An anonymous reader shares a report: Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, which are suing OpenAI for allegedly scraping their works to train its AI models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data potentially relevant to the case. Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so that counsel for The Times and Daily News could perform searches for their copyrighted content in its AI training sets. In a letter, attorneys for the publishers say that they and experts they hired have spent over 150 hours since November 1 searching OpenAI's training data. But on November 14, OpenAI engineers erased all the publishers' search data stored on one of the virtual machines, according to the aforementioned letter, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late Wednesday. OpenAI tried to recover the data -- and was mostly successful. However, because the folder structure and file names were "irretrievably" lost, the recovered data "cannot be used to determine where the news plaintiffs' copied articles were used to build [OpenAI's] models," per the letter. "News plaintiffs have been forced to recreate their work from scratch using significant person-hours and computer processing time," counsel for The Times and Daily News wrote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, a 900-page opus of conservative policy recommendations published by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. But he has nominated two of the document’s co-authors to Cabinet-level positions, and many others served in his first administration, which suggests the document may be a window into what the next four years could bring. 

On Monday, Trump nominated Brendan Carr, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to head the agency. He has also appointed Tom Homan, a Heritage Foundation fellow named as a contributor to Project 2025, as his so-called “border czar.” 

Eighteen of the 40 co-authors and editors of the report served in the first Trump administration. Among them are Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security; Christopher Miller, former acting Defense secretary; and Russell T. Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought is reportedly being considered for another top post in the coming administration. 

During the 2024 campaign, Democrats sought to tie Trump to Project 2025 — a policy agenda they decried as “dangerous” and “shockingly radical” — framing it as a blueprint for his second term that is much more detailed than the GOP’s 28-page platform. The document focuses on proposals to expand presidential power, gut the federal bureaucracy, enact the priorities of the religious right, deregulate, and more. 

Trump at one point claimed to have “no idea who is behind it” and denied any connection with it when asked about it at the September presidential debate: “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it.”

However, since Trump’s reelection, some of his allies have suggested that the document was always intended to be the playbook for his second term. Trump’s nominations of Carr and Homan seem to support that idea. Neither will require additional Senate confirmation to take on their roles; through them, they will be in a position to advocate for Project 2025’s ideas on communications and immigration, respectively.  

Here’s what we know about Carr and Homan and the ideas relevant to their posts outlined in Project 2025. 

Brendan Carr

Carr, a pick approved by Trump’s billionaire backer Elon Musk, currently serves as the senior Republican on the FCC and was previously its general counsel. Now, he is set to take the helm, steering the commission toward a hardline stance against Big Tech and what he describes in Project 2025 as its “attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.” 

Among his key proposals in Project 2025 is ending legal immunities for internet platforms hosting user-generated content under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That would require stricter content moderation on the part of these platforms or cutbacks to the degree to which users can contribute content, fundamentally changing the way people interact online. 

At the same time, he wrote in Project 2025 that he wants to ensure that “Internet companies no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech.” That echoes some of Trump’s other Cabinet picks who are seeking to crack down on “wokeness” in their respective agencies. 

Carr also supports efforts to block TikTok in the US, identifying it, along with the Chinese smartphone producer Huawei, as a national security threat. He claims in Project 2025 that TikTok is part of a Chinese “foreign influence campaign by determining the news and information that the app feeds to millions of Americans.” However, there are reasons to believe that a TikTok ban would, as Vox previously reported, have “serious consequences for online expression,” which include shutting down what has proved a hub for activism.

Carr may have some difficulty enacting his agenda initially, however. The commission will have a 3-2 Democratic majority until next June when Trump will be able to nominate a new member. 

Tom Homan

Homan isn’t named as an author of a particular chapter of Project 2025 but as an overall contributor — and some of his stated hardline views on immigration and the border are reflected in the report.

He started out as a Border Patrol agent in the 1980s and worked his way up through the immigration agencies, becoming the head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s removal operations arm under former President Barack Obama. There, he presided over the most immigrants ever deported in a single year, exceeding 400,000. Under Trump, Homan served as acting director of ICE but was never confirmed to the position permanently by the Senate.

Homan’s new role as “border czar” appears to involve far-reaching responsibilities. Those include overseeing the implementation of Trump’s mass deportations policy — the centerpiece of the former president’s immigration agenda. 

That means Homan’s responsibilities will likely intersect with many of the numerous immigration priorities outlined in Project 2025. Here is a non-exhaustive list of what’s included:

• Expanding the use of a legal authority known as “expedited removal” to quickly deport immigrants who crossed the border without authorization.
• Deporting immigrants even in currently protected, sensitive zones like churches.
• Ending large-scale parole programs that the Biden administration has relied upon as a deportation shield for individuals from certain countries, including Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. 
• Ending programs like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has protected hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation.
• Creating a new legal authority akin to the Title 42 policy, which was implemented by Trump and maintained by Biden to rapidly expel immigrants arriving on the US southern border on the dubious public health grounds of stopping the spread of Covid-19. 

Homan has yet to indicate whether he or Trump fully endorses these policies. But unlike Trump, who claims to have never read Project 2025, Homan put his name to the document, and could draw from it in his new role. 

Patients in China will be able to purchase the blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy for 1,400 yuan, or about $193, just a fraction of the US list price of $1,349, according to media reports.

The price in China is in line with pricing elsewhere outside of the US. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) noted in a September Senate hearing, Wegovy, made by Novo Nordisk, is sold for $265 in Canada, $186 in Denmark, $137 in Germany, and just $92 in the United Kingdom. In the hearing, Sanders and other senators grilled Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Jørgensen on the "outrageously high prices" in the US of Wegovy and the company's other popular GLP-1 drug, Ozempic, used for diabetes.

"What we are dealing with today is not just an issue of economics, it is not just an issue of corporate greed. It is a profound moral issue," Sanders said in opening remarks about the prices of the highly effective drugs.

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Four of the 14 people Donald Trump has nominated for top roles in his administration have faced sex scandals, including three who have faced allegations of sexual abuse, according to a Daily Kos review. (The list of 14 nominees includes only those requiring Senate confirmation.)

Vanity Fair and The New York Times reported that Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, was accused of sexual assault in 2017 following an encounter he had in Monterey, California. Hegseth and his second wife were divorced the same year the assault allegation was made, CBS News reported.

The allegation, which was made to Monterey police, was unknown to Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, ahead of the nomination, Vanity Fair reported. It’s yet another failure of her tenure less than a week since Trump chose her for the role. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, also has an untoward history with women.

In 2013, the New York Post reported that Kennedy kept a journal in which he detailed his sexual exploits with 37 different women, none of which were his wife at the time. 

From the Post’s story:

Most women are identified only by their first name in the ledger.

They include a lawyer, an environmental activist, a doctor, and at least one woman married to a famous actor.

A Post reporter who questioned Kennedy on Friday about the diary was first met with six seconds of stunned silence.

The Post reported that his then-wife, Mary Richardson, was the one who found the journal. Richardson would later commit suicide amid their divorce proceedings.

In July, Politico reported that Kennedy apologized to a woman who accused Kennedy of forcibly groping her when she was a babysitter for his kids.

“I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings,” Kennedy texted the woman, who was in her 20s at the time of the alleged incident. 

And during his since-failed presidential campaign, Kennedy had a digital affair with Olivia Nuzzi, a New York Magazine reporter who has since resigned after news of the relationship became public. The Daily Beast reported that Nuzzi sent Kennedy nude images of herself, which Kennedy bragged to others about possessing.

Then there’s now-former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general, who was investigated by the Justice Department for alleged child sex trafficking.

The Republican-led House Ethics Committee also probed reports that Gaetz had inappropriate relationships with underaged girls, one of whom testified under oath before the committee that she had sex with Gaetz when she was 17. 

And Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor whom Trump tapped to lead the Department of Homeland Security, allegedly had an extramarital affair with former Trump campaign aide Corey Lewandowski, the New York Post reported in 2023.

From the Post’s report:

Though no images of the two getting frisky are known to exist, the pair have been less than discreet about their relationship, with one source recalling them making out at a hotel bar during the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla.  

“I remember it was so absurdly blatant and public,” said the person, who recalled Noem and Lewandowski getting “handsy” at the bar of the Hyatt Regency Orlando with between 100 and 200 others around.

“It wasn’t like 2 a.m.,” the source said. “It isn’t like we caught them at some dive bar miles away. It’s a lobby bar where everyone is staying and so there’s a bajillion political operatives and journalists and electeds around. I remember I saw it with my own eyes and a couple other people saw it and the blatantness was absurd.”

Of course, Trump himself is also an accused sexual abuser. 

In 2023, a jury in New York found Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store dressing room in 1996. 

Trump has also faced allegations of sexual misconduct from dozens of women. Trump has denied their allegations. But don’t forget that he was caught on tape bragging about kissing women without their consent, saying, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Ultimately, Trump’s nominees are so corrupt and compromised that he is bypassing FBI background checks and instead using private companies to vet them—likely because his picks wouldn't pass an FBI screening with their baggage.

“Passing an FBI security clearance to be entrusted with our country’s most guarded secrets requires unquestionable loyalty to the United States, a test Trump and his cronies, who are the poster children of plutocratic globalization and ‘elite capture,’ know they could never pass,” Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland told the news outlet Government Executive. 

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President-elect Donald Trump tapped notorious anti-vaxxer and bear-meat aficionado Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services Thursday. The prospect of a man who has railed against fluoride in water and promised to stop research on drug development and infectious diseases for at least eight years heading the country’s public health initiatives has given many people pause.

Reactions to the news have begun to come in, though none of those reactions mention Kennedy’s theory that chemicals in drinking water have resulted in “gender confusion.”

Republican Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana took time away from saying that women should not be allowed to leave their state for reproductive care to lament vague “vaccine mandates” in support of Kennedy’s nomination.

Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis shocked many with his statement on X. 

“I’m excited by the news that the President-Elect will appoint @RobertKennedyJr to @HHSGov,” Polis wrote. “He helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 and will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA. I hope he leans into personal choice on vaccines rather than bans (which I think are terrible, just like mandates) but what I’m most optimistic about is taking on big pharma and the corporate ag oligopoly to improve our health.”

Polis’ support for RFK Jr. was a far cry from his feelings on the matter back in August, when he posted this.

Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, an actual physician, readied his rubber stamp by writing that Kennedy “has championed issues like healthy foods and the need for greater transparency in our public health infrastructure. I look forward to learning more about his other policy positions and how they will support a conservative, pro-American agenda.”

Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, not known for being particularly bright, called the pick “absolutely brilliant.”

And the always craven Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin seemed over the moon about an HHS chief who is as far out when it comes to public health as he is.

Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts kept his reaction short and sweet.

“Mr. Kennedy’s outlandish views on basic scientific facts are disturbing and should worry all parents who expect schools and other public spaces to be safe for their children,” Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden said in a statement, calling bullshit on the Kennedy-Trump allegiance. “When Mr. Kennedy comes before the Finance Committee, it’s going to be very clear what Americans stand to lose under Trump and Republicans in Congress.”

Kennedy’s history of half-baked ideas about public health has some appeal among anti-science, anti-establishment circles. Now we all get to be subjected to his whims.

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We have just witnessed the greatest failure of federal law enforcement in American history.

The reasons for Donald Trump’s reelection are numerous and will be hotly debated in the weeks ahead. But the story of his comeback cannot be told without seriously grappling with how he managed to outrun four criminal cases, including — most notably — the Justice Department’s prosecution over Trump’s alleged effort to overturn the 2020 election.

At the root of it all are the considerable and truly historic legal missteps by the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland, as well as a series of decisions by Republicans throughout the political and legal systems in recent years that effectively bailed Trump out when the risks for him were greatest.

The two federal criminal cases against him are now dead as a practical matter. Already there is reporting suggesting that special counsel Jack Smith will leave his post and dismiss the pending cases, which is not that surprising considering that Trump pledged to fire him once back in office anyway. The Georgia case, an overhyped and misguided vehicle for post-2020 legal accountability, is going to remain on ice and perhaps get thrown out entirely in the coming years, at least as to Trump (if not his co-defendants). In Manhattan, where Trump was supposed to be sentenced in a matter of weeks after his conviction in the Stormy Daniels hush money case earlier this year, Trump is likely to ask the court to cancel the sentencing date; regardless of the mechanics, there is no reasonable scenario in which Trump serves some period of incarceration while also serving in the White House.

All of this will happen despite the majority of the public’s stated interest in concluding the criminal cases — the federal election subversion case in particular — as well as polling that suggested that Trump’s conviction early this year hurt his standing across the electorate and with independents in particular.

If that seems incongruous, it is not. The most obvious explanation for Trump’s win despite his considerable legal problems is that a critical mass of voters were willing to set aside their concerns about Trump’s alleged misconduct because of their dissatisfaction with the Biden-Harris administration. Fair or not, this was absolutely their right as voters.

But if the system had worked the way it should have, voters would never have faced such a choice. If Trump had actually faced accountability for his alleged crimes, he may not have even appeared on the ballot.

