2026-01-17 06:21:36
On December 1, under President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—which more than 40 million Americans rely on—introduced new work requirements for people verging on retirement age.
Millions of adults ages of 55 to 64 may now be locked out of the program if they’re not able to work—and in a one-two punch of attacks on federal services, the USDA has terminated its annual food insecurity survey, making it impossible to know just how devastating an impact Trump’s backdoor SNAP cuts will have on aging adults who are unable to get exemptions from their state.
In normal conditions, said Tufts University food economist Parke Wilde. policymakers and government workers would ask, “‘What are the consequences of policy changes this fall so that we can calibrate and improve the program in the future?’ We won’t be able to do that this year.”
Targeted actions to eliminate federal government data have accompanied countless other Trump administration cuts and defundings: An executive order by Trump curtailed the collection of gender and sexuality information in federal surveys, and the Institute of Education Sciences, which disseminates education data, faced mass layoffs last year.
What existing data tells us is that tacking on new SNAP work requirements leads people to lose their benefits. Research from George Washington University found that between 2013 and 2017, changes to SNAP work requirement waivers led to around one-third of adults without dependents losing SNAP benefits. “There is scant evidence that work requirements are effective in helping people gain employment or become more self-sufficient, and there is strong evidence that work requirements create hardships,” the researchers concluded.
Colleen Heflin, a Syracuse University professor of public administration and international affairs, said that around half of early retirements between the ages of 55 and 65 are the result of health issues or difficulties maintaining employment, often compounded by challenging state processes to seek exemption from it.
“It’s really important for states to be thinking about the administrative burden,” Heflin said. “All these things become a little bit harder as people become older, and they may have declines in hearing, sight or cognitive function.”
Some states try to reduce hurdles, rather than add them, explained Lauren Schuyler, a specialist in family welfare at the University of Maryland School of Social Work.
“Having your practitioner provide documentation or proving that you have disabilities is just an added layer of that administrative burden,” Schuyler said, which is especially likely to strip SNAP from people in their fifties and through mid-sixties. With the USDA’s decision to quit tracking food insecurity, the impact will remain unclear and far more challenging to address.
Heflin is wary of smaller organizations trying to fill the data gap left by USDA—but some states are seeing an effort to do so.
“There’s a movement for state legislators to pass bills to mandate the state measurement of food insecurity, perhaps putting it on something like the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey,” Heflin said.
In response to a request for comment, a USDA spokesperson characterized the food insecurity survey as “subjective, liberal fodder” designed “as a means to support the increase of SNAP eligibility and benefit allotments.”
2026-01-17 03:55:54
A mother in Minneapolis rushed to perform CPR on her 6-month-old baby on Wednesday night after federal immigration agents deployed a flash bang and chemical agent near her car, leading all six of her children to be taken to the hospital.
The Jackson family told local news outlets that they were coming home from their son’s basketball game when they got stuck between protesters and immigration agents, unable to drive away. That’s when, according to the family, their car began filling with a chemical irritant.
“All we heard was BOOM and every airbag deployed,” Destiny Jackson, the mother, told KARE 11 News.
She recalled screaming for her children to get out of the car and hearing them say that they couldn’t maneuver out—and couldn’t breathe. Bystanders rushed to help as Destiny said she screamed out for her youngest.
“He was just lifeless, like he had foam around his mouth,” she said. “He had tears coming out of his eyes. “I was giving him mouth-to-mouth, and I remember stopping, and I said, ‘I will give you all my breath ‘til you get yours back.’”
“Nobody wants to see their kids like that,” Jackson said, visibly holding back tears as she discussed the violence.
The whole family was taken to the hospital. Destiny called the incident “very traumatizing” in a GoFundMe post, writing that “never in a million years would I have thought something like this would happen to me and my family.”
In an X post that appears to have been taken down, DHS appeared to blame the Jackson family for their hospitalization. “It is horrific to see radical agitators bring children to their violent riots,” adding, “PLEASE STOP ENDANGERING YOUR CHILDREN.”
