2025-07-01 07:59:50
The Senate version of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” unveiled to the public at Midnight on Friday, went even further than the House version in its hostility toward the nation’s burgeoning renewable energy sector. The House version merely seeks to end the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) subsidies for wind and solar development enacted under President Joe Biden. Now, Republican senators want to levy punishing new taxes on wind and solar projects.
“I hate to say it, but it would kill [America’s] renewable energy market,” says Kenneth Gillingham, a dean and professor of environmental and energy economics at Yale University.
“It would kill it!” concurs Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a national organization of business leaders advocating for smarter climate policies and the author of a recent book titled Clean Economy Now.
If solar and wind projects aren’t finished by 2027, per the Senate version, the developers will face a tax that would add an additional 10 to 20 percent to their costs, per Rhodium Group‘s analysis. The American Clean Power Association estimates that this will cost companies $4 billion to $7 billion by 2036 and raise consumer electricity costs by 8 percent to 1o percent.
Red-state voters “will be losing out on jobs that they would have been getting otherwise, but they might not know that.”
Ending the IRA subsidies would cause a big industry slowdown, Gillingham says, but the proposed taxes are nails in its coffin. The Senate bill, he says, shifts the economy away from wind and solar—the fastest-growing energy sources here and worldwide—and back toward fossil fuels. “It very clearly shows the policy priorities of the Republicans who are drafting this bill. They are entirely pro-fossil fuels,” says Gillingham.
Jesse D. Jenkins, an energy systems engineering professor at Princeton University, calls the bill a “truly bizarre, a self-defeating measure,” especially from a “party that claims to stand for American energy dominance.” Its provisions, in addition to hindering the development of clean power, Jenkins says, will lead to more pollution and higher energy bills for homes and businesses.
Indeed, according to an analysis by Michael Thomas, founder and CEO of the clean energy data platform Cleanview, the bill will increase electricity costs substantially for customers in every state—in some cases by more than 20 percent.
That’s particularly notable now that demand for electricity has begun to increase after a decade of flatlining. The rise in demand, Keefe told me, referring to Trump’s invention of a crisis to rationalize his “drill, baby drill” energy policies, could well turn into an actual “energy emergency.” And the only way to fix that, he says, “is through solar, wind, and batteries.”
The Republicans’ bill utilizes what journalist Jael Holzman calls the party’s’ “anti-China trap.” Namely, wind and solar companies won’t have to pay the excise tax if they extract their supply chains from China—as if that’s remotely possible. “It would take several years to get to a point where a supply chain would not face this tax, if possible at all,” Gillingham told me. “In the meantime, the manufacturing would be destroyed.”
Keefe calls is a “worthwhile goal” to move manufacturing to the United States from China, the global renewable energy leader by leaps and bounds, but he says this bill would do the opposite. Fueled by the IRA funding, the US renewables industry was just starting to gain a stronger footing. “All of those projects now are at risk because we’re killing the tax policies that made them possible,” Keefe says.
The economic losses would almost certainly hit red, rural districts the hardest, because 78 percent of the IRA tax credits for clean energy have gone to these areas. And all the new jobs being created in states like Georgia were just the start. “The greater loss is actually on the jobs that would have happened within the next year or two,” Gillinhgam says. “They will be losing out on jobs that they would have been getting otherwise, but they might not know that.”
Keefe emphasizes that the losses won’t stop with IRA-funded projects. “Business investments were prompted because of the market signal that the previous administration set when it said it was shifting to a cleaner economy,” he says. Even if the bill fails, $14 billion and 10,000 clean jobs already have been lost just thanks to uncertainty created by the administration’s energy and trade rhetoric.
A handful of Republican Senators are balking at the new renewables taxes—three are backing an amendment to ease the proposed levies in ways that could jeopardize the larger bill.
In any case, the crux of the matter goes well beyond economic and political considerations, Keefe says, citing the bill’s downstream effects: “We’re going to be going backwards on protecting the air that you and I breathe, in the water that we drink, and and the planet that we live on.”
2025-06-30 21:03:50
Dear Joe Rogan,
I don’t know you. We’ve never met, and I am not a regular listener of your podcast. But I have the impression you are a man who does not like to be played. I regret to inform you that Kash Patel played you.
When the FBI director was on your show last month, he made multiple statements that were false or misleading. Given that you’re a proponent of truth-telling, I expect you will be troubled to learn this.