It is now clearer than ever that Garland was a highly questionable choice to serve as attorney general from the start. From the outset of the Biden presidency, it was readily apparent that Garland had little desire to investigate and potentially prosecute Trump.

The most comprehensive accounts on the matter, from investigative reporting at The Washington Post and The New York Times, strongly indicate that the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation and public hearings in 2022 effectively forced Garland to investigate Trump and eventually to appoint Smith in November of that year — nearly two years after Trump incited the riot at the Capitol.

There are many people — including many Democratic legal pundits — who have continued to defend this delay and may continue to do so, so let me be very clear: Those people are wrong.

It was clear after Trump’s loss in 2020 — even before Jan. 6 — that his conduct warranted serious legal scrutiny by the Justice Department, particularly in the area of potential financial crimes. But that probe, which could and should have been pursued by Biden’s U.S. Attorney and aspiring attorney general in Manhattan, somehow never materialized.

It was also clear — on Jan. 6 itself — that Trump may have committed criminal misconduct after his loss in 2020 that required immediate and serious attention from the Justice Department.

The formation of the Jan. 6 committee in early 2021 did nothing to change the calculus. There too, it was clear from the start that there would still need to be a criminal investigation to deliver any meaningful legal accountability for Trump.

In fact, the warning signs for where this could all end up — where the country finds itself now — were clear by late 2021, less than a year into Biden’s term. The public reporting at the time indicated (correctly, we now know) that there was no real Justice Department investigation into Trump and his inner circle at that point, even though the outlines of a criminal case against Trump — including some of the charges themselves that were eventually brought nearly two years later — were already apparent.

As a result, the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department were running an extremely obvious risk — namely, that Trump would run for reelection and win, and that any meaningful criminal accountability for his misconduct after 2020 would literally become impossible. That, of course, has now happened. It was all eminently predictable.

Garland’s defenders over the years — including many Democratic lawyers who regularly appear on cable news — claimed that Garland and the department were simply following a standard, “bottom-up” investigative effort. Prosecutors would start with the rioters, on this theory, and then eventually get to Trump.

This never made any sense.

It did not reflect some unwritten playbook for criminal investigations. In fact, in criminal cases involving large and potentially overlapping groups of participants — as well as serious time sensitivity — good prosecutors try to get to the top as quickly as possible.

The Justice Department can — and should — have quickly pursued the rioters and Trump in parallel. The fact that many legal pundits actually defended this gross dereliction of duty — and actually argued that this was the appropriate course — continues to amaze me.

As for Garland, his legacy is now out of his control, and the early returns are not looking good.

Garland is a serious, well-intentioned and complex figure. But given all this, he may go down as one of the worst and most broadly unpopular attorney generals in American history — hated by the anti-Trump part of the country for failing to bring Trump to justice, and hated by the pro-Trump part of the country for pursuing Trump at all. I sincerely hope he provides a first-hand accounting of what happened after he too leaves office next year.

None of this, however, excuses the Republican political and legal class for their role in all this as well. In fact, Trump could not have pulled it off without a great deal of help from them too.

Start with Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans in 2021. They could — and should — have voted to convict Trump after his second impeachment, which would have prevented him from running again for the presidency. Instead, McConnell and almost every other GOP senator let him off the hook.

Trump then proceeded to execute perhaps the most remarkable political rehabilitation in American history, but which should not have been nearly such a surprise. He never seemed to lose his grip on the party and in fact strengthened it over the course of 2021, as the likes of Kevin McCarthy and others quickly rallied around him.

The Republican presidential primaries also proved, in the end, to be a boon for Trump in his legal fight. By the time they concluded, Trump had been indicted by the Justice Department and local prosecutors in Manhattan and Fulton County. Under the traditional rules of politics, this should have provided incredible fodder for his adversaries and essentially killed his campaign.

Instead, his most prominent primary opponents — his opponents — came to his defense. As the prosecution in Manhattan came into focus, for instance, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis belittled the effort as “some manufactured circus by some Soros-DA.” Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy both said that they would pardon Trump if elected.

It was no surprise, then, that Republican primary voters rallied around Trump. Perhaps it was inevitable, but it was certainly made easier by the fact that Trump’s supposed adversaries were all endorsing his legal defense as well as his false claims about the prosecutions themselves.

Last but most certainly not least: The Republican appointees on the Supreme Court bailed Trump out this year — in the heart of the general election campaign and when it mattered most.

A very large swathe of the public — somewhere around 60 percent according to our polling and others — wanted Trump to stand trial this year in the 2020 election subversion case. Before the Supreme Court weighed in, an even larger portion of Americans — somewhere around 70 percent — rejected the idea that presidents should be immune from prosecution for alleged crimes they committed while in office.

The six Republican appointees — three of whom, of course, were appointed by Trump himself — sided with Trump on both counts.

They first slow-walked Trump’s appeal on immunity grounds this year and then created a new doctrine of criminal immunity for Trump that had no real basis in the law — effectively foreclosing the possibility of a trial before Election Day. It was a gross distortion of the law in apparent service of the Republican appointees’ partisan political objectives.

This was all quite bad all around, but make no mistake: Trump’s reelection caps off the most remarkable reversal of legal fortunes in the history of American law. And besides Trump himself, many political figures in both parties share the blame.

“Concealed carry reciprocity” is the latest example of President-elect Donald Trump’s shifting views on state rights. 

“I will protect the right of self-defense everywhere it is under siege, and I will sign concealed carry reciprocity. Your Second Amendment right does not end at the state line,” Trump said in a video.

If implemented, this would force states that don’t allow for concealed carry—i.e., carrying a firearm out of public view—to recognize permits from other states. That means a person from Arizona, which does not require a permit for concealed carry, could legally carry a hidden firearm in California, which requires a permit for concealed carry.

At the heart of Trump’s push for concealed-carry reciprocity is the idea that certain rights, like the right to bear arms, are so fundamental to American life that they should supersede state laws. But when it comes to, say, abortion? No, Trump feels very differently. For nearly half a century, abortion was constitutionally protected under Roe v. Wade, but now, due to the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, it’s been left up to the states. 

Unlike concealed carry, apparently. 

Donald Trump Jr. posted on his Instagram on Sunday, “BOOM! My father just announced full conceal carry reciprocity! The 2nd Amendment will stay and remain protected.” 

Trump had no specific gun policy on his campaign website during the election cycle, but announcing this policy before he takes office shows its priority—and that it’s something he didn’t want to inform voters about before they voted. Sneaky.

In June, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence to be a public health crisis. Mass shootings have become a part of American life, and they vastly exceed those in other developed countries. According to Small Arms Survey, a Switzerland-based research organization, the U.S. has 121 firearms per 100 residents as of 2017. In other words, more guns than people that exist in the country. The U.S. also quadruples other developed countries when it comes to gun homicides per 100,000 people.  Democratic governors are planning to fight the Trump administration’s policies tooth and nail. But it remains to be seen how they’ll manage to keep other state’s gun laws out of their home states. After all, federal law supersedes state law.

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CNN reported on Monday that anti-immigrant bigot Stephen Miller is expected to join the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff for policy, putting him in a key role in shaping Donald Trump's second-term policy agenda.

“This is another fantastic pick by the president. Congrats @StephenM!” Vice President-elect JD Vance wrote in a post on X.

Miller, who has spent his career palling around with white supremacists and working to enact anti-immigrant policies, is one of the most nefarious people in Trump's orbit. He’s been working for Trump since his first campaign in 2016, and stayed on as a senior adviser to Trump for the entirety of Trump’s first term. 

During that time, Miller wrote some of Trump’s darkest speeches, including the 2017 inaugural address where Trump spoke of “American carnage” and said he will ensure Americans will “live in a country where criminal gangs cannot just cross our border and rape and murder with impunity.”

Miller also helped Trump craft the "zero tolerance" immigration policy that led to family separations at the border, as well as Trump's Muslim ban, which led to chaos at numerous airports with legal residents even being blocked from entering the country. And Miller was reportedly behind Trump’s effort to cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allows undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to remain in the country and work or attend school legally.

A group called Hatewatch obtained emails Miller sent in 2015 where he decried the DACA program because he said it uses “immigration to replace existing demographics”—pushing the white supremacist “great replacement” theory that has inspired violent attacks on immigrants.

Vanity Fair reported in 2019 that Miller sickeningly took pleasure in witnessing the suffering his policies created, writing that Miller “actually enjoys seeing those pictures" of anguished families at the border.

Even after Trump’s first term in office ended, Miller never left Trump’s orbit. In 2023, Miller told The New York Times that Trump would once again come for immigrants if elected to a second term.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller told the Times, saying that Trump will again try to end DACA, refuse to accept asylum seekers, and carry out mass deportations. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

Most recently, Miller gave a vile speech at Trump’s racist campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, where he declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

His hatred of immigrants and non-white communities runs deep. Before joining the Trump White House, Miller worked with anti-Muslim hate groups and white supremacists like neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and Peter Brimelow, who founded the white nationalist hate website VDARE, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Early on in his career, Miller worked for now-former Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters due to their mutual disdain of immigrants but later had a falling out after Trump thought Sessions did not adequately protect him from investigations into his collusion with Russia in the 2016 campaign. 

Miller helped Sessions defeat a 2013 comprehensive immigration reform bill, with Politico reporting in 2016 that Miller wrote a handbook for House Republicans that they used to kill the legislation.

Miller is so awful that the SPLC added him to their list of extremists in January 2020.

“Through the conscious use of fearmongering and xenophobia, Miller implements policies which demonize immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, in an apparent effort to halt all forms of immigration to the United States,” the SPLC wrote in its profile of Miller.

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Donald Trump announced on Sunday that he is appointing former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas Homan to serve as his “border czar,” saying Homan will be "in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin."

“I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Homan, a Project 2025 contributor, ran ICE when Trump first took office in 2017.

While in the Trump administration, Homan is considered the “father” of Trump's "zero tolerance" border policy, which led to thousands of unnecessary and inhumane family separations. It took months for many of the children who were separated from their parents to reunite with their families, leading to agonizing images of children in cages in detention facilities without their parents. 

He also made menacing comments to immigrants, saying at a congressional hearing in 2017 that they "should be worried.”

“If you’re in this country illegally and you committed a crime by being in this country, you should be uncomfortable, you should look over your shoulder. You need to be worried,” Homan said in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee. “No population is off the table.”

When asked later by CNN if he regretted those comments, Homan said no. 

“It needed to be said,” Homan told CNN in June 2017. 

Homan lasted only 17 months in the Trump administration the first time around. According to The Washington Post, Homan "retired in frustration when the White House failed to move his nomination toward Senate confirmation."

But now Homan will be back, and is gung-ho on Trump's plan to carry out mass deportations.

In February 2023, before Trump officially became the GOP nominee, Homan bragged to right-wing propagandist Charlie Kirk that he would be back in a future Trump administration to help deport immigrants. 

“I'm going to run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen,” Homan said. 

He also spoke during the Republican National Convention in July, declaring in a speech, "I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden's released in our country … You better start packing now."

Of course, experts say it will be extremely expensive to run a mass-deportation operation, costing almost $11,000 per immigrant.  

It’s also logistically difficult. 

Homan said on Fox News on Sunday that the deportation plan would be "a well-targeted, planned operation ... by the men of ICE."

But a number of undocumented immigrants have family members here legally, meaning deportations could once again separate families.

CBS News asked Homan about this in an interview that aired on "60 Minutes" before the election.

“Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” CBS’ Cecilia Vega asked Homan.

To which Homan replied, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”

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President-elect Donald Trump is pushing for the next Senate majority leader to allow recess appointments, which would allow him to install some officials without Senate confirmation.

Typically, the Senate must approve presidential nominations for high-level posts, including cabinet positions, ambassadorships, and inspector general jobs, in a process outlined in the US Constitution. This procedure is meant to be a check on presidential power — a way of ensuring officials directly elected by citizens can guard against the appointment of unqualified or corrupt personnel.

The Constitution, however, also allows for “recess appointments,” a provision that aims to prevent prolonged government vacancies by allowing the president to install officials without Senate approval while Congress is not in session. 

Using such recess appointments, Trump would be able to appoint whoever he’d like without giving the Senate the opportunity to question or object to the pick. Critics of the practice note that it increases the risk of unqualified, corrupt, or ideological appointees filling government posts. It also significantly expands presidential power. 

Though recess appointments have been used in the past by presidents of both parties, in recent years, the Senate has avoided going to extended recesses, blocking presidents from making any appointments in senators’ absence.

Reinstating recess appointments “would essentially negate one of the Senate’s main roles in governance, which is to vet presidential nominations for high-level positions,” Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri, told Vox. “It would, if the Republicans in the Senate were willing to go along with it, represent sort of an abdication; they would be simply giving up the power that’s afforded them.”