This isn’t the first time kids have been on the receiving end of chemical weapons used by federal immigration agents in the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans. These include incidents where children have been harmed as ICE agents targeted their parents with chemical agents. Young people have also been caught in the crosshairs at protests or nearby. Several incidents of tear gas have taken place at or near schools.
Just a week earlier in Minneapolis, and just hours after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in her car, US Border Patrol agents descended upon Roosevelt High School, “began tackling people,” and “handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders,” according to reporting from Minnesota Public Radio. The Department of Homeland Security denied that tear gas was used; the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers said in a statement that agents did use a chemical irritant.
The incident prompted Minneapolis Public Schools to cancel classes for the remainder of the week for the whole district. The school system is now allowing for remote learning through at least February 12 after a district spokesperson said they had received “multiple threats impacting several MPS schools.” The charter school where one of Good’s children attends has also switched to online learning following right-wing attacks, according to reporting from Sahan Journal.
And it’s not just kids in Minneapolis, nor is it just this month.
In July 2025, children were seen on video running away from a chemical agent that ICE set off during a raid on farmworkers in Southern California.
In August, a Portland grade school announced that it was relocating as an “emergency move” due to dangerous conditions surrounding a nearby ICE facility. “We have been impacted mostly by chemical weapons that are being used against protesters in the vicinity of our school,” the school’s interim executive director explained at the time, adding that they had routinely found “munitions” on the playground.
Multiple incidents involving alleged chemical agents and children were also reported in Chicago last fall.
On the Northwest side of the city in late October, Border Patrol agents reportedly interrupted a children’s Halloween parade, deployed chemical agents, and tackled and arrested several people, including US citizens, according to residents in the neighborhood and videos verified by ABC News.
Days later, near the Logan Square neighborhood, federal agents threw a chemical irritant onto a busy street near an elementary school, with DHS later justifying the action by claiming protesters had been impeding an activeoperation. According to reporting from ABC 7, children were playing on the monkey bars at school moments before officials threw tear gas canisters from a white SUV.
Shortly after, in November, in a Chicago suburb, video showed what appearedto be a federal agent in a truck spraying a chemical irritant into a car as it drove past. In that car was Rafael Veraza and his family, including his one-year-old daughter, who was reportedly impacted by the chemical agent.
“My daughter was trying to open her eyes,” Veraza told reporters at a press conference following the interaction. “She was struggling to breathe.”
“Us, as adults,” he said, “we can handle it. But as kids, they shouldn’t be targeting kids.”
2026-01-17 00:10:30
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
For someone who cares about climate change, Matt Carlsson had what seemed like a dream job: teaching clients how to decarbonize buildings. But he was frustrated. He could give customers the tools to improve energy efficiency and phase out fossil fuels, but if they couldn’t easily turn his guidance into cost savings, they’d simply ignore him.
“Most of these people are not going to take action,” he realized, “because there’s not going to be a business case.”
Carlsson decided that he’d need to find a job where he could make the case for energy efficiency on economic terms. This led him somewhere surprising: bitcoin.
Mining bitcoin throws off an enormous amount of heat. That’s because the “mining” in question refers to the energy-intensive computational process by which bitcoin transactions are verified. In a typical transaction, a boxy computer attempts to solve what’s essentially a very complex math problem. If it can do this before any of the other “miners” working on the problem across the world, the miner is rewarded with bitcoin of its own.
This process takes a whole lot of power; overall, bitcoin mining accounted for an estimated 0.5 percent of global electricity use in 2024. The more complex the task at hand, the more electricity is needed—and the more heat is created. Essentially, as long as it’s lucrative to mine bitcoin, it’s going to spit out a lot of extra heat as a byproduct. The question becomes: Can that heat be put to beneficial use?
“It’s not a bad thing to be able to heat homes in an affordable way. But does that provide justification for the industry?”
That’s where Carlsson comes in. He’s now helping to heat the homes of 80,000 residents in Finland with waste heat from local cryptocurrency miners, as a part of a project run by his new employer, the bitcoin mining company MARA Holdings.