Let me start with Patel’s remarks about what he derisively calls “Russiagate.” A good chunk of your two-hour-long conversation was devoted to this topic, a personal obsession of Patel. As he has done for years, Patel presented to you and your audience a highly skewed and false narrative. “All roads lead to Russiagate,” he declared. “That’s where it all started.” He meant that his entire critique of the so-called Deep State and the supposedly corrupt Joe Biden gang stems from the Trump-Russia scandal. So it can be rather instructive to look at his claims about this foundational matter.
During the podcast, Patel gave you the “90-seconds” version of this controversy:
Can you imagine a time in the United Staes of America in the 21st century, where a political party would go overseas and acquire fake foreign intelligence from a foreign intelligence officer funded by donations to that political party in the United States of America, then take that material, package it, walk it to the FBI, literally, and say, ‘Hey, we need you to surveil the opponent of our political party who happens to be running for the president of the United States”? Then convince the FBI to go to a secret federal FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court that I used to use to manhunt terrorists and say, ‘Hey I need you to wiretap essentially all the comms in and around Trump camp because of the material we gave you.’ And then have that FBI lie to the federal court and the judge in that warrant application, which is a felony, and intentionally remove information of innocence from that application just to get it above the threshold so the judge would sign it. That’s Russiagate.
Much in this description was inaccurate. The political party Patel was referring to—the Democrats—did not hand that opposition research to the FBI and request surveillance of Donald Trump, and the FBI did not seek to wiretap “essentially all the comms” of the Trump camp. It requested a wiretap on one former Trump campaign adviser.
But more to the point, Joe, what Patel was referring to was merely one slice of the much larger Trump-Russia affair. And this is Patel’s magic trick. It’s a diversion. He wants you and others to fixate on the issue of a search warrant and not pay attention to the bigger story: Russia attacked the 2016 election to help Trump, and Trump aided and abetted Moscow by denying this assault, thus providing cover to Vladimir Putin.
For years, Patel and other Trump allies have deflected from these basic facts by focusing solely on what’s become known as the Steele dossier and how it was used by the FBI to obtain that surveillance warrant for Carter Page, a little-known foreign policy adviser for Trump’s 2016 campaign.
As you know, the dossier was a collection of memos that Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official and Russia counterintelligence specialist, wrote during the 2016 election on possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Steele, who had previously worked with the FBI, was commissioned to do so by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm that was being paid by a lawyer for the Clinton campaign to dig up material on Trump. Starting in June that year, Steele sent periodic reports to Fusion GPS that contained unconfirmed information, much of it gossip and speculation from unidentified sources about internal Russian politics and juicy but unsubstantiated tidbits on Trump and his campaign. Weeks later, Steele began sharing these documents with his FBI contact.
And this is Patel’s magic trick. It’s a diversion. He wants you and others to fixate on the issue of a search warrant and not pay attention to the bigger story: Russia attacked the 2016 election to help Trump, and Trump aided and abetted Moscow by denying this assault.
The first of these research memos alleged that Russia had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting TRUMP for at least five years.” It noted that Trump and his inner circle had accepted “intelligence from the Kremlin” on his Democratic rivals. It claimed that Russian intelligence had compromising information on Trump that could be used to blackmail him (including what would come to be known as the “pee tape,” which supposedly showed Trump instructing prostitutes to perform a “golden showers” show in his hotel room). The report stated that the Kremlin’s cultivation of Trump included offering him real estate deals in Russia. Another of Steele’s memos cited a source saying there was a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that Paul Manafort, the campaign chair (who had a history of working for a Russian oligarch and Moscow-friendly Ukrainian politicians) was overseeing this arrangement.
Steele’s memos remained a secret until I revealed their existence in a story I reported in Mother Jones on October 31. One of the owners of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, had shown me a copy of the documents and set up an interview for me with Steele, with the provision that I could not cite Steele by name. My article disclosed that a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence had provided the FBI with memos contending the Russian government had for years attempted to co-opt and assist Trump and that the FBI was looking into these allegations. (I did not report the details of the unsubstantiated lurid claims about Trump’s personal behavior believing that would not be fair to him.)
My story on the Steele memos received some attention, but it did not have much impact on the overall coverage of the race in the final week. (By the way, because of my reporting on the Steele documents, I’ve been pulled into some right-wing conspiracy theories about all this. If you’re interested, you can read about that here.)