Trump injected his demand into the fierce race to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell as the leader of the Senate, which will be under GOP control next session thanks to the results of last week’s election. Trump largely stayed out of that contest while on the campaign trail, but he waded into it on Sunday, writing on X, “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!)”

The three candidates for the position — Sens. John Thune (South Dakota), John Cornyn (Texas), and Rick Scott (Florida) — quickly expressed support for Trump’s demand. Scott, the underdog in the race who is also the closest Trump ally of the three, was the most explicit in his endorsement of the plan, writing “100% agree. I will do whatever it takes to get your nominations through as quickly as possible,” on X.

What’s a recess appointment and how does it work?

In ordinary circumstances, nominees to many government posts including cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and federal judges must undergo a confirmation hearing, during which they are questioned by the Senate about their record, qualifications, and how they will perform their government duties. Confirmation in this process requires a simple majority voting to confirm. 

Recess appointments work differently, and they don’t require a vote. The president simply appoints an official of their choice. The idea behind them was that there might arise times when the president needed to appoint someone to keep the government functioning, while Congress was out of session (in recess).

“At the time the Constitution was written, Congress met mainly nine out of 24 months, and there were long stretches where Congress wasn’t in session,” Squire told Vox. As such, the Constitution states the president has the “Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” 

Congressional recesses aren’t as long as they once were. Now, recesses happen in between each congressional session and around holidays. Recess appointments still work the same way, however. And as the text notes, any appointment made during a recess isn’t permanent: Presidential appointments made during a recess last to the end of that second session, meaning for a period of no more than two years. A president can renominate their pick after that, or reappoint them during another recess. 

How have they been used in the past?

With the exception of Trump and President Joe Biden, recent presidents have made use of recess appointments; according to the Congressional Research Service, former President Barack Obama made 32 recess appointments, Bill Clinton made 139 recess appointments, and George W. Bush made 171 recess appointments.

Though recess appointments were meant to be used in emergencies or in times when Congress met less often, over the past few decades, they’ve become seen as a way for presidents to get around congressional opposition. The process faced major scrutiny during the Obama administration, and was curtailed after a 2014 Supreme Court ruling that Obama had overstepped his power in utilizing recess nominations. (That’s why neither Trump nor Biden made any recess appointments.)

In an effort to block recess appointments, the chamber often employs what are known as “pro forma” sessions. These short meetings, in which no real business is conducted, mean the Senate is never in recess for more than 10 days — preventing the president from making any appointments without the body’s consent. A pro forma session can be as simple as one senator gavelling in, and then calling the session over.

If recess appointments are reinstated, there is little Democrats could do to stop the process, Squire said. But they could slow down legislative processes, which “wouldn’t necessarily prevent [recess appointments] from happening, but there would be a penalty — a cost attached to it.” 

Donald Trump on Friday broke his post-election silence on his failing Truth Social platform, issuing threats against unnamed people who he said were trash talking his company.

"There are fake, untrue, and probably illegal rumors and/or statements made by, perhaps, market manipulators or short sellers, that I am interested in selling shares of Truth. THOSE RUMORS OR STATEMENTS ARE FALSE. I HAVE NO INTENTION OF SELLING!” Trump wrote in the TruthSocial post. “I hereby request that the people who have set off these fake rumors or statements, and who may have done so in the past, be immediately investigated by the appropriate authorities. Truth is an important part of our historic win, and I deeply believe in it. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

It was the first real comment he's made on his Truth Social feed since his victory on Tuesday. The few other posts he sent were merely images of newspapers announcing his win.

Trump's Truth Social stock price has fallen precipitously since the company went public in March. 

Initially, the stock was trading around $60 when the company first went public. It's now trading at around $30, up from the nose-dive it took in September amid reports that Trump was eligible to start trading his own shares and possibly cash out on the failing platform. 

The fact that Truth Social is trading at anything of value is confounding, as the site has barely any users and lost $19 million in the third quarter alone, Axios reported.

Now that Trump will take office again, it’s unclear whether he’ll put his shares in a blind trust to avoid flouting ethics rules. Of course, Trump has no ethics and did not put his companies in a blind trust the first time around, so it’s unlikely he’ll do so now.

Also absurd is that Trump said in his post the "truth is an important part" of his win.

Trump is a notorious liar. 

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale wrote an article ahead of Trump’s win titled “Donald Trump’s campaign of relentless lying,” in which he implored media organizations to cover Trump’s lies more often.

“For the third consecutive presidential election, the Republican presidential nominee is running a relentlessly dishonest campaign for the world’s most powerful office,” he wrote. “Wildly exaggerating statistics, grossly distorting his opponent’s record and his own, regularly just plain making stuff up, Trump is lying to American voters with a frequency and variety whose only precedent is his own previous campaigns.”

In fact, during Trump’s first round, the Washington Post tracked over 30,000 misleading statements.

“If you met someone at a bar who told you 25 things that weren’t true, that would be one of the first things you told other people about this encounter,” Dale wrote. “Trump telling the American people 25 things that aren’t true in a rally speech should be one of the first things media outlets tell their readers and viewers about the speech. Maybe then Trump would care a bit more about being corrected.”

Here’s hoping the media takes Dale’s warnings seriously.

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West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice appointed his wife to the state school board about a day after a decisive victory in a U.S. Senate race against his Democratic opponent.

The 73-year-old Republican governor announced First Lady Cathy Justice's appointment to the West Virginia State Board of Education during a press briefing on Thursday, after submitting a letter notifying the Secretary of State's office Wednesday.

“She’ll do an amazing job," Justice said. “And really, truly, Cathy loves kids beyond good sense.”

Cathy Justice, 71, will serve a nine-year term on the board, taking over the seat of Dr. Daniel Snavely, a Huntington cardiologist whose term expired this week. Justice said his wife wasn’t initially sure about the position but that after some convincing, “she's fired up now and ready to go and do the job.”

When asked by a reporter about whether nepotism played a role in the appointment, Justice insisted Cathy Justice is more than qualified.

“How could you possibly think that Cathy is not just covered up with qualifications?" he asked.

Justice cited the work of his wife, who earned a degree in secondary education at Marshall University, within the state's Communities In Schools program. As first lady, Cathy Justice helped the nonprofit school dropout prevention program launch in 2018 and expand to 285 schools in all of the state's 55 counties.

According to the governor’s office, West Virginia is the only state in the nation to have the program operating in every county.

Cathy Justice also spearheaded the Friends With Paws program, which puts certified therapy dogs in schools to provide comfort and companionship to students. More than 40 such dogs have been placed throughout the state.

“There’s no way that I could find someone—no matter where they are—that’s more qualified than Cathy Justice for this job,” Justice told reporters.

Cathy Justice has taught as a substitute teacher in Raleigh County schools and is involved in a elementary school program affiliated with a local church. She previously served as president of Comer Electric, Inc., a business started by her father and mother. She also served on the board of directors for First National Bank in Ronceverte for five years.

In 2007, former Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin—whose seat Justice is taking over in the Senate—appointed his wife Gayle Manchin to the state school board. Gayle Manchin, a former Marion County public school teacher was later elected the board's president for a two-year term.

In January, Justice will be going to Washington, D.C., to start a six-year term as a U.S. senator after easily besting Democrat Glenn Elliott.

A businessman whose family owns dozens of companies and the historic resort The Greenbrier, Justice has in the past donated his $150,000 a year salary as governor to the Communities In Schools program.

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The morning after the election, a second result emerged beside the blindingly obvious one that Donald Trump will once again be president of the United States: In some places, abortion rights remained a winning issue.

Ballot measures to expand abortion access passed in seven states, including Missouri, Arizona, and Montana, three places that Trump won. Previous polling and election outcomes had shown that most Americans support abortion rights. Less clear was how they’d behave with Trump on the ballot. The issue of abortion may have shed its partisan salience—just not in a way that helped Kamala Harris and other Democrats. Abortion access “is becoming less partisan, ironically, in the sense that Republicans and independents are more likely to support abortion rights,” Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis and an Atlantic contributor, told me, “while not translating that into support for Democratic candidates.”

For Democrats and abortion-rights activists, last night’s referenda were glittering pinpricks of light in an otherwise long, dark night of defeats. The White House—gone; control of the Senate—gone; the House of Representatives—clearly leaning Republican. Missouri, which went for Trump by 18 percent and had one of the strictest abortion bans in America, voted 52 to 48 percent to establish a constitutional guarantee to the “fundamental right to reproductive freedom.” Similar measures passed in Arizona and Montana, by 23 and 15 points so far, respectively. Four other states—Nevada, Maryland, New York, and Colorado—passed their own abortion measures, though these were less politically revealing, given the existing abortion-rights protections there.

Not all the news was rosy for abortion-rights activists. Ballot measures failed in Nebraska by 2.6 points and in South Dakota by 17. Different reasons might account for those losses, Ziegler said. Nebraska had two abortion referenda on the ballot, each proposing contrary changes to state law, which could easily have confused voters. In Florida, a large majority of voters did support an effort to overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban—but it fell a few points short of the 60 percent needed to pass.

Those three state results were the biggest wins the anti-abortion movement has achieved since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Expect to hear this example touted more widely, Ziegler said. “Activists will take that to Republicans and say, ‘Hey, you don’t need to be afraid of being pro-life. You can take aggressive positions,’” she told me. “This should be a huge encouragement to the pro-life movement,” the conservative political commentator Matt Walsh wrote on X yesterday afternoon. “We have a lot of work to do. But the people are on our side.”

That would be an overstatement, based on last night’s results. Harris had worked to make abortion rights a strong campaign issue—though not enough, evidently, to carry her party to victory. But abortion-rights groups achieved victories in spite of the Democrats’ failed presidential efforts. Several factors are involved: Abortion access is popular. And Trump, through his chaotic and confusing abortion tightrope walk, may have successfully neutralized the issue for now, for his voters: assuring enough pro-choice voters that he would protect their reproductive rights, while hanging on to pro-life base voters who want him to further restrict abortion access. “Trump created this possibility of being all things to all people,” Ziegler told me.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

But when you’re president, you have to pick. A near future in which Trump continues to downplay any talk of restricting abortion and focuses instead on issues that do not divide his voter coalition, such as immigration, is easy to imagine. “And then there’s a scenario where he doesn’t, and the partisan divide springs back as ever,” Ziegler said. If that happens, then what the anti-abortion movement will be demanding from a second Trump administration is immediate executive action to restrict abortion. That could mean appointments of committed anti-abortion officials to important Cabinet positions—former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell for attorney general, say, or Heritage Foundation adviser Roger Severino as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. It could also involve a reinterpretation of the Comstock Act, which could see abortion banned across the country de facto, without any congressional legislative action at all.

The anti-abortion movement may not be successful in these maneuvers. Little suggests, right now, that Trump is interested in cementing his legacy as the most pro-life president in history. But the one thing Americans can almost certainly count on is a slew of new anti-abortion judges appointed to the federal courts. Conservative groups are already floating favored names—such as the Fifth Circuit’s James Ho and Kristen Waggoner, the chief executive of the pro-life group Alliance Defending Freedom—for the Supreme Court. With a Republican Senate, these could be easy appointments. “That may be how Trump has his cake and eats it too,” Ziegler said. “Put conservatives on the courts, and their decisions may not happen until years after he’s no longer in office.”

After last night, abortion-rights activists can take a measure of comfort in the confirmation that their position is still popular. But cutting against that is the fact that abortion rights are no cure-all for Democrats—especially when the leader of the Republican Party has apparently managed to detoxify the issue.

Donald Trump has already appointed three Supreme Court justices. In his second term, he could well have a chance to name two more, creating a high court with a Trump-appointed majority that could serve for decades.

The decisive outcome spares the court from having to wade into election disputes. It also seems likely to change the tenor of cases that come before the justices, including on abortion and immigration.

The two eldest justices—Clarence Thomas, 76, and Samuel Alito, 74—could consider stepping down knowing that Trump, a Republican, would nominate replacements who might be three decades younger and ensure conservative domination of the court through the middle of the century, or beyond.

Trump would have a long list of candidates to choose from among the more than 50 men and women he appointed to federal appeals courts, including some of Thomas' and Alito's former law clerks.

If both men were to retire, they probably would not do so at once to minimize disruption to the court. Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens retired a year apart, in the first two years of Barack Obama's presidency.

Thomas has said on more than one occasion that he has no intention of retiring.

But Ed Whelan, a conservative lawyer who was once a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote on the National Review's Bench Memos blog that Thomas will realize that the best way to burnish his legacy is to have a like-minded justice replace him and retire before the midterm congressional elections.

If Thomas stays on the court until near his 80th birthday, in June 2028, he will surpass William O. Douglas as the longest-serving justice. Douglas was on the court for more than 36 years.

There's no guarantee Republicans will have their Senate majority then, and Thomas saw what happened when one of his colleagues didn't retire when she might have, Whelan wrote. “But it would be foolish of him to risk repeating Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s mistake — hanging on only to die in office and be replaced by someone with a very different judicial philosophy,” Whelan wrote.