Water runs through MARA’s miners, which are stored in black metal units in the center of the towns, cooling them off before coming out at a scalding 122 to 172 degrees Fahrenheit (50 to 78 degrees Celsius). From there, the water is pumped underground through the cities’ existing district heating systems, drastically cutting down the need for traditional boilers. As a result, MARA’s two bitcoin districts have avoided greenhouse gas emissions roughly equivalent to those produced by 700 US homes since its first project came online in 2024.
Carlsson thinks this model could be expanded to cities and buildings across the world—and he’s not the only one. Joint bitcoin mining and heating operations are popping up across Finland, an ideal location because of its cool climate and existing district heating systems that companies can easily plug into. Terahash Energy’s “Genesis” project, for example, is sending waste heat from bitcoin mining to be used in an industrial area in the Nordic nation, plus some nearby homes. The global bitcoin mining infrastructure firm Hashlabs hosts six sites connecting miners to district heating systems elsewhere in Finland, with more in the works.
“It’s a business, after all,” said Alen Makhmetov, co-founder of Hashlabs. “I just want to make our business much more sustainable, robust, and long term,” he said. Though there’s a climate case to be made for the operation as well, Makhmetov means “sustainable” in an economic sense. That’s because Hashlabs is now insulated from a crash in the price of bitcoin—if it loses crypto revenue, it’ll still get revenue for its heating services. The heating customers are insulated, too: Hashlabs has promised to continue producing heat, even if the value of bitcoin makes its mining unprofitable.
“It was really a no-brainer in terms of: Why not do this?” said Adam Swick, MARA’s chief strategy officer. That’s because MARA gets to pull in two revenue streams: The company earns bitcoin by mining, of course, but it also earns a fee from the districts for supplying heat—all while receiving the water necessary to cool its miners for free. Each of MARA’s bitcoin heating systems are sized so they provide the minimum heat needed year-round in the cities where they operate. (In the winter, the districts use a combination of electric and biomass boilers to provide extra heat.)
Residents of the two locations where MARA operates, the region of Satakunta and the city Seinäjoki, might not realize that anything has changed, since they’re getting heat from the same pipes that they always have. “That’s kind of the goal, that nobody’s impacted,” Swick said. MARA assumed all equipment costs and is providing heat at a lower price compared to electric heating companies.
Through MARA’s eyes, it’s better for the climate, too. District heating systems in Finland are mostly powered by burning biomass, such as wood chips. While biomass is considered renewable by some, including the European Union, it still emits carbon when burned. (In the two sites where MARA installed its bitcoin miners, the districts were also burning peat.) By cutting down on the amount of biomass and peat the districts need to use, MARA calculates that it has mitigated almost 5,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the 1.5 years that its districts have been operating. (To come up with this tally, the company references the latest official count of emissions caused by producing and consuming electricity in Finland to figure out how many emissions are caused by the miners, and then it compares that to the emissions stemming from traditional district heating in Finland.)
But the scheme won’t make sense for every district heating system in the Nordic nation, because many of them are already highly efficient. Nearly half source their heat from co-generation plants, or power plants that are already burning fuel for the electricity grid. These systems “harvest that heat to be as efficient as possible,” said Eric Bosworth, founder of Thermal Energy Insights, where he advises on projects to transition heating systems from gas to low-carbon thermal energy networks. That weakens the case for heating with bitcoin.
“If a bitcoin operation is already planned, then that heat should definitely be recovered.”
And even where using waste heat from co-generation plants is not possible, reusing the heat from bitcoin mining is by no means the ideal form of efficient heating—although it is undoubtedly better than letting it go to waste. Bitcoin miners use the same amount of energy as an electric-resistance water heater. Essentially, one unit of energy in produces one unit of heat out. That pales in comparison to the efficiency of electric heat pumps.
But while converting to heat pumps would be far more efficient, that would require costly overhauls; each individual building would have to install a heat pump and the associated infrastructure. Most existing systems are not prepared to bear these costs—another version of the dilemma Carlsson found himself confronting before he joined MARA.