Let’s back up a bit: Unknown to the public during the 2016 campaign was that in late July the FBI had opened up an investigation—dubbed Crossfire Hurricane—to determine whether Russia was trying to covertly intervene in the election and whether there had been contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians related to this. (The bureau had already been investigating the hacking of Democratic Party computers—an operation attributed to Moscow.) As part of this investigation, the FBI applied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act federal court for a warrant to spy on Page, the Trump campaign adviser, who had had curious interactions with Russian officials during a trip to Moscow.
For those who don’t know, this was S.O.P. It’s generally tough to get a warrant for surveillance on an American citizen—as it should be. The bureau has to file an extensive application with this court to win such permission. In its application for the Page warrant, the FBI cited the Steele memos. This was an egregious mistake. The documents contained unconfirmed scuttlebutt about Page from a foreign source. And as Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz later noted in a 2019 report, the application was loaded with other errors. Nevertheless, in late October 2016, the FISA court approved the secret warrant—and would in subsequent months approve re-authorizations of this warrant.
This was FBI wrongdoing. Patel is correct about that. An FBI lawyer even pleaded guilty to doctoring an email that the bureau used to win FISA court approval to eavesdrop on Page after the 2016 campaign was over. Much of FBI misconduct regarding the application for the surveillance of Page was laid out in that 478-page report issued by Horowitz. (For those in your audience who want to do their own research, the report can be found here.) By the way, the Horowitz report noted that the Steele dossier was only used in the surveillance application regarding Page. There were no other FISA warrants sought by the FBI in this investigation.
Discussing his effort as a congressional investigator to uncover FBI malfeasance related to the Page surveillance, Patel told you, “What I had unearthed was the biggest political criminal scheme ever perpetuated by portions of the FBI leadership and other people in the intelligence community in coordination [with the media].”
Sounds like hype to me. But you be the judge.
Patel, Trump, and others have beat the drum about the FBI’s misuse of the Steele dossier to draw attention from Putin’s assault on the 2016 election and Trump’s complicity. They claim that there is nothing to the Russia “witch hunt” or “hoax”—and that the entire fuss was kicked off by the Steele dossier, which was a Democratic dirty trick. That is, the Dems orchestrated the entire “Russia, Russia, Russia” business with the Steele documents.
That’s not true. Who says so? Many sources. We can start with Horowitz. His report concluded, “We found that Crossfire Hurricane was opened for an authorized investigative purpose and with sufficient factual predication.” It also found no “documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced…[the] decision to open Crossfire Hurricane.” In fact, his report noted that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with the FBI’s launch of the Russia investigation. That inquiry began after the FBI learned that another Trump campaign foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos had told an Australian diplomat that the Trump team had been informed that Moscow could assist it by anonymously releasing information damaging for Clinton.
So it wasn’t a political witch hunt engineered by the Dems. You know who else says this? Special counsel John Durham, who was appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the Russian investigation.
Durham found flaws in the probe, but he concluded that the FBI inquiry “could have been opened more appropriately as an assessment or preliminary investigation” and not a “full investigation,” as it had been. In other words, the bureau did not improperly launch this investigation but assigned it the wrong level of seriousness. Durham, too, did not report uncovering any “political bias” regarding the FBI’s investigation, though he did assail the bureau for “confirmation bias.”
Now let’s look not at the investigation but the thing itself: what happened in 2016. Several government investigations have concluded that Russia mounted a covert operation to hack and leak Democratic emails and other materials to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Trump.
Trump and Patel, though, deny this. In a recent documentary, Patel said that the the FBI and the rest of the US intelligence community that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election “knew it didn’t exist.” For his participation in this documentary, Patel was paid $25,000 by a Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker who has worked on a Russian propaganda project financed by Putin’s presidential office. Joe, I wish you had asked Patel about that payment. Maybe you can next time he’s on. Here are the details.
It’s rather odd that Patel would deny Russia clandestinely intervened in the 2016 election. When he was investigating what he calls “Russiagate,” he was a Republican staffer on the GOP-run House intelligence committee, which in March 2018 released a report on the Russian attack that opened with this line: “In 2015, Russia began engaging in a covert influence campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election. The Russian government, at the direction of President Vladimir Putin, sought to sow discord in American society and undermine our faith In the democratic process.” Yet Patel won’t acknowledge even the existence of this Russian operation. Joe, why is that? Why isn’t he—or you—pissed off that Russia messed with our election? Why is the FBI director covering for Putin?
I know you like to get to the bottom of things. In this case, that would mean spending time with the 966-page report released by the Senate intelligence committee in 2020. This is the most comprehensive account of what Russia did in 2016—and it’s bipartisan. In fact, Republican Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state, was chair of the committee when the report was released. He and other Republicans on the panel endorsed its findings. So it ain’t Democratic spin or a phony narrative cooked up by the liberal press and Deep State that hates Trump.