Ginsburg died in September 2020, less than two months before Joe Biden's election as president. Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill the vacancy and majority Republicans rammed her nomination through the Senate before the election.

Barrett, along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's other two high court appointees, joined Thomas and Alito to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the national right to abortion.

RELATED STORY: Trump praises 'genius' of Supreme Court justices who threw out Roe v. Wade

Along with Chief Justice John Roberts, the conservatives also have expanded gun rights, ended affirmative action in college admissions, reined in Biden administration efforts to deal with climate change, and weakened federal regulators by overturning a 40-year-old decision that had long been a target of business and conservative interests.

The court's landmark decision didn't end its involvement with abortion: the justices also considered cases this year on emergency abortions in states with bans and access to medication abortion.

The new administration seems likely to drop Biden administration guidance saying doctors need to provide emergency abortions if necessary to protect a woman’s life or health, even in states where abortion is otherwise banned. That would end a case out of Idaho that the justices sent back to lower courts over the summer.

Access to the abortion medication mifepristone is also facing a renewed challenge in lower courts. That suit could have an uphill climb in lower courts after the Supreme Court preserved access to the drug earlier this year, but abortion opponents have floated other ways a conservative administration could restrict access to the medication. That includes enforcement of a 19th century “anti-vice” law called the Comstock Act that prohibits the mailing of drugs that could be used in abortion, though Trump himself hasn't stated a clear position on mifepristone.

RELATED STORY: Abortion pills are safe from the Supreme Court—for now

Immigration cases also are bubbling up through the courts over the Obama era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Trump tried to end DACA in his first term, but he was thwarted by the Supreme Court. Now, the conservative appeals court based in New Orleans is considering whether DACA is legal.

One of the first Trump-era fights to reach the Supreme Court concerned the ban on visitors from some Muslim-majority countries. The justices ended up approving the program, after two revisions.

He spoke during the campaign about bringing back the travel ban.

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.

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Elon Musk spent Election Day on X praising men, amplifying anti-immigrant conspiracies, and accusing Democrats of voter fraud. It was all pretty on-brand for the billionaire, who has become one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters and a one-man misinformation machine. When it was clear early Wednesday morning that Trump would win the presidency, Musk told his followers: “You are the media now.”

A statement like that would have been laughable even a month ago, when estimates showed that X, formerly Twitter, had dropped nearly 80 percent in value since Musk purchased the platform for $44 billion in 2022. Until its transformation into X, the platform was regarded by some as a once-vibrant place on the internet that Musk utterly destroyed. But after Musk spent at least $119 million to get Trump elected and turned his platform into a MAGA megaphone — and then Trump won — the social media site’s real value is starting to take new shape.

From the day his Twitter purchase went through, Musk vowed to make free speech central to the platform’s future. He purged the company’s trust and safety staff, setting a precedent that other social media companies followed. Since then, however, Musk has been willing to let authoritarian regimes dictate how X will work in their countries. In the United States, more free speech on X meant more misinformation and an embrace of right-wing politics. 

X is certainly not the biggest social media platform, but as other major platforms continue to shy away from policing content and Trump heads back to the White House, X certainly looks more influential than it did last week.

You might not like this. Since buying the platform in 2022, Musk has helped turn X into an epicenter of election misinformation. With 203 million followers, Musk has the biggest reach on X and is the platform’s most prominent pusher of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda. At Musk’s request last year, X changed the site’s algorithm to put his posts in more people’s feeds — posts that increasingly urged people not to trust the outcome of the election. The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that Musk’s misleading posts about the election have been viewed more than 2 billion times this year. 

Gone are the warning labels that Twitter once used to flag false or misleading information. Musk replaced that system with a crowd-sourced fact-checking program called Community Notes. He called it “the best source of truth on the internet.” Unfortunately, the new system doesn’t work very well.

So if your feed feels as though it’s especially full of right-wing voices and conspiracy theories, that’s because it probably is. It’s not exactly a coordinated effort by Musk’s lieutenants to push your views to the right. It’s just how X is designed these days. 

It’s way too soon to tell just how big a role X played in Trump’s reelection. We also don’t know what, if anything, Musk will do differently with the platform as he eyes some sort of role in the new administration. You can count on continuing to question everything you see on social media, though.

“The problem will get worse because there are no guardrails in place right now,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “All the trends are moving in the wrong direction.”

Indeed, thanks to the apathy of social media platforms and the rise of AI, lying on the internet has never been easier. And if you’re on X, it’s part of the appeal.

The right will continue to rule X

Leading up to the election, opinions on the fate of X were grim. There were plenty of reports on the dangers of election misinformation on the platform or Musk’s broken promises about what X would do by now. Bloomberg columnist Dave Lee argued that the platform was simply failing, losing users and relevance. That seems less likely now. 

Despite rumors of its demise, X is still quite big. X told advertisers as recently as September that it has over 570 million monthly active users, dwarfing right-wing platforms like Truth Social and Rumble, whose users are in the hundreds of thousands. It is also much bigger than platforms like Mastodon and Blue Sky, which progressives fled to after Musk bought Twitter. 

Meanwhile, Meta recently said its Twitter-replacement platform, Threads, has 275 million monthly active users. A big difference between the two? Meta limits the amount of political content you see on Threads. It looks like people are either staying on X or flocking to it for unfiltered politics news.

Political news on Twitter used to be marginal, where celebrities were the main draw. The celebrities have left, and now X is the most popular major social media platform for keeping up with politics, according to a Pew survey published in June. There has also been a major partisan shift. Democrats historically dominated political discussion on the platform, but X has become dominated by right-wing voices in just the last couple of years. Posts from Republicans are far more likely to go viral on X, and once-popular Democrat accounts have seen their audiences disintegrate, according to a recent Washington Post investigation.

Republicans have also changed their minds about the platform’s impact on democracy. While Twitter was once framed as the platform that censored conservative voices, X has become the right’s favorite place for freedom. Only 17 percent of Republicans thought Twitter was good for democracy in 2021, but 53 percent said X was good for democracy in 2024, according to the Pew study. 

“Democratic users are much more likely to think people getting harassed is a major problem on the platform, and on the flip side, Republicans who post about politics are especially likely to do so because their views feel welcome there,” Colleen McClain, one of the authors of the Pew study, told me this week. McClain added that “in recent years, we haven’t seen any mass exodus or flocking to or from X in our data, either overall or by party.”

None of this should come as a huge surprise if you’ve spent any time on X. But the partisan split took on new dimensions leading up to this year’s election, if only because the Republicans who felt like their voices were heard on X also felt heard at the ballot box. 

Their guy won, and maybe the weird, violent memes on X helped.

Elon Musk is just getting started

We don’t know if X will grow or change — or just stay its same problematic self — as Trump prepares to take office again. We do know Musk isn’t done with politics. Musk was at Trump’s side at Mar-a-Lago as the results rolled in on election night, and there’s good reason to believe we’ll see the SpaceX owner in DC soon enough.

As far as politics go, Musk says he’s not done funding political races. In a livestream on X, Musk said his America PAC would “keep going after this election, and prepare for the midterms and any intermediate elections.” Trump, meanwhile, said in his victory speech, “We have a new star. A star is born — Elon!”

In September, Trump promised Musk a role heading up a task force to review federal expenditures, one that would make “drastic reforms” to the federal government. This makes sense because Musk had been the one who pitched the idea for such a task force to the president-elect. Trump even suggested a new job title, “Secretary of Cost Cutting,” while Musk suggested he’d be head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which does not exist and whose acronym is a reference to a dog-themed cryptocurrency. Musk later said at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally that he wanted to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, which would be very difficult.

It’s easy, however, to see how Musk’s many companies stand to benefit immensely from a close relationship with the Trump administration. SpaceX is already one of NASA’s primary contractors, pulling in hundreds of millions if not several billions of dollars with every contract. Musk’s contact with Vladimir Putin reportedly put these contracts in jeopardy, although knowing what we know about Trump’s affinity for the Russian autocrat, the president-elect might not mind this.

Tesla also stands to benefit, which explains why the company’s stock soared after Trump’s victory was secured. The EV company wants to roll out a massive fleet of robotaxis, a tall order that comes with significant regulatory challenges. Tesla’s self-driving car program in general has faced pushback from federal authorities, including a recently announced investigation into the system. Regulatory approval and investigations can be easier, of course, if you bankrolled the president’s final push to reelection. 

Musk’s bet on developing artificial general intelligence, xAI, can also look forward to more cooperation from the federal government. The second Trump administration could pave the way for xAI to get access to cheap energy, especially as it faces heat for running gas generators without permits to power its data center in Memphis. 

On top of these lucrative potential deals, the idea that X might win new relevance and influence must feel like a bonus to Musk. 

For its right-wing users, though, X is finally the digital town square they were promised so many months ago. It seems like just yesterday, Musk was carrying a sink into Twitter’s headquarters on his first day as the company’s owner. (“Let that sink in” is supposed to be the joke there.) 

Musk paid tribute to that post on X just after midnight on election night. Except this time, in a doctored photo, he was carrying a sink into the Oval Office.

A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Former President Donald Trump won a sweeping victory in the Electoral College, four years after executing multiple schemes to overthrow an election he lost and seize power by force, and months after being convicted of state crimes in New York. He ran a race of slander and lies against immigrants and his political opponents, vowing to seize dictatorial powers in a campaign of vengeance.  

But he won. When all the votes are counted, he may not have won the popular vote, but he will have won a decisive victory in the Electoral College nonetheless. Behind him are Republican Party apparatchiks who see the devotion of Trump’s followers as a vehicle for their most extreme ideological schemes, including national bans on abortion, a mass deportation that could wreck the economy and subject Americans of any immigration status to invasive state scrutiny and force, and an immense distribution of income upward. The Democrats’ reward for steering the economy out of the post-pandemic economic crisis will be watching their opponent claim credit for the prosperity that their work created—an economy unencumbered by inflation and the high interest rates once needed to tame it. If Trump seems popular now, he will likely be much more popular in a year.

Trump will claim a popular mandate for everything he does. He did that when he eked out a narrow Electoral College victory in 2016, and he will do it now. But there is no constitutional mandate for authoritarianism. No matter what the Roberts Supreme Court says, the president is not a king, and he is not entitled to ignore the law in order to do whatever he pleases.

Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery. The restraints of the Constitution protect the American people from the unscrupulous designs of whatever lawless people might take the reins of their government, and that does not change simply because Trump believes that those restraints need not be respected by him. The Constitution does not allow a president to be a “dictator on day one,” or on any other day. The presidency will give Trump and his cronies the power to do many awful things. But that power does not make them moral or correct.

[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]

The Trump administration’s record of union busting, repealing workplace regulations, and cutting the welfare state to enrich the already wealthy will have few obstacles. The coterie of extremists that surrounds Trump has a radical conception of what America should be that includes suppressing the speech and expression of their political opponents; a racial hierarchy entitled to legal protection and enforcement; a society in which women’s bodies are treated as state property and LGBTQ people have few rights that others need respect. They will have a willing partner in an already extreme-right Supreme Court, which will be emboldened to enable this agenda of discrimination, deportation, and domination, using a fictionalized historical jurisprudence to justify it.

The Biden administration sought to bring down the temperature of the Trump era by offering aid to families, revitalizing American manufacturing, and easing inflation without increasing unemployment. That politics brought them few rewards, and the Democrats are unlikely to pursue such an agenda again, if they ever return to power. Trump has expressed admiration for nationalist strongmen such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who holds power in a country that still has elections but where there is little chance of the opposition succeeding, because both the state and social levers of power are under the purview of one man. The Trump entourage will return with more detailed plans for authoritarian governance; perhaps the only guardrail they now face is that they prize loyalty over genuine expertise. But fewer people will be willing to stand up to Trump than last time.

I believe that, as in previous eras when the authoritarian strain in American politics was ascendant, the time will come when Americans will have to face the question of why democracy was so meaningless to them that they chose a man who tried to overthrow their government to lead it. They’ll have to decide why someone who slandered blameless immigrants as pet-eating savages and vowed to deport them for the crime of working hard and contributing to their community, something conservatives claim they want from newcomers, should lead a nation where all are supposed to be created equal. They’ll have to determine why a country conceived in liberty would hand power to the person most responsible for subjecting women to state control over their bodies, to the point of treating them as mere reproductive vessels not worth saving until they are bleeding out in an emergency room.

Millions of Americans are already asking themselves these questions this morning. All of the potential answers are disquieting. Choosing Trump in 2016, prior to everything he did as president, was frightening enough. Choosing him in full knowledge of how he would govern is worse. But there is no sunset on the right and duty of self-determination; there are no final victories in a democracy. Americans must continue to ensure that they live in one.

Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos licked Donald Trump's boots Wednesday morning as he congratulated the president-elect on his win.

“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos wrote on X. “No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing [Donald Trump] all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”

Bezos' fawning congrats comes after he stopped The Washington Post’s editorial board from endorsing in the election, claiming that the Post needed to stay neutral in the race in order to fix the distrust in media organizations.