When district heating systems find themselves overly reliant on imported fossil fuel sources, however, waste heat from bitcoin can offer a cost-effective solution that comes with a plausible climate case. Hashlabs got its first contract for a bitcoin heating district after Russia invaded Ukraine, sending energy prices soaring. Some district heating plants that relied on natural gas had gone bankrupt and “needed to either shut down or innovate,” said Makhmetov. Bitcoin mining offered a cheaper solution—one that provided heat with far less need for fossil fuels.
Of course, it’s easy to argue that the one thing better than efficiently using bitcoin’s waste heat is not mining bitcoin at all. Out of all forms of crypto, bitcoin consumes the most electricity—more than a small country—because of the particularly energy-intensive way it verifies transactions, which is called proof of work.
Given that most electricity grids today still run primarily on fossil fuels—unlike in Finland, which is powered by nearly 95 percent carbon-free sources, including nuclear and biomass—this could severely limit the climate case of welcoming bitcoin mining to harness its waste heat.
“It’s not a bad thing to be able to heat homes in an affordable way,” said Johanna Fornberg, a senior research specialist at the environmental advocacy nonprofit Greenpeace. “But does that actually provide justification for the industry? I would argue it does not.”
“We want to avoid believing these claims that bitcoin is providing a solution where there otherwise is not one,” she added. Greenpeace, along with other climate organizations, has advocated for bitcoin to change its verification method, which would cut its energy use drastically.
In a world where decarbonization efforts frequently involve tradeoffs, Carlsson is happy that, in this case at least, bitcoin mining produces what looks to him like a win-win.
“When I first started learning about bitcoin, I was leery of it and trying to figure out if it was a scam,” he said. Seven years later, two tiny miners sit atop his desk. “Now, I feel like a missionary, part of a strange cult.”
Still, if operations like MARA’s expand further, it could mean fossil power plants in Finland have to run more, increasing overall emissions, just to have enough energy to power bitcoin mining, Bosworth said. “I think the more valid argument is that if a bitcoin operation is already planned, then that heat should definitely be recovered and sent to a district where possible,” he said.
A reduction in energy use stemming from reuse of mining’s waste-heat “is more of a positive side-effect that largely has a negative climate impact,” said Fornberg, “not something that we want to incentivize and become increasingly reliant on in the long term.”
2026-01-16 20:00:00
Once again, the response was quick, fuming, and filled with falsehoods.
On January 7, about five hours after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis fatally shot a woman in her SUV, President Donald Trump addressed the reckless killing in a social-media post: The victim, he said, “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive.”
Those were lies. Trump shared murky slow-motion footage from a distant door camera, but clearer videos from eyewitnesses had already gone viral and showed the reality. ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good, an American citizen and 37-year-old mother of three, point-blank through the windshield and open driver’s-side window as Good tried to turn her slow-moving vehicle away from him. Ross then reholstered his gun and walked down the street toward where the SUV had crashed, eyewitness video showed. (Moments later in that same video, Ross can be seen even more clearly walking back up the street and showing no signs of serious injury. Trump officials have since claimed that Ross suffered from an unspecified degree of internal bleeding.)
Trump’s post culminated with him blaming Good’s death on what he said was a sprawling conspiracy targeting ICE agents: “We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate!” Just over a week later, amid tense protests and further violence by ICE in Minneapolis, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act.
Trump’s vitriol, though often seen as “unhinged” by critics, is methodical and by design. He uses any violent national tragedy as political ammo. During his first year back in the White House, he has seized upon assassinations, mass shootings, and other deadly traumas to stoke partisan division and justify extreme policies and actions. Fact-finding in the aftermath of a tragedy does not matter to him—only setting the narrative does.
“He only speaks in one key, and that key is division.”