There’s a lot of mind-blowing stuff in this report. But here are the basics:
The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process…
While [Russian military intelligence] and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.
You and your listeners ought to give those passages a good read. The committee—including such Republicans as Rubio, Tom Cotton, and John Cornyn—was saying the Russian assault was real and that Trump assisted Putin by echoing Moscow’s denial. What’s more, these Republicans were confirming that Trump had been indifferent to an attack on the United States by a foreign adversary and had even sought to exploit it.
Oh boy. I ask you, Joe: What’s worse—the FBI screwing up one FISA application or Trump helping Russia subvert an election for his own benefit? Is it a close call?
I’m guessing that about now you are thinking, “Well, what about all that talk of collusion?” Democrats and some in the media did spend a lot of time claiming that Trump colluded with Russia in this attack. Special counsel Robert Mueller, reported that he found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia. But his report did detail extensive contacts between the campaign and Russian operatives who tried to influence the election. As Mueller testified to Congress, “We did not address ‘collusion,’ which is not a legal term.” Trump and his loyalists seized on the absence of criminal charges to claim full exoneration. That was spin.
On the issue of collusion, Joe, I would, once more, direct you to that lengthy GOP-backed bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report. Its many revelations include the disclosure that Manafort, when he was chair of Trump’s 2016 campaign, covertly met with a former business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik whom the committee characterized as a “Russian intelligence officer,” and he handed over inside campaign information.
Check out this line from the report: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” Trump’s top campaign aide hobnobbing with Russian intelligence. Isn’t that scandalous? Why does that not interest Patel?
The committee noted it had “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” That’s big: Trump’s campaign chief was in close contact with a Russian intelligence officer who might have been tied to Putin’s covert attack on the 2016 campaign to help elect Trump. Moreover, the report reveals that the committee found “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” Might one call this collusion?
This was not the only possible collusion. Several government investigations, include the Senate intelligence committee’s, confirmed that in June 2016, top officials of the Trump campaign—Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner—met in Trump Tower with a Russian intermediary after being informed she was bringing them dirt on Clinton as part of a secret Russian government effort to help Trump. The information she handed over was apparently not useful. But by agreeing to this meeting, the Trump campaign signaled to Moscow it was just fine with Russia mucking about in the election. Collusion? I dunno. But it’s certainly getting cozy with an enemy.
And consider this: After that Trump Tower meeting, when the news broke that Russians had hacked into Democratic Party computers and 20,000 pages of the pilfered material was leaked right before the party’s convention to hurt the Clinton campaign, Trump Jr. and Manafort publicly insisted that Russia had nothing to do with it. They had been informed Moscow was scheming to covertly boost Trump. Yet here they were backing up Putin’s assertion that Russia had nothing to do with the the hack-and-leak operation. They were lying to protect Russia. Collusion? If not, perhaps complicity?
Joe, if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably tiring from all these details. I know this whole affair can seem convoluted. But for my money, it remains damn important. It’s the original sin of the Trump presidencies. And I wonder why the current FBI director, whose brief includes countering Russian covert actions targeting the United States, doesn’t seem to care that Putin screwed with an American election.
Patel calls Russiagate “the disinformation seed that started it all.” In a way, I agree. Trump’s betrayal in 2016 helped him reach the White House. Remember when WikiLeaks released John Podesta’s emails, which were hacked by Russian ops, to draw attention from Trump’s “grab ’em’ by the pussy” video? During the final weeks of the campaign, the dissemination of those swiped emails generated a ton of negative news stories for Clinton, which certainly contributed to her ultimate defeat.
Over the past nine years Trump and loyalists like Patel have done their mightiest to cover up Trump’s foul deed—his aiding of the Russian attack—pushing a competing narrative that lets Putin and Russia off scot-free.
During the podcast with Patel, you appeared to accept his version of all this at face value and expressed outrage at the FBI’s misuse of the Steele dossier: “It’s so crazy,” you said, “that someone could do something like that and a whole enormous group of people could do something like that with no repercussions….You were part of something that was one of the biggest scandals in political history. But because it was targeted toward Trump people look the other way.”
And you blasted the left:
The disturbing thing to me is how people on the left are willing to look the other way….If the federal government is doing this, and they’re doing this to someone you consider an enemy, what’s to stop them from doing this against your candidate. This is unprecedented behavior that is tolerated and coordinated with the media. That’s dangerous for the country. But people are so ideologically captured. They’re so locked into their party. By any means necessary. We gotta get Trump out. And they push that narrative so hard that they’re willing to do a very un-American thing.