“What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias,” Bezos wrote in an op-ed in the paper, while more than 250,000 people canceled their subscriptions in protest of his decision. “A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

People who canceled their subscriptions following his decision accused Bezos of preemptively bending the knee to a wannabe authoritarian in order to protect his businesses from being targeted in a second Trump term. When Trump was in office the first go-round, he threatened Amazon’s tax status because he was angry at Bezos.

“You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up,” Bezos wrote in defense of his decision to block the editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, an endorsement it had already written.

Yet less than 24 hours after Trump's victory, following his lie-filled, dark and misogynistic campaign, Bezos heaped praise on Trump and his "extraordinary political comeback.” 

The Amazon founder’s post gives the perception that he is not, indeed, independent, as well as proves his critics right that his endorsement decision was a self-interested one.

"This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty," Marty Baron, the former executive editor of The Washington Post, wrote in a post on X after Bezos’ original decision. “[Trump] will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner [Bezos] (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

Ultimately, the media’s inability, or flat-out refusal, to treat Trump as the danger he is is partly why we are in the position we are in today.

It turns out, democracy does die in darkness.

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Amid the horrors of Tuesday's election, there was one bright spot: Seven states passed ballot measures to expand or enshrine the right to an abortion: Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York.

Abortion-rights ballot measures failed in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota—the first such measures to fail at the state level since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.

Florida's abortion-rights ballot measure—which would have nixed the state’s draconian six-week ban and protected the right to the procedure before fetal viability—got 57%, just shy of the 60% supermajority that it needed. This comes at the end of a long campaign from state Republicans against the measure.

And in Nebraska, a slim majority of voters voted to ban abortion after the first trimester—generally considered to be the end of the 12th week of pregnancy—except for cases of rape, incest, or in medical emergencies. A rights-restoring measure failed, securing just 49% of the vote. However, because there were conflicting measures on the ballot, the abortion-rights initiative would have also needed to get a higher share of the vote than the abortion-banning measure to become law.

Though seven states expanded or protected access to abortion, those laws now appear to be under threat. President-elect Donald Trump and the GOP—which look poised to capture unified control of Washington—could make abortion illegal at the federal level, overruling these state laws.

Most concerning is that the Project 2025 agenda—created by former Trump aides and allies who may get roles in the next Trump White House—calls for revoking approval of the drug mifepristone. Mifepristone is part of a common two-drug regimen used for medication abortions in early pregnancy. According to the Guttmacher Institute, nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States are medication abortions.

The Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for reproductive freedom around the world, said that if Trump and the GOP make good on that Project 2025 promise, it would “increase demand for procedural care, placing additional strain on clinics and increasing wait time for patients.”

But polls show that taking such a step could spell electoral disaster for Republicans.

A Civiqs poll from July found that 48% of registered voters say they would not support a candidate who has a differing position on abortion.

It’s cold comfort amid the grim reality of a second Trump term. But we’ll take wins where we can get them.

Campaign Action

Yesterday, Donald Trump won a second presidential term from American voters. His first term was marked, among other things, by attempts to water down environmental laws and regulations aimed at the auto industry. And as a candidate in 2024, Trump has promised plenty of disruption to the sector through both trade policy and an abrogation of the government's commitment to fight climate change. Here are some of the more significant changes we think are coming.

Electric vehicle adoption

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was one of President Joe Biden's signature policy achievements, part of a $450 billion climate package. One of its many sections revised the way we incentivize consumers to buy electric vehicles, with an update to the clean vehicle tax credit that requires final assembly in North America, as well as ever-increasing amounts of US-sourced battery components and minerals to be eligible.

But such policies are not loved by the Republican Party. During his first term, Trump repeatedly criticized EVs, saying that "all-electric is not going to work," and he vociferously attacked EVs during his campaign, telling supporters at his party's national convention in July that "I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one," referring to a current White House goal to reach 50 percent EV adoption by 2030, and calling the most significant climate legislation ever "the new green scam."

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Now that it is clear Donald Trump will become president again and will have a Republican Senate and almost certainly a Republican House to back him, it’s important to ask: What will he do with these majorities? And given his track record last time, what will it mean for poor Americans and the programs they rely on?

The last time Trump won the presidency, in 2016, I wrote a piece predicting a huge rollback of the safety net. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), with its massive expansion of Medicaid and patient protections, would be repealed; Medicaid itself would see its funding slashed and its guarantee of coverage to poor people eliminated; food stamps would be cut deep and maybe turned over to the states, much as welfare for single parents was in 1996, largely destroying that program.

I was wrong. Trump, and especially then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, did try to do all of that, but in the end enough Republicans realized repealing the ACA wasn’t viable. Medicaid and food stamps survived more or less intact. A Democratic House after the 2018 midterms and, more importantly, a global pandemic, meant that by 2020, the safety net was significantly stronger than in 2016.

I do not know that the same scenario will play out in 2025, and I certainly hope the pandemic part does not repeat. But despite the devastating electoral blow to Democrats, there are reasons for safety net supporters to be optimistic. 

The Senate is solidly Republican but not a total blowout, and four defections would be enough for a bill to fail. With Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who opposed Obamacare repeal in 2017, still in the chamber, it’s not difficult to imagine them and two allies blocking serious changes again. 

The House results will not be known exactly for weeks but look, if anything, closer. And while House Speaker Mike Johnson surely wants to slash the safety net, he is not Ryan. Shrinking government is not his all-consuming passion the way it was for 2017’s House speaker, who once famously said he dreamed of cutting Medicaid while drinking out of kegs as a college student.

Here’s what Republicans might attempt to do to safety net programs, and why achieving it might be difficult.

Health care programs will shrink, but serious cuts will be challenging to pass

On health care, Republicans have one victory that’s more or less baked in. As part of the 2021 stimulus package, Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress adopted expanded subsidies for the ACA’s marketplaces. If you were an individual or small business buying private insurance, the tax credits you received to offset premiums were larger. Subsidies were no longer cut off for people making over 400 percent of the poverty line (about $125,000 for a family of four), and subsidies for people below that were made more generous. These provisions were later extended through the end of 2025 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

It’s hard to imagine a Republican Congress voting to extend these measures past next year, though insurance companies will certainly lobby for it. Trump’s past budgets have also zeroed out subsidies for private health insurance entirely, which would be a much larger shift.

But subsidies for private insurance are a relatively small part of federal spending on health care. This fiscal year, they amount to $125 billion — very significant, but piddling next to $858 billion on Medicare and $607 billion on Medicaid.

Trump has promised not to cut Medicare, much as he did in 2016, and while his budgets as president did envision spending reductions, they were mostly minor and came from cutting provider payments rather than limiting eligibility.

He did, repeatedly and explicitly, propose cutting Medicaid. The most recent Trump budget to explicitly lay out its plans, for fiscal year 2020, entailed at least $1.1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the ACA over a decade, per the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). At that time, the agency was projecting $6.2 trillion in 10-year spending on non-Medicare health programs, meaning Trump was calling for a cut of over 17 percent.

Trump waffled on how clear he wanted to be in calling for Medicaid cuts. His 2021 budget was too vague for the CBO to even model. But when he was clear, the proposals had three steps:

• Repeal the ACA’s Medicaid coverage expansion and replace it with a “block grant” for states to spend how they like on health programs.
• Place a “per capita cap” on the rest of Medicaid, meaning states would only be granted a set amount per covered person by the federal government, regardless of what health care they actually received.
• Impose a work requirement, specifically to “require able-bodied, working-age individuals to find employment, train for work, or volunteer” in order to receive Medicaid.

What unites these proposals, especially the per-capita cap and block grant, is that they mean Congress and the White House don’t have to make granular decisions about who specifically is covered and for what. They can simply cut spending and pass decisions on how to spend what’s left to the states. 

Without knowing the exact cap and block grant amounts for the future, it’s hard to say exactly how big these cuts would be, but the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Gideon Lukens and Allison Orris analyzed how Medicaid would’ve been cut if per-capita caps had been put in place in 2018. By 2020, most states would’ve had to slash spending on disabled enrollees (by 12 percent in Pennsylvania and 13 percent in Kentucky); seniors would have seen cuts in 21 states, including cuts of around 17 percent in California; children would have seen cuts in 28 states. 

The point here is not the specific numbers but that the idea can, in practice, amount to significant reductions in resources for the program.

There is not much room to cut Medicaid without reducing access to the program. Physicians are already paid about 28 percent less by Medicaid than by Medicare, and Medicare in turn pays roughly 22 percent less than private insurers. Medicaid, in other words, pays maybe half of what private insurance pays. Further cuts to prices paid to providers would almost certainly reduce the number who accept the program, making it that much harder for poor people to find care. More likely, states would respond to federal cuts by restricting eligibility and kicking people off the program.

Whether Trump can make these plans a reality depends strongly on what moderate Republicans (like Murkowski and Collins in the Senate and Don Bacon and David Valadao in the House) feel about them. While we don’t know margins for sure right now, it’s looking like Republicans will have 53 Senate seats and fewer than 225 House seats (they need 218 to pass a bill there). That means that even a small number of defections would be enough to defeat legislation, even legislation that is advanced through the budget reconciliation process and thus needs only 50 Senate votes plus Vice President-elect JD Vance’s tie-breaker.

Murkowski and Collins alone wouldn’t be able to sink a Medicaid cuts bill, but they would only need two other defections to help them. Remember that in 2017, the bill that Sen. John McCain famously killed with them by making a thumbs-down motion on the Senate floor was the so-called “skinny repeal,” which would have only repealed the individual mandate and a few other provisions. The idea was that this bill could then go to a conference committee with the House’s Obamacare repeal bill, where they’d hash out a compromise measure. 

Some Republicans who voted for the skinny repeal, like Lindsey Graham and Ron Johnson, did so only after being promised that the House’s bill, which included deep Medicaid cuts, would never become law. There was rather deep opposition to passing sweeping cuts, even outside the three Republicans who blocked the Senate bill. As West Virginia Republican Shelley Moore Capito said that summer, “I did not come to Washington to hurt people.”

All this suggests to me that getting 50 votes for sweeping Medicaid cuts in the Senate will be rather difficult. More difficult still might be the House, where Republicans will have to defend a number of seats where Kamala Harris won and where candidates will not want to enter 2026 midterms with votes to shred Medicaid hanging on them like albatrosses.

Food stamps face brutal cuts

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), colloquially called food stamps, is perhaps the most important safety net program for people who are very poor. Seventy-five percent of recipients are at or below the poverty line, and over 1 in 5 report having no other source of income besides food stamps. The share of single parents living on less than $2 a day is nearly 10 percent before you include SNAP benefits. Food stamps take the number below 3 percent, slashing it by over two-thirds.

Because the program grew out of efforts to prop up crop prices by redirecting “surplus” crops to poor people, it is the province of the Department of Agriculture, and is renewed every five years in a “farm bill” controlled by the House and Senate Agriculture Committees. The last farm bill, from 2018, expired on September 30, meaning that writing a new farm bill will be one of Congress’s main priorities early next year.

Glenn Thompson, the Republican chair of the House Ag Committee, released his proposed farm bill in May. Its most striking provision would limit the ability of the Department of Agriculture to update its Thrifty Food Plan, upon which SNAP benefit levels are based. This would amount to a $30 billion cut over a decade, and is a response to the Biden administration updating the Thrifty Food Plan, which resulted in a nearly 30 percent hike in benefit levels.

Trump’s past budgets have envisioned much more sweeping cuts. His last one proposed a nearly 30 percent cut to the program, including new work requirements on top of those already in the program and a plan to shift a big share of the program into a “Harvest Box,” a plan in which households would not get to choose the food they buy but instead be sent a monthly box of shelf-stable foods that the government picks.

Realistically, I suspect the Harvest Box plan in particular will struggle to get traction, in part because major retailers like Walmart and Kroger rely on revenue from customers using food stamps and will fight efforts to redirect funds from them to government provision of food. What’s more, farm bills usually go through regular order, meaning that they’re subject to the filibuster and will need Democratic support in the Senate, which will not be forthcoming for sweeping cuts.

That said, Trump has been consistent about wanting to restrict SNAP as a program and will have Ag Committee chairs in both houses who are broadly on his side. The potential for sharp cuts is definitely present.

The 2021 child tax credit is gone, but the credit might improve all the same

An area where Trump is unlikely to sign sweeping cuts and might even oversee modest expansions is the child tax credit.

Harris ran on reviving the 2021 version of the child tax credit, which expanded it from $2,000 to as much as $3,600 per child and for the first time made it fully refundable, so poor Americans could benefit even if they were out of work. She also proposed a “baby bonus” of $6,000 to families with newborns.

Those dreams are dead for at least the next four years. But with the 2017 Trump tax cuts expiring next year, including their doubling of the child credit from $1,000 to $2,000, changes are likely coming to the credit all the same. While returning to 2021 is impossible, it’s likely that the end result will direct more money to poor Americans than the credit does under current law.