His top officials back him in lockstep. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared shortly after Good’s killing—before any investigation—that Good had committed “an act of domestic terrorism.” Noem’s description of what happened with the ICE agents defied reality: “A woman attacked them, and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.” Vice President JD Vance blamed the deceased victim for “an attack on the American people,” declaring it “classic terrorism.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that Good’s death was “a result of a larger, sinister left-wing movement that has spread across our country.”
The brazen lying and demonization were familiar, the latest in a pattern from Trump that has included his response to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, a mass shooting at a Mormon church, a terrorist attack on National Guard soldiers, and even the shocking murders of Hollywood icon Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. (Details on these and others below.)
Most modern presidents have sought to console and reassure the country in the face of national tragedy, but Trump’s behavior stands alone, says Matt Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “He seems incapable of trying to unify people or issue words of healing,” Dallek says. “I can’t think of a single instance in which he tried to calm tempers. He only speaks in one key, and that key is division.”
Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush stated that true Islam “is peace” and urged Americans not to vilify millions of Muslims who were making “an incredibly valuable contribution to our country.” After the devastating gun massacre at a historic Black church in South Carolina in 2015, President Barack Obama called for national soul-searching and emphasized the power of goodness and grace over racist hatred.
You have to go back half a century, to “law and order” hardliner Richard Nixon, to find a more combative approach, Dallek notes. Yet even though Nixon was bilious and conspiratorial against the political left, he was more measured in his public reaction to national trauma and less willing than Trump to disregard reality. Nixon’s messaging included victim-blaming after four students were shot dead by national guard troops at Kent State University in May 1970—but he also acknowledged that most in the protest movement were “very peaceful” and said he would withhold judgement about the shooting until after a factual investigation.
Trump’s tactics have been effective for helping him maintain a minority base of fervent supporters, says Dallek. “They can all get behind this idea that whatever is happening within MAGA is much less worse than the threat of ‘the radical left.’”
He adds: “It justifies, after the fact, his very aggressive and even extremist policies, including the unleashing of ICE on blue cities and states. The narrative he creates says to all his supporters that what he’s doing is ‘destroying the enemy within,’ that he’s taking care of the scourge that he promised to address. I think it’s a mistake to discount just how powerful that can be.”
Trump provokes so much news and controversy for the public to process that his exploitation of violent tragedies tends to fade quickly from consciousness. The rhetoric has an intended effect, then attention is gone. But scrutiny of recent disasters reveals the clear pattern by which Trump has built up a leftist bogeyman (including designating antifa a domestic terrorist group) and has further cultivated contempt for immigrants and political adversaries.
When Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, the Trump White House emphasized blame, rapidly and without evidence, on a broad conspiracy. Law enforcement authorities announced in the initial aftermath that the suspect charged in the killing, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, likely acted alone—and no evidence to the contrary has emerged in the more than four months since. Nevertheless, top Trump aide Stephen Miller hammered home the preferred narrative on Kirk’s former podcast, in a conversation with Vance that was live-streamed from the White House five days after the killing. “It is a vast domestic terror movement,” Miller said. “And with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks…and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi pushed broader blame in an interview with ABC News: “Who killed Charlie?” she asked. “Left-wing radicals, and they will be held accountable.” On Newsmax, Dan Bongino, then the FBI deputy director, leaned into talk of investigating a possible conspiracy.
“That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent.”
Inside a Phoenix stadium 11 days after the killing, Trump led the memorializing of Kirk as a persecuted martyr. He said that Kirk had faced “menacing hate” everywhere on his campus tours from “rage-filled radicals.” He denounced “antifa terrorists” and claimed that “many of these people” allegedly targeting Kirk were highly paid “agitators.”
In an especially dark turn, Trump went off script after saying that Kirk was a “noble spirit” with a forgiving view of the political opposition. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” Trump added, waxing sardonic. “I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them.”
Later in September, a man committed a mass shooting and arson at a Mormon church in Michigan and was quickly killed by police. Less than three hours afterward, Trump commented on social media: “The suspect is dead, but there is still a lot to learn.” In that same post, however, he declared a motive: “This appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America.” Asked the next morning about motive on Fox & Friends, Leavitt said she’d learned from FBI director Kash Patel that all they knew so far was that the killer “hated people of the Mormon faith.”
