensive, and four-fifths of the more than 2,000 active leases in the Gulf are sitting unused. And while opening up public lands to drilling may sound like an industry wish-list item, companies faced with an uncertain American regulatory environment—from the looming threat of tariffs to accelerated permitting timelines that could get projects held up in court to promises made under a Republican administration that may be withdrawn the next time a Democrat is president—may not want to invest years and capital in starting up a project in a risky area. “For more than a century, energy companies have looked at projects in part based on the host country’s political risk, but the United States wasn’t on that list,” Seigle says. “These days we see huge swings in political support for oil and gas, and the trend of reversing the prior administration’s approach. So energy companies and their investors are now thinking about the political risk of energy projects right here at home.”

After a French court found far-right leader and former presidential frontrunner Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement on Monday—a conviction that will bar her from holding political office for five years—some of President Donald Trump’s closest allies are boosting baseless conspiracy theories alleging that Le Pen’s conviction is part of a global scheme to keep right-wing populists from holding office. Le Pen is reportedly accused of wrongfully diverting $5 million in funds earmarked for the European Parliament to staffers of her nationalist, xenophobic party, the National Rally, over a 12-year period. The verdict makes her ineligible to run in the country’s next presidential election in 2027—and comes after she was polling at 37 percent, more than 10 points ahead of her closest challenger. Le Pen has run for that office three times before, and became more popular as right-wing political parties across Europe rose in prominence in recent years; in the 2022 presidential runoff, Le Pen earned 41.5 percent of votes to President Emmanuel Macron’s 58.6 percent. (Macron is term-limited.) In addition to being ineligible to hold office as a result of the conviction, Le Pen will also have to serve two years’ house arrest and pay a fine of more than $100,000. The politician has denied wrongdoing and said she intends to appeal the charges, which she dismissed on French television Monday night as “a political decision” intended to prevent her election. “The rule of law has been completely violated by this decision,” Le Pen added. (Sound familiar?) A variety of right-wing politicos from around the world condemned the verdict. Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán posted on X, “I am Marine!” Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—who will face a trial on accusations of inciting a 2022 coup attempt seeking to overturn the election he lost, the country’s Supreme Court ruled last week—characterized Le Pen’s conviction to Reuters as “left-wing judicial activism.” And Le Pen’s protégé, National Rally president Jordan Bardella, alleged that “French democracy…is being executed” by the verdict. You might think Trump’s cronies would abstain from commenting and count themselves lucky that their guy managed to evade criminal conviction himself for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. But you’d be wrong. Trump allies couldn’t help but characterize Le Pen’s conviction as evidence that the American president, too, had been unfairly targeted in his many court cases. “When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents. This is their standard playbook throughout the world,” Elon Musk wrote on X in a post Monday morning, which had more than 16 million views by that afternoon. Musk made those comments when he re-shared a post from Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official who previously posted racist conspiracy theories online and interacted with white nationalists under a pseudonym, according to a 2023 NBC News report. The Benz post that Musk re-shared on Monday grouped Le Pen and Trump with a series of others accused, or convicted, of crimes—”[Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil, Imran Khan in Pakistan, Matteo Salvini in Italy…Călin Georgescu in Romania”—and alleged, “The criminal prosecution of every populist challenger is a dagger in the heart of the credibility of democracy.” In response to another post from Benz boosting the conspiracy theory about the Le Pen verdict, Musk wrote: “This will backfire, like the legal attacks against President Trump.” (But Trump has not, in fact, been immune from court rulings: Several court orders have successfully halted or even reversed some of his most outlandish moves since taking office for the second time, such as his attempts to overturn birthright citizenship and fire thousands of probationary federal workers. Trump was also found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the hush-money payments he made to Stormy Daniels, and found liable by a jury of sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.) Responding to a post from X user Alex Lorusso—executive producer of the right-wing commentator Benny Johnson’s Benny Show on YouTube —that alleged, “they’re trying the same playbook they did to Trump in France,” Musk wrote: “Same playbook everywhere.” And in response to a two-minute video posted by Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a right-wing Dutch political commentator characterizing the Le Pen verdict as “lawfare against the European right-wing,” Musk replied: “Unreal.” Donald Trump Jr. also got in on the baseless paranoia, writing in his own post: “France is sending le Pen [sic] to jail and barring her from running?! Are they just trying to prove JD Vance was right about everything?” (He was presumably referring to the vice president’s well-documented disdain for Europe.) Trump Jr. made that post while re-posting another from Robby Starbuck—a conservative activist who brags about getting corporations to roll back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts—claiming that “the left in France” was behind the “BS charges” Le Pen was convicted of. Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on Le Pen’s conviction yet, and spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones about whether the president supports Musk’s and Trump Jr.’s claims. There is no evidence to support the idea that Le Pen’s conviction was politically motivated; instead, it’s a reminder that despite Trump’s successful evasion of punishment himself, nobody—not even an aspiring president—is above the law in a truly healthy and just democracy. It’s no wonder this concept triggers the Trump crowd.