Republicans have been insistent that any credit include a “phase-in,” or a provision stating that families must have some earnings to receive the child tax credit. But within that framework, they’ve expressed openness to increasing the amount working families receive. 

Vance notably called for a $5,000 baby bonus, only to be one-upped by Harris’s $6,000 bid. This past year, Republican Jason Smith, the chair of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, cut a deal with Democrat Ron Wyden, the outgoing chair of the Senate Finance Committee, to expand the child credit by altering the way it phases in. Smith will still be the head tax-writer in 2025 and is likely to push for this provision to stay in.

The complication is that Republicans face a wide array of expiring tax provisions next year, and while some, like incoming Senate Finance Committee chair Mike Crapo, suggest they don’t want to pay for extending those provisions, the reality of higher interest rates (meaning government deficits are now more costly to run) suggests that they probably can’t pass everything they want. Given a wish list that runs from extending those cuts to exempting tips and Social Security income from taxation to letting people deduct interest on car loans, that means that expensive provisions like child tax credit expansions will likely get squeezed. It’s hard to say what exactly will make it into the final package.

One of the least-trumpeted changes of the past half-century is the steady growth of America’s safety net. In 1979, the average lower-income American got $5,300 from government programs aimed at poor people. In 2019, that number was $15,800. America’s commitment to poor people more than tripled, and the result was a marked reduction in poverty. Trump’s reelection threatens that trend. But his first term, and those of Presidents Bush and Reagan before him, were not enough to reverse it. There are reasons to think it could continue even through the next four years.

Americans in 10 states cast votes on ballot measures to protect or expand abortion access, and in seven, the measures for abortion rights won. That brings the total to 14 states approving abortion rights referendums since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.

Ballot proposals sailed through on Tuesday not only in blue states like New York and Maryland, but also in red and purple states like Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and Montana. Missouri, which was the first state to completely ban abortion after Roe fell, is now the first state to overturn a ban. All told, the pro-abortion rights measures passed on Tuesday will expand access for millions of women of reproductive age who live in those states, as well as thousands of others traveling from more restrictive areas for care.

The biggest loss of the night was undoubtedly in Florida, where advocates had raised more than $100 million to reverse the state’s near-total ban on abortion. The ban, which took effect this past spring, has decimated access not only for residents living in the third most populous state but also for people across the South who had been traveling to Florida since Roe was overturned. While a majority of Florida voters backed the proposal, which would have restored abortion rights up to the point of fetal viability — typically between 22 and 24 weeks of a pregnancy — Florida law requires at least 60 percent of voters to approve a ballot measure to pass. 

This 60 percent “supermajority” threshold is simply a high bar for any referendum, and Florida’s earned 57 percent. Of all the winning abortion rights ballot measures that have passed in red or purple states since Roe’s overturn, none have reached that 60 percent level. In 2023, Republican lawmakers tried to raise Ohio’s ballot measure threshold to 60 percent precisely to make it harder for a pending abortion rights proposal to pass, and voters rejected the move. Ohio voters ultimately approved their abortion rights measure by 57 percent.

The other losses Tuesday night were in red states, like Nebraska, where voters were confronted with two (intentionally confusing) constitutional measures, and South Dakota, where reproductive rights groups didn’t help campaign for a ballot measure that would have overturned the state’s total ban. The ballot measure failed. 

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Ballot measures have become a powerful tool over the past 2.5 years, giving voters a direct way to challenge abortion bans and often cutting across partisan divides. Measures in red and purple states have won precisely because they’ve earned votes from individuals who otherwise cast ballots for Republicans, libertarians, or no candidate at all. On Tuesday, for example, voters in Arizona, Missouri, and Montana elected Donald Trump, but still cast their ballots in favor of abortion rights.

Anti-abortion groups were determined to end the clean winning streak of the abortion rights movement this year. The 2022 midterms were “a wake-up call that taught us we have a ton of work to do,” Kelsey Pritchard, the state public affairs director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told Politico in the spring of 2023. “We’re going to be really engaged on these ballot measures,” she promised.

And indeed, anti-abortion leaders did lean in much harder this cycle, leveraging a range of new tactics. In Florida, for example, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis actively attacked the proposed ballot measure for months, using his state agencies to help, including by threatening local television stations with criminal penalties if they aired ads in support of the abortion rights measure. 

“Florida Governor Ron DeSantis deserves special recognition for taking the abortion industry head on and setting a new standard for what it means to be a Pro-Life Champion as a state's chief executive,” said Carol Tobias, the president of National Right to Life, in a statement after Florida’s measure failed.

Still, in the end, proponents for abortion rights nationwide raised nearly six times as much as their opponents, according to a recent campaign finance analysis by the Associated Press. Abortion rights advocates spent more than three times as much as anti-abortion activists on TV, streaming services, radio, and websites, according to the AP.

“While we are disappointed with the Florida ballot measure election results not meeting the 60% threshold, we still saw the majority of Floridians voting in support of abortion access,” said Nourbese Flint, president of the pro-abortion rights group All In Action Fund. “This outcome is a direct result of anti-democratic tactics designed to undermine the will of the people and Floridians’ access to life-saving medical care.”

While organizers for abortion rights ballot campaigns have a lot to feel proud of, even in states that have approved measures, rights will not be restored immediately, and in some cases litigation is likely to follow. In Nevada, voters will need to reapprove their measure in 2026 to formally amend their constitution. Moreover, restoring legal rights is not the same as restoring access, and even in states with favorable laws many women still struggle to afford their abortion care. 

The abortion rights ballot measures and their results

1. Arizona: Proposition 139

Establish abortion as a “fundamental right” up to fetal viability, and permit abortion beyond that if a doctor deems it necessary to protect the patient’s life, physical or mental health.

It passed. 

Know more: Abortion is currently banned after 15 weeks in Arizona with no exceptions for rape or incest. “Next time the nation wonders how much government interference in reproductive healthcare is acceptable, or what type of arbitrary abortion ban is popular, they can look at Arizona and know the answer is 'none',” said Chris Love, a spokesperson for the YES on 139 campaign and a senior advisor to Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona.

2. Colorado: Amendment 79
Bar any state or local government regulation from interfering with an individual’s right to an abortion, and eliminate the state’s ban on public funding for abortion.

It passed.

Know more: Colorado is one of seven states without limits on when an abortion can occur. It barred state funding for abortion for 40 years. Overturning that ban means Colorado could start covering abortion for people on Medicaid and state employees. 

3. Florida: Amendment 4
Establish state constitutional protection for abortion up to fetal viability, or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by their doctor.

It failed.

Know more: Three executive agencies within the Ron DeSantis administration aired and distributed ads against Amendment 4. The ACLU of Florida filed a lawsuit alleging the misuse of taxpayer funds, though their case was dismissed. 

4. Maryland: Question 1

Establish an individual’s “fundamental right to reproductive freedom” including the ability to prevent or end a pregnancy.

It passed.

Know more: Maryland has very supportive abortion rights laws, and has become a destination for pregnant patients traveling from the South, especially those from North Carolina, Texas, Florida, and Virginia. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the state experienced a 26.7 percent increase in clinician-provided abortions between 2020 and 2023.

5. Missouri: Amendment 3
Establish a right to reproductive freedom, including contraception, and abortion through fetal viability, with exceptions thereafter to protect the life or health of the patient.

It passed. 

Know more: Missouri was a leader in restricting abortion. In 1825, it became the second state to ban abortion, after Connecticut in 1821. “All people deserve the freedom to access abortion, to access all reproductive health care, throughout our lives, on our own terms, and with dignity and respect. That’s what we proved today … And today’s win is just the beginning,” said Mallory Schwarz, the executive director of Abortion Action Missouri.

6. Montana: Constitutional Initiative-128
Establish a state right to abortion through fetal viability, with exceptions to protect the life or health of the pregnant patient.

It passed.

Know more: After Roe v. Wade was overturned, Montana’s Republican-led legislature passed several bills to restrict abortion, but the courts blocked them, citing a state Supreme Court precedent dating back to 1999. Abortion remains legal up to viability.

7. Nebraska: Initiative 434
Ban abortion in the second and third trimesters, with exceptions for sexual assault, incest, or medical emergencies.

It passed.

Know more: Abortion is already banned after 12 weeks in Nebraska, and this proposal would not prevent further restrictions. Anti-abortion activists sponsored this measure and have been clear that they plan to keep pushing to entirely ban the procedure in the state. 

8. Nebraska: Initiative 439 
Establish a state constitutional right to abortion up to fetal viability or when necessary to protect the “health or life” of the pregnant patient.

It failed.

Know more: The two dueling ballot measures were confusing to voters, and many signed the petition for the anti-abortion measure thinking they were supporting expanding access. Over 300 Nebraskans later filed affidavits to remove their names, the most in state history.

9. Nevada: Question 6
Establish a constitutional right to abortion through viability, and after when deemed medically necessary to protect the life or health of the patient.

It passed.

Know more: Abortion is already legal in Nevada until 24 weeks of pregnancy, but advocates want to secure that right in the state constitution. Voters will need to approve the measure again in two years to formally make the change. 

10. New York: Proposition 1
Amends New York’s existing Equal Rights Amendment by adding “sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy,” to its list of protected classes.

It passed.

Know more: Anti-abortion activists started running ads claiming the abortion rights measure would create "special rights for illegal immigrants" and could block local efforts from dealing with the migrant crisis.

11. South Dakota: Constitutional Amendment G
Grants the right to abortion for any reason in the first trimester, allows second trimester abortion only for health reasons, and permits third trimester abortions to protect the patient's life or health.

It failed.

Know more: Nearly all abortions are banned in South Dakota, with no exceptions for rape or incest. However, as we reported earlier this year, the state's measure faced criticism from both local and national reproductive rights advocates, who argued it didn’t go far enough to truly restore access.

Abortion rights looked potent, but it will take time to get a clear sense of what happened

Going into election night, it wasn’t clear how much abortion rights would matter to voters, compared to issues like the economy and immigration and crime. While it was clear it mattered to voters in the midterms, election experts say those voters — known as “high propensity” or “frequent” voters — tend to prioritize different issues from those who vote only once every four years. Roughly 160 million Americans cast ballots in the 2020 election, or 67 percent of the voting-eligible population. By contrast, just 112 million people voted in 2022, or 46 percent of those eligible.

It was also unclear how much ticket-splitting there would be this cycle, as polarization tends to ramp up in presidential elections compared to midterms. We still don’t yet know the gender or racial breakdown for Election Day voters, although early results indicated that women were turning out in higher numbers than men. Women voters make up a slight majority of the voting population, and advocates were banking on women being particularly motivated to protect abortion rights this cycle. We’ll continue to update our coverage as we get more information about how the votes broke down. 

The 2024 election certainly won’t end the national debate around abortion. The election of Donald Trump to the White House, and Republican control of at least the US Senate, are setbacks for abortion rights advocates, who had hoped to restore access to care. However, the success of abortion rights ballot measures offers more hopeful signs and reaffirms the unpopularity of many state restrictions, even in states where referendums lost.

“Abortion rights are winnable in pretty much any state at this point,” said Joey Teitelbaum, a pollster with Global Strategy Group who has worked on nine state abortion rights ballot measure campaigns over the last three years.  “People have been very clear about what side they are on, and just because a candidate or a ballot measure loses, it does not change that fact.”

Vice President Kamala Harris elevated abortion rights to the heart of her campaign, but President-elect Donald Trump is the winner of the 2024 presidential election. So what does this mean for reproductive rights on the federal level? 

The short answer is that there are many ways Trump could ban abortion, and the most likely way isn’t through Congress, even with a Republican-controlled Senate. (It is not yet clear whether Republicans will take control of the House.)

The long answer is that as a candidate, Trump waffled on his positions on abortion. Despite frequently bragging about appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, Trump started to soften his tune in the months leading up to the election, especially as his vice presidential pick JD Vance began generating negative media attention for his anti-abortion views.

As Election Day drew nearer, Trump began insisting he’d be “great for women and their reproductive rights” but he also repeatedly dodged questions about whether he’d veto any national abortion bans that land on his desk. At the presidential debate in September, Trump refused to answer that question multiple times, insisting it wouldn’t be necessary since abortion rights are now a matter of state discretion. By October, though, he finally came out to say he would veto a federal abortion ban, posting on social media that he would “not support a federal abortion ban, under any circumstances.” 

Unfortunately, that’s not as reassuring as it sounds.

Federal abortion bans in 2025 are not likely to take the form of bills landing on the president’s desk. Any bill out of Congress would still require some bipartisan agreement unless lawmakers overturned the filibuster. Republican senators have already promised to preserve the filibuster in a Trump administration, and the anti-abortion movement, for its part, has not been counting on the GOP to push bills with a simple majority. Given the widespread support for abortion rights across the US, passing a federal ban would also be politically dangerous for congressional lawmakers from swing or moderate districts, making the near-term prospect of such efforts highly unlikely.