Further media reporting on the perpetrator, who killed four victims and injured eight others, soon complicated the Trump narrative of a war on Christianity. Friends said that 40-year-old Thomas Sanford was a right-wing Republican. Social media posts showed he’d backed Trump for president, and recently a Trump sign had been displayed on his home. His grievance with the Mormon church appeared to hinge specifically on a rough breakup he’d gone through years prior with a Mormon girlfriend. He was an ex-Marine who’d served in Iraq and had a history of substance abuse. He had a young son with a rare genetic disorder, a source of emotional and financial strain. Sanford, in other words, was like many other suicidal mass killers: his pathway to violence was complex, with no clear ideological explanation.
The Trump White House said nothing further. Media coverage dwindled. But there was evidence from the start that some people had perceived the source of the massacre the way Trump wanted: As a Wall Street Journal reporter described from near the scene that day, “I’ve heard people yelling out car windows about radical leftists.”
Depending on who the victims are, Trump’s divisiveness has taken other forms—including what he doesn’t say or do in the aftermath. Back in June of last year, when a man in Minnesota hunted two Democratic state lawmakers at their homes, fatally shooting former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounding Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Trump was notably muted as a search was underway for the suspect. Trump offered only a brief, uncharacteristic written statement, posted by Leavitt on his behalf, in which he denounced the violence generally and said that the DOJ and FBI were fully on the case. After the suspect was captured and evidence emerged that he was a Trump supporter who held extreme far-right views, Trump began using media interviews to trash Gov. Tim Walz as “grossly incompetent” and “a terrible governor.”
Normally after such a rare, high-stakes catastrophe, a president would offer support to regional leaders directly impacted, but not in this case. Trump sowed uncertainty in the media about whether he would reach out to Walz, and when asked again three days after the assassinations, he scoffed. “I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I’m not calling him,” he said. “The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess.”
Three months later, when asked by a reporter why he hadn’t ordered US flags lowered in honor of Hortman—as he had just done for Kirk—Trump said he was “not familiar” with who Hortman was. He added that he “wouldn’t have thought of” lowering flags for her and blamed Walz for not making the request. Earlier this January, Trump promoted a delusional conspiracy theory on social media suggesting that Walz himself was behind Hortman’s killing.
After an Afghan national gunned down two National Guard members in a terrorist attack just before Thanksgiving in Washington, DC, Trump unleashed a broad tirade against immigrants. The shooter had first been resettled in the US in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome, a program for some who’d fought alongside the US military in Afghanistan. But although the shooter had later been approved for asylum under the Trump administration in 2025, Trump railed against his predecessor, vowing to “re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden.” In those same remarks from Mar-a-Lago the day of the attack, Trump went on to demonize “hundreds of thousands of Somalians” in Minnesota (overstating and misnaming that population). He blamed them for “ripping off billions of dollars” and alleged they hate America.
Trump soon amped up his dehumanizing rhetoric as ICE began aggressive operations targeting Somalis and others in the Minneapolis region. During a Dec. 2 cabinet meeting broadcast live, the president laced into Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whom he has vilified for years: “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work.” He said further of the Somali community, “When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.”
Trump’s team applauded as Vance pounded the table enthusiastically.
Trump’s reaction to another high-profile tragedy late last year seemed especially revealing. It is difficult to conceive of any purpose—other than to express vengeful satisfaction and provoke outrage—for his response to the news that Rob and Michele Reiner had been stabbed to death in their home, and that their long-troubled son Nick was the suspected killer.
Trump’s victim-blaming post on social media was bizarre, degrading, and grim: “A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME… He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.”
The outrage came indeed. (“We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House,” wrote conservative columnist Bret Stephens.)
This pattern of conduct from Trump may be pushing the nation farther down a dark path, says Dallek, the historian. One concern is that the more violent events we have, the more divided the country could become. “Because the interpretation of those events by different factions is so in conflict, each violent episode worsens the atmosphere. It inflames people on all sides, and it’s impossible at that point for reason to triumph over the fury that people feel, in some cases justifiably.”