I wonder if you can take a critical look at your embrace of Patel’s self-serving narrative and at the Trump gang’s unrelenting effort to hide Trump’s involvement in Russia’s assault on the United States. I know that might be tough to do. But I would love to see you have Patel back on the show after you read through those reports I cited above. He sure can sound convincing—unless you know the facts.
While I have you: Two other small things regarding your chat with Patel. At one point, he said, “We are on track to have the lowest…murder rate ever…We’re already down 20 percent from last year.” You asked him how he achieved this, and Patel explained that he was following the policy “let good cops be cops,” suggesting the Biden administration had not focused on stopping crime. I contacted the FBI and asked for statistics to back up Patel’s claim of a 20-percent decline. It responded, “The 2024 and 2025 statistics on the murder rate have not been publicly released yet.” The most recent numbers cover 2023, and those show a 11.6 drop in the murder rate. In fact, the murder rate peaked in 2020, during Covid, when Trump was president, and it has been decreasing since then. Any decline in murders is good news, but Patel made it seem as if the Trump administration had scored an unprecedented achievement, when this drop (assuming Patel’s stat is accurate) may well be part of a historical trend.
Also during the podcast, Patel brought up a claim he has many times made: that Trump “preemptively authorized” the deployment of 10,000 to 20,000 National Guard troops before January 6—and these troops were rejected by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser. You seized on this to suggest these Democrats were somehow behind the riot: “So they wanted it to be chaos?” (Patel did not dispel that notion and replied, “I will leave it to you on that.”) But does it make sense that Pelosi or any other Democrat would want to cause a riot that might interfere with the certification of Biden’s electoral victory? What would be the point? In any event, the acting defense secretary at that time, Chris Miller—a Trump appointee—has testified there was no Trump order to ready military personal ahead of January 6: “I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature,” Miller told Congress.
There were other assertions that Patel made during his time with you that could be similarly challenged or debunked. But by now you get my drift. He didn’t deserve the free ride you provided him. I realize it’s popular to blast the Deep State and portray the Biden crowd as nothing but evil and corrupt—and to depict “the media” as craven accomplices in assorted schemes to undermine Trump. This is Patel’s hymnal. But if you critically scrutinize many of his claims, you will find they don’t hold up or are not the full story. Patel deserves factchecking as much as any government official. Perhaps more so, given he’s been running a con for years, insisting the Russia scandal was not real.
You’re an influencer with a massive audience. So I hope you’ll take the time to read up on the Trump-Russia affair. You know, do your own research. There’s a ton of material. Being informed these days can take a huge amount of effort, especially when Patel and others are out there pushing disinformation. But I assume you’ll agree that whatever our differences we all believe that an accurate flow of information is what’s best for our country and necessary to ensure a sound future for American democracy.
If you want to discuss any of this, Joe, I’d be delighted. My DMs are open.
All best,
David
If you appreciate kick-ass journalism and analysis, sign up for a free trial subscription to Our Land, David Corn’s twice-a-week newsletter at davidcorn.com.
2025-06-30 18:00:00
Donald Trump’s realty firm is representing one of the country’s largest pharmaceutical companies in its effort to offload a $12 million New York condo—an arrangement that represents yet another apparent conflict of interest for the 47th president of the United States.
The condo on the 39th floor of the Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle has been on and off the market for several years but hasn’t been successfully sold. According to real estate websites, it was listed by a different realty firm, Sotheby’s, until late last month. Around that time, it was listed for sale on Trump International Realty’s website. If it sells at its current listing price, it would likely earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions for Trump’s firm.
According to New York real estate records, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche bought the swanky 3,000-square-foot condo back in 2006. The two-bedroom unit features “sweeping views of Central Park,” along with “lacquered custom tray ceilings with custom lighting, custom pocket doors, Steinway black lacquered doors, Corian counters, subzero refrigerator, Wolf convection oven, wine cooler and marble bath.” It’s unclear why Roche—which has offices across the United States—originally purchased the property or why it recently turned to Trump’s real estate firm for help. Roche and its American biotech subsidiary, Genentech, did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did the Trump Organization or Karina Lynch, an attorney with the powerhouse firm DLA Piper, who was recently announced as the Trump Organization’s “outside ethics adviser.”