“Quite frankly, unless something really unusual happens in this election, neither side is going to have the votes in Congress to pass a national law,” Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, told the Associated Press in early October. “So that wasn’t really at the top of our list anyway.”

They do have a list, though.

Sending abortion pills by mail is more at risk

One agenda item at the top of the anti-abortion movement’s list is enforcement of the Comstock Act, an 1873 federal law that could prohibit anything associated with abortion from being sent in the mail. Such a ban could mean not only restricting abortion medication — the most common method used to end a pregnancy in the US — but also any medical equipment used during abortion procedures, like speculums, suction catheters, and dilators.

“We don’t need a federal abortion ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan Mitchell, the legal architect behind a 2021 law in Texas that effectively banned abortion in that state, told the New York Times earlier this year. Mitchell urged anti-abortion groups to “keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election” regarding this strategy.

The Comstock Act was rendered moot by Roe in the 1970s but never formally repealed, and now, with Roe gone, many conservatives see it as an ideal vehicle for restricting abortion nationwide, precisely because it wouldn’t require the passage of a new federal law. 

For months Trump dodged journalists’ questions regarding the Comstock Act, but by August, he finally said he would not use the old statute to ban abortion drugs in the mail. However, many people in his close orbit, including the vice president-elect, are on record urging the opposite, and it was a core item in Project 2025, the notorious policy blueprint drafted by the Heritage Foundation and many people close to Trump’s campaign.

Trump could also ban abortion by appointing anti-abortion leaders to control key federal agencies that could use executive power to restrict reproductive rights, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, said her top priority is to push Trump to appoint anti-abortion leaders to executive agencies so they can integrate anti-abortion policies into existing federal programs. “I think reversing the Biden-Harris abortion agenda will be vibrant, it’ll be active,” she told the New York Times over the summer. 

Hawkins said her group’s second priority will be to push HHS to defund Planned Parenthood. While federal funds are already barred from financing abortion, Planned Parenthood receives federal money from the Office of Population Affairs for family planning and preventive health services, including contraception, cancer screenings, and STI testing. (In 2019, Trump issued a rule to limit this money, which was subsequently reversed under the Biden administration.)

Appointing anti-abortion leaders to agencies like the FDA and DOJ could affect anti-abortion litigation. In October, three Republican attorneys general (Raúl Labrador in Idaho, Kris Kobach in Kansas, and Andrew Bailey in Missouri) filed a lawsuit to force the FDA to heavily restrict access to mifepristone, one of two drugs used to induce abortions. (Though medication abortion has a lower risk of complication than many other widely available drugs, it has faced stricter regulation in the US largely for political reasons. Since 2016, the FDA has gradually reduced these restrictions, including allowing for telemedicine prescriptions.)

While the Supreme Court threw out a similar FDA complaint over the summer, concluding the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the lawsuit, the Republican attorneys general believe they’ll be better able to prevail in this new attempt. Notably, they also argue in their complaint that the FDA has violated the Comstock Act by permitting abortion pills to be sent by mail. While a 2022 Biden DOJ opinion ruled that the Comstock Act doesn’t criminalize mailing abortion drugs if the sender lacks intent for unlawful use, a Trump DOJ could interpret the law differently. A Trump FDA also may not fight changing rules on abortion pills at all.

The judiciary awaits

The last major way Trump could promote a federal abortion ban is through federal court appointments.

In his first presidential term, for example, Trump appointed one of the most anti-abortion judges in the country — Matthew Kacsmaryk — to a federal court in Texas. Kacsmaryk greenlighted the now-overturned legal opinion that the FDA should revoke its approval of mifepristone.

Trump’s campaign has maintained close ties to Leonard Leo, the co-chair of the right-wing Federalist Society, which helped Trump vet all his anti-abortion judicial appointments in his first four years in office. (Leo also helps finance groups to bring cases to the Supreme Court and orchestrates strategy for the conservative legal movement broadly.) 

The anti-abortion movement has been explicit that its long-term goal is “fetal personhood” — endowing fetuses, embryos, and fertilized eggs with full human rights and legal protections. This once-fringe idea has been gaining traction over the last few years. (Kacsmaryk also embraced the idea of “unborn humans” and fetal personhood.) At least 19 states have declared that fetuses at some stage of pregnancy are people, according to a report from Pregnancy Justice, a group that advocates for pregnant people’s rights.

In February, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a decision that claimed frozen embryos count as “children” under state law. In April, the Florida Supreme Court signaled openness to hearing a future challenge on fetal personhood when its chief justice asked whether Florida’s constitution should include “the unborn” in its equal protection statute. 

And in the 2022 majority opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito seemed to lay the groundwork for a fetal personhood challenge by repeatedly emphasizing the significance of “fetal life.” Over the spring, Alito also seemed to endorse the idea that a fetus needed the same “stabilizing treatment” in a hospital as a pregnant patient.

Codifying a fetal personhood standard could lead not only to the outright ban of abortion but also of most forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization (IVF). While Trump and Republican lawmakers insist they are determined to protect reproductive rights, including IVF and contraception, their anti-abortion judicial picks could do just the opposite. 

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The 2024 presidential election is over — and Donald Trump is the victor. There is no doubt about the election’s legitimacy: Trump is on track to win the Electoral College by a wide margin, and potentially win the popular vote for the first time.

Yet while the election itself was clearly on the level, what comes next may not be. Having won power democratically, Trump is now in a position to enact his long-proposed plans to hollow out American democracy from within.

Trump and his team have developed detailed plans for turning the federal government into an extension of his will: an instrument for carrying out his oft-promised “retribution” against President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and anyone else who has opposed him. Trump’s inner circle, purged of nearly anyone who might challenge him, is ready to enact his will. And the Supreme Court, in its wisdom, has granted him sweeping immunity from his actions in office.

In nearly every conceivable way, a second Trump administration will likely be more dangerous than the first, a term that ended in over 1 million deaths from Covid-19 and a riot at the Capitol. A predictable crisis — a president consolidating power in his own hands and using it to punish his enemies — looms on the horizon, with many unpredictable crises likely waiting in the wings.

Yet as dire as things are, America has reserves it can draw on to withstand the coming assault. Over the course of the country’s long democratic history, it has built up robust systems for checking abuses of power. 

America’s federal structure gives blue states control over key powers like election administration. Its independent judiciary stood strong during Trump’s first term. Its professional, apolitical military will likely push back against unlawful orders. Its politically active citizenry has a proven capacity to take to the streets. And America’s world-leading media will fiercely resist any effort to compromise its independence.

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No country at America’s level of political-economic development has ever collapsed into authoritarianism. There are some reasonably close modern analogues, most worryingly modern Hungary, but even they are different in crucial respects.

This is not to make an argument for complacency or naive optimism. Quite the opposite: The next four years will be American democracy’s gravest threat since the Civil War; if it survives them, it will surely do so battered, bruised, and battle-scarred.

But this realism should not be cause for succumbing to despair. As grim as things feel now, it’s possible that — if people take the gravity of the threat seriously — the republic may come out intact on the other side.

Trump’s scary second-term agenda, explained

We do not know why, exactly, America’s voters have chosen to return Trump to high office. The data isn’t fully in, let alone analyzed in detail. But as murky as the electoral picture remains, certain elements of the policy future are crystal clear. Trump’s own comments, his campaign’s statements, and allied documents like Project 2025 give us a relatively coherent picture of what the agenda will be in the next Trump administration.

Much of it resembles what you’d see from any other Republican president. Trump will appoint corporate allies to lead federal agencies, where they will work to slash regulations on issues ranging from workplace safety standards to pollution. He has already proposed regressive tax cuts without off-setting hikes, which would increase the federal deficit in the same way as George W. Bush’s fiscal policy did. He will likely take steps to curtail abortion access, end federal police efforts to rein in abusive police, and crack down on federal protections for trans people — all examples of how his agenda would hurt certain groups of people, typically already vulnerable ones, more than others.

Trump’s biggest breaks with his party in traditional policy areas will likely come on trade, immigration, and foreign policy. Trump has proposed a “universal” tariff on imported goods, a mass deportation campaign that detains suspected “illegals” in camps, and weakening America’s commitment to the NATO alliance. These policies would together be a recipe for economic decline, domestic turmoil, and global chaos — at an already chaotic time.

But perhaps the most dangerous Trump policies will come in an area that traditionally transcends partisan conflict: the nature of the American system of government itself. 

Throughout the campaign, Trump has proven himself obsessed with two ideas: exerting personal control over the federal government, and exacting “retribution” against Democrats who challenged him and the prosecutors who indicted him. His team has, obligingly, provided detailed plans for doing both of these things.

This process begins with something called Schedule F, an executive order Trump issued at the end of his first term but never got to implement. Schedule F reclassifies a large chunk of the professional civil service — likely upward of 50,000 people — as political appointees. Trump could fire these nonpartisan officials and replace them with cronies: people who would follow his orders, no matter how dubious. Trump has vowed to revive Schedule F “immediately” upon returning to office, and there is no reason to doubt him.

Between a newly compliant bureaucracy and leadership ranks purged of first-term dissenting voices like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Trump will face little resistance as he attempts to implement policies that threaten core democratic freedoms. 

And Trump and his team have already proposed many of them. Notable examples include investigating leading Democrats on questionable charges, prosecuting local election administrators, using regulatory authority for retribution against corporations that cross him, and either shuttering public broadcasters or turning them into propaganda mouthpieces. Trump and his allies have claimed unilateral executive authority to take all of these actions. (It remains unclear which party will control the House, but Republicans will be in charge of the Senate for at least the next two years.)

Ultimately, all this executive activity is aimed at turning the United States into a larger version of Hungary — a country whose leadership and policies are regularly praised by Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance, and Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts.

Hungary still has elections and nominal free speech rights; there are no tanks in the streets or concentration camps for regime critics. But it is a place where everything — from the national elections authority down to government art agencies — has been twisted to punish dissent and spread the government’s propaganda. Every aspect of government has been bent to ensure that national elections are contests in which the opposition never has a fighting chance. It is a kind of stealth autocratization, one that maintains the veneer of democracy while hollowing it from within.

This is why the second Trump presidency is an extinction-level threat to American democracy. The governing agenda Trump and his allies explicitly laid out is a systematic attempt to turn Washington into Budapest-on-the-Potomac, to deliberately and quietly destroy democracy from within.

Democracy is not lost

It is important to remember that, as dire as things are, the United States is not Hungary.

When Prime Minister Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010, he had a two-thirds majority in the country’s parliament — one that allowed him to pass a new constitution that twisted election rules in his party’s favor and imposed political controls on the judiciary. Trump has no such majority, and the US Constitution is nearly impossible to amend.

America’s federal structure also creates quite a few checks on the national government’s power. Election administration in America is done at the state level, which makes it very hard for Trump to seize control over it from Washington. A lot of prosecution is done by district attorneys who don’t answer to Trump and might resist federal bullying.

The American media is much bigger and more robust than its Hungarian peers. Orbán brought the press to heel by, among other things, politicizing government ad purchasing — a stream of revenue that the American press, for all our problems, does not depend on.

But most fundamentally, the American population has something Hungarians didn’t: advanced warning.

While the form of subtle authoritarianism pioneered in Hungary was novel in 2010, it’s well understood today. Orbán managed to come across as a “normal” democratic leader until it was too late to undo what he had done; Trump is taking office with roughly half the voting public primed to see him as a threat to democracy and resist as such. He can expect major opposition to his most authoritarian plans not only from the elected opposition, but from the federal bureaucracy, lower levels of government, civil society, and the people themselves.

This is the case against despair.

As grim as things seem now, little in politics is a given — especially not the outcome of a struggle as titanic as the one about to unfold in the United States. While Trump has four years to attack democracy, using a playbook he and his team have been developing since the moment he left office, defenders of democracy have also had time to prepare and develop countermeasures. Now is the time to begin deploying them.

Trump has won the presidency, which gives him a tremendous amount of power to make his antidemocratic dreams into power. But it is not unlimited power, and there are robust means of resistance. The fate of the American republic will depend on how willing Americans are to take up the fight.

Anton Shilov reports via Tom's Hardware: FFmpeg is an open-source video decoding project developed by volunteers who contribute to its codebase, fix bugs, and add new features. The project is led by a small group of core developers and maintainers who oversee its direction and ensure that contributions meet certain standards. They coordinate the project's development and release cycles, merging contributions from other developers. This group of developers tried to implement a handwritten AVX512 assembly code path, something that has rarely been done before, at least not in the video industry. The developers have created an optimized code path using the AVX-512 instruction set to accelerate specific functions within the FFmpeg multimedia processing library. By leveraging AVX-512, they were able to achieve significant performance improvements -- from three to 94 times faster -- compared to standard implementations. AVX-512 enables processing large chunks of data in parallel using 512-bit registers, which can handle up to 16 single-precision FLOPS or 8 double-precision FLOPS in one operation. This optimization is ideal for compute-heavy tasks in general, but in the case of video and image processing in particular. The benchmarking results show that the new handwritten AVX-512 code path performs considerably faster than other implementations, including baseline C code and lower SIMD instruction sets like AVX2 and SSSE3. In some cases, the revamped AVX-512 codepath achieves a speedup of nearly 94 times over the baseline, highlighting the efficiency of hand-optimized assembly code for AVX-512.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In June, Ivan Raiklin, a retired Green Beret and pro–Donald Trump activist, sat down for a chat with Cliven Bundy, a Nevada cattle rancher who instigated an armed standoff with federal authorities in 2014 over his refusal to pay grazing fees.