Trump has made clear repeatedly that he may further attempt to use the American military against Americans.
The risk has heightened around the killing of Renee Good and as ICE and Border Patrol operations have grown more lawless and violent. In Dallek’s view, Trump’s signals have been disturbingly clear: disinterest in the real facts of what’s happening on the ground, a total absence of accountability, and the White House doubling down on claims that it is their militarized deportation forces, not communities, that are under siege.
“To all ICE officers,” Miller declared on Fox News this week, “you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.”
“It creates a kind of permission structure,” Dallek says. “I think the leaders of the Trump administration have told ICE and Border Patrol to take off the gloves, to be very aggressive. Now we are seeing the results of that message on the streets of American cities.”
Trump’s latest threat has long been building. Though the federal courts recently thwarted some of his extended deployments of National Guard troops, he has made clear repeatedly that he may further attempt to use the American military against Americans.
“We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” he told reporters in the Oval Office last fall. “If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that.”
2026-01-16 01:58:04
The Trump administration’s offensive against immigrants in Minneapolis—and those who seek to help them—continued to intensify Wednesday night and into Thursday after a federal agent shot another person during an immigration operation.
President Donald Trump, in a Thursday morning Truth social post, threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act—a centuries-old law that allows the president to deploy the US military domestically.
The move comes after another chaotic night in Minneapolis during which a federal agent shot a man in the leg, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The City of Minneapolis said that the man was taken to the hospital with a non-life threatening injury.
According to DHS, the man was a Venezuelan national who was a target in an immigration operation. The federal agency claimed in a statement on X that officers were assaulted on the scene prior to the shooting and that an agent was also taken to the hospital.
This latest shooting by a federal agent comes just one week after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in her car.
In a post commenting on initial reports of the shooting, US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said Wednesday evening that there was a “Minnesota insurrection” happening. Blanche, who used to be Trump’s personal attorney, accused Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz of “encouraging violence against law enforcement.” Both Frey and Walz have multiple times called for peaceful protests against ICE’s actions in the city.
“Walz and Frey,” Blanche wrote, “I’m focused on stopping YOU from your terrorism by whatever means necessary. This is not a threat. It’s a promise.”
President Trump threatening to send the military into a US city under the Insurrection Act isn’t a new idea for the administration. Back in 2023 in an interview with the New York Times, Stephen Miller, Trump’s longtime adviser, said that they were already planning to invoke the law to apprehend immigrants.
The ongoing situation in Minneapolis has been intensifying for over a month and has only become more acute after the killing of Good. Videos from the frontlines, including many published by Mother Jones, show federal agents violently pulling a woman from her car, repeatedly deploying chemical agents on protesters, and otherwise continuing their offensive against those DHS claims are in the country without legal status—in their home, at school, and at work.
In a Wednesday night address, Gov. Walz spoke directly to Minnesotans, urging them to continue to record ICE’s actions. “If you see these ICE agents in your neighborhood, take out that phone and record. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans. Not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution,” he said, once again telling protesters to respond peacefully. “Trump wants this chaos,” Walz added. “He wants confusion. And yes, he wants more violence on our streets. We cannot give him what he wants. We can’t. We must protest loudly, urgently, but also peacefully.”
“This long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement, instead, it’s a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by the federal government,” Walz said, telling Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to “end this occupation.”
2026-01-15 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking a major step toward changing its math to favor polluters over people: It’s going to stop tallying up the dollar value of lives saved and hospital visits avoided by air pollution regulations.
Instead, the agency will consider the effects of regulations without attaching a price tag to human life.
In particular, the EPA is changing how it conducts the cost-benefit analysis of regulations for two major pollutants, fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns—usually referred to as PM2.5—and ozone. The change was buried in a document published this month analyzing the economic impacts of final pollution regulations for power plants, arguing that the way the EPA historically calculated the economic benefits of regulations had too much uncertainty and gave people “a false sense of precision.”