Trump International Realty is far from the president’s most profitable venture, but it’s still plenty lucrative. Boasting a “luxury portfolio” full of “exclusive listings,” the firm pulled in $2.4 million in revenue last year, according to Trump’s most recent financial disclosure filing. Trump owns 55 percent of the firm, and his children own the rest. It currently lists 10 properties for sale in New York, with a combined listed price of $42.6 million. Most are in Trump-branded luxury buildings.
The Roche condo is, by far, the priciest unit. But the second-most expensive—a $6.6 million condo in a nearby building known as Trump Parc—also raises some questions. According to real estate records, that unit has been owned since 2001 by a British Virgin Islands-based company. The identity of the individual or individuals behind that company are unclear. An accountant whose name appears on the deed did not respond to a request for comment.
The amount of commission a realty firm earns on a property sale can vary, but real estate websites say the typical seller’s commission in New York is around 2.7 percent. At that rate, selling Roche’s condo for the asking price of $11,950,000 could earn the Trumps’ realty business about $323,000 in commissions. And selling the mysterious Trump Parc condo could bring in another $178,000. It’s not clear what portion of those commissions would go directly to the individual real estate agents employed by Trump International Realty and what portion would be retained by the Trumps.
Roche has massive and complex interests in Washington, DC, and the Trump administration has considerable authority over the price of pharmaceuticals and the approval of new products. The drugmaker is one of heaviest spenders on K Street, with the company and its subsidiaries shelling out more than $10.7 million on lobbying expenses last year. In the first three months of 2025, the company reported nearly $3.6 million in federal lobbying. Most of that spending went to Genentech’s in-house lobbying team. In March, Genentech also hired MAGA-linked K Street firm Miller Strategies to lobby the Executive Office of the President and other parts of the administration. Roche’s overall spending this year on lobbyists ranks 6th in the pharmaceutical industry and just outside the top 25 of any special interest.
The possibility that one of Trump’s businesses could collect a substantial commission from a major corporation during his presidency is deeply problematic, says Robert Maguire, research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group.
“The optics are terrible, but there’s also all of the unanswerable questions which are raised by it, like did someone tell them that by enriching the president, they’d have a better chance of having their interests heard by the administration?” Maguire says. “Or is there just a general perception that if you do business with the president, if you enrich the president, you will get better treatment by the administration?”
Even if the decision by Roche to list its condo for sale with the sitting president’s realty firm was unrelated to politics, it could undermine public confidence in the integrity of the regulatory system, Maguire says.
Roche has had its fair share of high-stakes dealing with the Trump administration over the last few months. As a Swiss-based drug company, it potentially has a lot to lose from Trump’s tariffs—the standard tariff of 10 percent is supposed to rise to 31 percent on many of its products. In April, Roche made a splash by announcing it would be investing up to $50 billion in the United States and creating as many as 12,000 jobs—a move that would theoretically help it avoid tariffs by moving some manufacturing to the US. The company’s CEO told investors that the firm was in ongoing discussions with the White House about the tariffs, and a few days later, Roche’s announcement earned praise from the administration.
In May, Trump signed an executive order that attempted to force pharmaceutical companies to tie their US drug prices to the prices they charge in other developed countries. Roche was one of the first—and loudest—companies to complain about the move.
By early June, though, the company’s US investment plans were once again being touted by the administration. “Since President Donald J. Trump took office,” the White House crowed, “his unwavering commitment to revitalizing American industry has spurred trillions of dollars of investments in US manufacturing, production, and innovation—and the list only continues to grow.”
Ethics experts have long urged Trump to divest from his businesses, but he has steadfastly refused to do so. As Maguire notes, conflict-of-interest rules would prohibit any federal official other than the president and vice president from hanging onto a business like Trump International Realty.
“He’s the president, so he’s exempted from any of these rules that would apply to other people—hundreds of thousands of other government employees would be restrained or prohibited from this kind of thing,” Maguire says. “It’s just another instance of how at every turn, the Trump family and their businesses are demonstrating why these rules exist in the first place.”
2025-06-30 18:00:00
When Karen Thompson became the legal director at Pregnancy Justice a year and a half ago, she was still learning about the reproductive justice issues at the heart of the organization’s mission. But after 20 years focused on the criminal justice system, first at the Innocence Project and then at the ACLU of New Jersey, she did know a lot about racial profiling, government surveillance, law enforcement overreach, and wrongful convictions. And to her, the parallels between her earlier work and the increasing criminalization of pregnancy and abortion in post-Roe v. Wade America could not have been clearer. “We are seeing all the same kinds of issues in the repro space that people in the criminal defense space have been talking about for years,” Thompson says.