In the video—posted on the America Happens Network, which has aired documentaries such as Bundy vs. Deep State and the series Conspiracy Truths—Raiklin explained that tens of thousands of service members had refused to comply with a Defense Department mandate that all personnel receive a vaccine for COVID-19, because they did not want to be “experimented on with an unsafe and ineffective, what I call ‘DNA-mutilation injection.’” He told Bundy that the “illegal” mandate, since rescinded, was to blame for the “total destruction of our constitutional order.”

“There must be consequences,” Raiklin said, for the “unlawful, immoral, unethical, illegal” vaccination program, which he also asserted, with no evidence, “ended up killing lots of people.” In fact, tens of thousands of service members did refuse the vaccine, and about 8,000 were discharged for failing to comply with the policy. But Raiklin speculated that as many as 1 million more still in uniform might “want to participate in retribution” against Pentagon leadership. (Depending on where in the world they serve, military personnel are required to receive about a dozen other vaccinations, including for polio, influenza, and typhoid.)

Retribution is Raiklin’s watchword these days. He calls himself Trump’s “secretary of retribution,” settling scores from the first term and ready to do the same in a potential second. His battles aren’t only with military leaders. After Trump lost the presidency in 2020, Raiklin suggested that Vice President Mike Pence could reject electors from the states that Joe Biden had won, on the grounds that they might be fraudulent. Those ideas were later taken up by John Eastman, a lawyer who has been indicted in Arizona for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results there. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Raiklin may be one of the intellectual founders of Trump’s election denialism.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]

More recently, Raiklin, who left the Army Reserve in 2022 at the rank of lieutenant colonel, according to an Army spokesperson, has promoted the potentially illegal idea that state legislatures could withhold their electors in the event that Trump loses. He has shown up in swing states, including North Carolina, where he pushed for lawmakers to award the electors to Trump ahead of time, on the theory that Hurricane Helene had disrupted the casting of ballots in the state.

Raiklin’s ideas for ensuring a Trump victory dovetail with the plans he has hinted at for exacting retributive justice on government officials. In his conversation with Bundy, Raiklin said that he would like to “coordinate” with those members of the armed forces supposedly still aggrieved over mandatory vaccinations, “to channel those skills, training, passion, in a positive way, to kind of autocorrect the lawlessness and to create consequences for those who created that lawlessness.”

Raiklin did not explicitly call for violence, even though he praised Bundy as “quite the legend” for his aggressive opposition to federal authority. Rather, he said he wanted “appropriate lawful justice”—but archly suggested that this should come from outside the court system. Raiklin chooses his words carefully, even when they are freighted with menace. Bundy asked how the ex-soldier would treat the federal prosecutors in his own case, and Raiklin replied calmly, “I would conduct the most peaceful and patriotic legal and moral and ethical actions that they’ve ever experienced in their life.”

A New York native with a degree from the Touro Law Center, in Central Islip, Raiklin describes himself as a constitutional lawyer. He served as an intelligence officer in the National Guard in several states as well as in the regular Army, deploying to Jordan and Afghanistan. Among his numerous commendations and awards is the Bronze Star Medal, given for meritorious service or acts of valor in a combat zone.  

He has suggested that military personnel could be “deputized by sheriffs,” as he told Bundy in their conversation. This idea is rooted in the fringe theory that local sheriffs possess law-enforcement authority superseding that of any elected official or officer, at any level of government. Proponents of the so-called constitutional sheriffs’ movement urged sheriffs to investigate disproven claims of election fraud in 2020 and to get involved this year in election administration.

Bundy seemed a bit daunted by the scale of resistance that Raiklin described to him. The federal bureaucracy is “so broad,” he said, that it’s practically immovable. Raiklin reassured him: “That’s where people like me come into play, that know the system very well and in detail, to create priorities. You start with the top, and you work your way through the system.”   

To guide that work, Raiklin has created a “deep-state target list,” with the names of more than 300 current and former government officials, members of Congress, journalists, and others who he thinks deserve some of that “lawful justice.” The names of some of their family members are also included.

The list, which is helpfully color-coded, reads like a greatest hits of all the supposedly corrupt plotters who Trump and his supporters allege have targeted them. Among others, it includes FBI officials who worked on the investigation into potential links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia; lawmakers and congressional staff who managed both Trump impeachments; members of the Capitol Police who defended Congress from pro-Trump rioters on January 6, 2021; witnesses who later testified to Congress about the attack; and the senior public-health officials who led the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. As if to demonstrate that even the closest of Trump’s allies can still be in league with the forces of government treachery, the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who helped speed development of the COVID vaccine as a member of Operation Warp Speed, also made Raiklin’s list.

Several former intelligence officials Raiklin has singled out told me they are well acquainted with his threats. They presume that if Trump is reelected, the Justice Department, the IRS, and other federal agencies will conduct capricious audits and frivolous investigations, all designed, if not to put them in prison, then to spend large sums of money on legal fees. A few told me they worried that Raiklin would publish their addresses or details about their families. They were less concerned about him showing up at their home than about some unhinged deep-state hunter he might inspire. In interviews with right-wing podcasters, Raiklin has said he would conduct “livestreamed swatting raids” against his targets. Swatting is the illegal practice of falsely reporting an emergency in order to summon armed law enforcement to someone’s home.

Raiklin’s future in a Trump administration is uncertain. But he is close to major figures in Trump’s orbit, particularly Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who was indicted for lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned him in November 2020.

Raikiln is also a board member of America’s Future, a nonprofit organization that has pursued conservative causes for decades, of which Flynn is the chair. Other board members have amplified the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory—promoted by the QAnon movement, of which Flynn is an ally—that some Democratic politicians kidnap, torture, and eat children.

Like Raiklin, Flynn has long railed against suspected deep-state actors, whom he has accused of torpedoing his career in intelligence. Flynn was regarded as a brilliant tactical intelligence officer when he served in Afghanistan and Iraq. But after he became the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, senior intelligence officials worried that his erratic management style and conspiratorial attitudes made him unfit for the job. Top intelligence officials pushed Flynn out in 2014, after an unhappy and sometimes-tumultuous two-year tenure. James Clapper, who was the director of national intelligence at the time, is on Raiklin’s list.

A few years later, Trump named Flynn to be his national security adviser, a position he held for just 24 days. Flynn resigned in February 2017, following revelations that he’d had contact with Russia’s ambassador to the United States and given misleading statements to senior administration officials.

A Trump-campaign official told me that Raiklin has “no role or affiliation with the campaign.” Raiklin seems to like to suggest a relationship by promoting his physical proximity to Trump. In a post on X, he shared a photo of himself standing feet from Trump while he spoke from the lectern at an unidentified rally. Also standing nearby was Kash Patel, a fierce Trump loyalist said to be on a shortlist for a senior national-security position in a second Trump administration, possibly director of the CIA.

[From the October 2024 issue: The man who will do anything for Trump]

Raiklin is not shy about his aspirations. I sent him an email, requesting an interview about his deep-state list. Rather than reply, he posted a screenshot of my message on X and said he would “much rather discuss” the subject, as well as the direct appointment of electors through state legislatures, “with Americans operating in good faith.” He suggested a number of conservative podcasters he thought fit the bill.

Raiklin invited me to post my questions on X, “in the interest of public transparency and exposure and [to] show the world you are operating in good faith.” So I did.  

“What is the purpose of this list?” I asked. “Why did you select these people? Do you intend to do anything to the people on this list?”

Raiklin replied with links to videos of interviews he had already done with conservative media figures, including the former television star Roseanne Barr. On her show, Raiklin explained that although the deep state went by many other names—“permanent Washington,” “the Uniparty,” “the duopoly”—“I just simply call them war-criminal scum.”

“I happen to be the guy that said, You know what? I’ve had enough,” he said. “Let me expose them by name, date, place, transgression, category. And let’s start educating the country on who they are, so that they’re not able to walk anywhere, whether it’s in the digital space or physical space, without them feeling the, let’s just say, wrath of their neighbors, friends, relatives, family.”

Barr then sang to Raiklin lyrics from “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” to his obvious delight.

It’s hard to know whether Raiklin is a true believer—and potentially dangerous—or just a profiteering troll. His unwillingness to respond to direct questions from a journalist suggests the latter.

After I pressed Raiklin to answer me, rather than post interviews he’d done with friendly hosts inclined to agree with him, he invited me to direct further questions through Minnect, an app that lets you solicit advice from self-professed experts. According to his Minnect profile, Raiklin’s current rate for answering a question via text is $50. For $100, he’ll provide a recorded video response. A video call, “for the most personalized advice,” will run you $20 a minute, with a 15-minute minimum.

“Are you asking me to book you for a fee?” I wrote in his X thread. I wanted to be sure I correctly understood Raiklin’s proposal. He replied, “And 50% of the revenue created from the article you write. Send the contract to [his email] for my team to review.”

I declined.

A few days later, he was back to campaign work, exhorting state officials to intervene in the presidential election.

“Republican State Legislatures just need to hand their States’ electors to Trump, just like the Democrat elites handed the primary ‘win’ to Kamala Harris,” he wrote Wednesday on X, adding, “276 electors on Nov 5 ... CheckMate! Then we can Castrate the Deep State and Crush the Commies immediately on January 20, 2025.”

It's no secret that the new spinoff series, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, was inspired by the 1985 film The Goonies. Executive Producer Kathleen Kennedy (who co-produced The Goonies) has publicly confirmed as much. The latest trailer really leans into that influence: The series feels like something not created specifically for kids, but rather telling a story that just happens to be about kids going on an adventure.

As previously reported, the eight-episode standalone series is set in the same timeframe as The Mandalorian and Ahsoka. Per the official premise:

Skeleton Crew follows the journey of four kids who make a mysterious discovery on their seemingly safe home planet, then get lost in a strange and dangerous galaxy, crossing paths with the likes of Jod Na Nawood, the mysterious character played by [Jude] Law. Finding their way home—and meeting unlikely allies and enemies—will be a greater adventure than they ever imagined.

Jude Law leads the cast as the quick-witted and charming (per Law) "Force-user" Jod Na Nawood. Ravi Cabot-Conyers plays Wim, Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays Fern, Kyriana Kratter plays KB, and Robert Timothy Smith plays Neil. Nick Frost will voice a droid named SM 33, the first mate of a spaceship called the Onyx Cylinder. The cast also includes Fred Tatasciore as Brutus, Jaleel White as Gunther, Mike Estes as Pax, Marti Matulis as Vane, and Dale Soules as Chaelt. Tunde Adebimpe and Kerry Condon will appear in as-yet-undisclosed roles.

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At a campaign event on Thursday night, Donald Trump told Tucker Carlson he thought former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney—an outspoken Trump critic—was a “radical war hawk.” He added “Let’s put her where the rifle’s standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about—you know when the guns are trained on her face.” 

Friday morning, Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee was on CNN to stump for Trump, and host Jim Acosta asked about those comments. Burchett was initially dismissive of the comment as anti-war rhetoric.

“What he says, ‘nine barrels shooting at her.’ That obviously evokes images of a firing squad,” Acosta repeated. “It evokes images of an execution. Does it not? Why? Why would he say nine barrels?

“I don't know why he would say nine—I didn't know there were nine barrels … in a firing squad, quite honestly,” Burchett said. “So I'm a little at a little loss at that,” adding that the Cheney family has profited off of wars. And that war profiting is totally true, but not what Trump was saying.

“Isn't it a bit much, though, for Donald Trump?” Acosta continued. “If you want to use that generous interpretation, to criticize Liz Cheney and say, you know, she should be sent off into battle if she's going to start wars, when Donald Trump claimed he had bone spurs and didn't go to Vietnam?” 

“Well, I don't know about all that, actually, Jim, I, he did apparently have that,” Burchett stumbled, probably realizing that “old cadet bone spurs” throwing rocks in glass houses wasn’t the best defense either. “And that's, that is a reason to not go. Obviously a lot of people didn't go.”

Burchett then retreated to saying his father and uncles went to Vietnam, adding “Those kind[s] of statements were made. It's close to the end of the election.”

Pathetic answers to serious questions about violence is sort of Burchett’s brand. In 2023, when asked on the steps of the Tennessee capitol what state legislators were going to do about the most recent mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Burchett responded, "We're not gonna fix it.”

I guess that’s not just Burchett’s brand, but the entire Republican Party at this point.

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