So to fix this, the EPA will stop tabulating the benefits altogether “until the Agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.”
The news was first reported by the New York Times. On X, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin pushed back on the reporting, calling it “another dishonest, fake news claim” and that the agency is still considering lives saved when setting pollution limits.
“You’re not able to compare the cost to the benefits unless you’re talking apples-to-apples, or in this case dollars-to-dollars.”
I spoke with several experts, including former EPA officials, and in fact, the change could lead to worsening air quality and harm public health.
The EPA exists to regulate pollution that harms people, and when it comes to things like ozone and tiny particles, there is robust evidence of the damage they can do, contributing to heart attacks and asthma attacks. Measured over populations, air pollution takes years off of people’s lives. Every year in the United States alone, air pollution pushes 135,000 people into early graves.
“There is a lot of science that shows very clearly that being exposed to increasing levels of PM2.5 has significant health impacts,” said Janet McCabe, who served as the EPA’s deputy administrator under President Joe Biden.
Anytime the EPA wants to issue a new regulation—say, revising how much mercury a power plant is allowed to emit—it looks at both the costs and the benefits before finalizing the rule. The EPA adds up how much companies would likely have to spend on things like installing upgraded scrubbers in smokestacks. Then the agency estimates the economic benefit of imposing the regulation, such as more days with cleaner air or fewer workers calling out sick. The biggest benefits usually come from improving health through things like avoiding hospital visits and reducing early deaths.
There is some fuzziness in the numbers on both sides of the ledger though. If a bunch of companies turn to a handful of suppliers for pollution control equipment, that could drive up compliance costs. And how exactly do you price a hypothetical emergency room trip that didn’t happen?
“In my experience at EPA, there’s never a perfect estimate of costs or benefits,” McCabe said. Yet even with imperfect calculations, regulators could get a decent sense of whether the juice was worth the squeeze when it comes to a new pollution standard, and the public would get a window into how the decision was made.
Under the Biden administration, the EPA found that enforcing the more stringent PM2.5 regulations it issued in 2024 would add up to $46 billion in health benefits by 2032, vastly more than the cost of complying with the rule.
The EPA now effectively wants to put receipts from the benefits side of the ledger through the shredder.
In theory, the EPA could still include the number of lives saved in how it considers the upside of a regulation without attaching a dollar value to it. But experts say that in practice, leaving the dollar costs of compliance in the equation and ignoring the economic value of the health benefits will likely skew the balance toward less regulation.
“You’re not able to compare the cost to the benefits unless you’re talking apples-to-apples, or in this case dollars-to-dollars,” said Christa Hasenkopf, director of the Clean Air Program at the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute.
This change in math is part of a broader pattern at the EPA—and across the federal government—of just measuring and counting fewer things under the second Trump Administration. The EPA has already closed its Office of Research and Development, which was meant to provide the scientific basis for environmental regulations, like tracking the effects of toxic chemicals on the human body.
With less data on science and economics, agencies like the EPA have less accountability for their actions as they face more pressure from the White House to cut regulations and craft policies benefiting politically favored industries. It also sets the stage for taking the teeth out of other regulations, like the Clean Air Act. The EPA has already dismantled its legal foundation for addressing climate change.
Joseph Goffman, who served as assistant administrator of the EPA’s air and radiation office under Biden, said this change in how the EPA calculates health benefits is part of a broader campaign against air pollution regulations.
“It really illustrates what the ulterior motive is and that is to mute or mask the true impact of [particulate matter] exposure and the huge benefits that flow from reducing it,” Goffman said. “Suddenly deciding that you can’t ascribe a dollar value to reducing PM really is convenient to the point of being instrumental to Zeldin’s efforts to weaken PM standards.”
If the EPA never comes up with a new way to monetize the health benefits of regulations, it’s likely that improvements in air quality will stall, and air pollution could get worse. “One would anticipate that we could see PM 2.5 levels rising across the country,” Hasenkopf said.