That criminal defense perspective frames how Thompson has been thinking about another major development of the post-Roe era: efforts to enshrine abortion rights into state constitutions. Since 2022, voters in 12 states have passed ballot measures aimed at protecting abortion rights, including seven states in November. But half of those measures restrict or ban abortions after viability—the point when a fetus is capable of living outside the womb, usually at around 22 to 24 weeks’ gestation. In Missouri, Ohio, and other states, reproductive rights advocates have rationalized viability limits as a necessary evil to win over voters who might be squeamish about abortions later in pregnancy. The same debate has been playing out in Virginia, where advocates are trying to get a constitutional amendment on the 2026 ballot.
“I get it,” Thompson says. “But my eyes and this organization’s eyes are on who is being criminalized.” By creating a constitutional line between acceptable and unacceptable abortions, she says law enforcement is given a powerful weapon it can use against women for any actions that might be seen as harming a viable fetus—drug use in pregnancy, for instance—as well as a rationale to investigate and punish people for miscarriages and stillbirths. “It’s already happening,” she says, “and viability lines just make it easier.”
A new report by Pregnancy Justice and the advocacy group Patient Forward underscores the fact that one of the most insidious things about viability lines is their close relationship to fetal personhood, the once-fringe idea—now increasingly embraced by the Republican mainstream—that embryos and fetuses are entitled to the same constitutional rights as anyone else. Personhood arguments are foundational to the anti-abortion movement, part of its long-term strategy to outlaw all abortions. Reproductive rights groups should be doing everything they can to fight the spread of personhood laws, the report’s authors argue. Instead, Thompson says, by accepting viability limits, abortion advocates are unwittingly legitimizing the idea of fetal rights.
I recently met Thompson at a convening of legal scholars and maternal health advocates at the UCLA School of Law and followed up by Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Gestational limits have been a central issue in the abortion debate since 1973, when Roe v. Wade held that women had a constitutional right to abortion until viability. When did you first become aware of the dangers that gestational limits pose to abortion rights?
After I graduated from law school in 2003, I got a job at a big private law firm, Morrison & Foerster, that does a lot of pro bono work on reproductive issues. My first pro bono case was against a guy named William Graham, who was holding himself out as an abortion provider in New Orleans. He had a business name, Causeway Center for Women, that was very similar to a real abortion provider, Causeway Medical Clinic. People would go through the Yellow Pages, stumble on his name first, and call. And he would stall them until it was too late in their pregnancy to get an abortion or it was now so expensive they couldn’t afford it.
This sounds like a crisis pregnancy center. But he was one dude doing all this through his phone. So we filed a class-action suit arguing that this was fraud and trademark infringement, which was a very non-repro approach to take. And we shut him down. He’s not allowed to hold himself out in public as an abortion provider. That was my first introduction to the overreach of anti-abortion activists and the real, practical realities around what a viability line does. It also showed me how easily the gestational age and viability line could be manipulated in a way that could cause very severe damage to people’s lives.
Twenty years later, Roe has been overturned and gestational and viability limits have become a significant point of conflict among people who support the right to abortion. A lot of mainstream reproductive rights groups rationalize viability limits as nonthreatening, just “restoring Roe.”
“Some of the things that some repro groups believe preserve the right to abortion are actually harming and paving the road to hell for people who are experiencing pregnancy criminalization.”
I want to be clear, I fully understand why people want viability limits—they believe this is what gets ballot measures passed. They can say, “Look, we’re going to protect access here in Missouri, here in Virginia, but we’re going to put a limit on this.” For legislators who are on the fence, that may seem like a reasonable compromise.
But some of the things that some repro groups believe preserve the right to abortion are actually harming and paving the road to hell for people who are experiencing pregnancy criminalization.
“Paving the road to hell for people who are experiencing pregnancy criminalization”—that’s some pretty strong language. How do viability limits do this?
What viability limits are saying is that there are good abortions and bad abortions, which is problematic all by itself. But you’re also creating soft fetal personhood because you’re saying: There is a moment when an abortion becomes bad; there is a moment when the government gets to involve itself in someone’s womb; there is a moment where the pregnant person disappears in favor of a governmental interest in the child or the fetus.
It’s that simple: If a fetus is considered a separate person under the law, and if you’re saying, “Here’s the line where that fetus becomes a separate person,” there are no limits to what a state can do after that moment under the guise of protecting that fetus. And that is never going to end well for the pregnant person.
Just this month, there was a West Virginia prosecutor who said, “Hey, if you’re having a miscarriage, call the police and report it!” What got less attention was the rest of what he said. The kind of criminal jeopardy a woman who miscarries would face would depend on “her intent,” which he went on to define as: “What did you do? How late were you in your pregnancy? Were you trying to hide something?” He said, “If you were relieved and you had been telling people, ‘I’d rather get ran over by a bus than have this baby,’ that may play into law enforcement’s thinking.” So that artificial viability line was enough to justify criminal charges in his head.
We are in dangerous territory. That is our reality now.
The idea that viability should determine when fetuses develop certain rights— that started long before Roe, right?
Historically, a fetus didn’t acquire full legal rights as a person until birth, which I think is the best and most legitimate standard. When a child is born, when there is a baby who is independent of its parent, who is able to breathe and live and be given medical treatment that is going to sustain that life without being dependent on the body of another person—that’s when life begins. That’s what the law said for a very, very long time. Many religions also believe that that’s when life begins.
Then in the 1940s, courts started ruling that a child could sue for fetal injuries that were incurred in the womb after the point of viability. So the idea of a viability line comes from a place of trying to do better and acknowledge harms that can occur to a fetus before it’s born. Legislators started passing [fetal homicide and wrongful death] laws to punish people’s bad behavior. For example, when somebody was pregnant and they were hit by a car because of someone else’s negligence and they lost their pregnancy.
But these kinds of laws only work if they are limited to specific situations, and they never are. They become a foundation for a much bigger legal and political drift, including the spread of the idea that fetal personhood begins not at viability and not at 12 weeks or eight weeks or six weeks, but at fertilization.
Have viability lines become more problematic since Dobbs [the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe]?
They are hugely dangerous now in a way that they weren’t necessarily before. Because at the very least, Roe put some guardrails down. At the end of the day, it said there was a constitutional right to abortion that was protected by federal law. With Roe gone, that federal protection is no longer with us. These issues are now being decided by the state, at the whim of whoever is running things, whoever wants to pass legislation or bring litigation based on their religious or personal beliefs.
“You’re also creating soft fetal personhood because you’re saying: There is a moment when an abortion becomes bad; there is a moment when the government gets to involve itself in someone’s womb.”
A recent Pregnancy Justice report shows a surge in pregnancy-related prosecutions in the first year after Dobbs, mostly involving drug use, but also for miscarriage and stillbirth. Is that a sign of things to come in states that enshrine viability into their constitutions?
Cases are going up. Part of that is because our research is getting tighter, so we’re able to find the cases. But what is also happening is that these are easy cases for prosecutors to bring, low-hanging fruit. If you are a prosecutor and you have certain numbers of convictions that you are getting pressure to hit every year, lest you be perceived as being soft on crime, it’s really easy to criminalize someone because of their miscarriage or because they were using substances while they were pregnant. All you have to say is, “Drug exposure to a fetus is a crime, and that crime is felony child abuse.” Boom! That’s a 10- to 20-year sentence, whether or not there is any harm to the fetus or an actual born child—which, by the way, you don’t have to prove—or whether someone has quit using after they found out they were pregnant, and so on. The guardrails are gone and standards to convict someone of a crime based on their pregnancy are so low.
Keep in mind: Something like 70 percent of these pregnancy criminalizations are being done through laws that were not written for this purpose. Women who might have smoked a joint while they’re pregnant are being charged with child neglect or domestic violence against themselves, or under laws that were written to protect children from fumes in a meth cookhouse. There’s already mission creep in these cases. So, yeah, I’m worried about how viability lines could become a new law enforcement tool. They will make the criminalization process easier and faster.
And with the sweeping cuts that the Trump administration is making to safety net programs like Medicaid and the attacks on Planned Parenthood and the legal fights over emergency medical care…
We’re only going to see things get worse. People are going to have more miscarriages and more stillbirths, and that will lead to more criminalization.
The rise in surveillance technology would seem to make that possibility even more concerning.
Criminal justice reform people have been raising the alarm about automatic license-plate readers for years. They’ve been talking about cellphone tower pings and all of this tracking tech that has been used to throw people in prison. Now we’re seeing this tech being used in the reproductive context. In Texas, you have a county sheriff who, under the guise of protecting a woman who they claimed might be bleeding out from a self-managed abortion, proceeds to use the information from 83,000 different license-plate reader reports to track this person down…If she wasn’t pregnant or she hadn’t had an abortion, would anyone be okay with that? Someone who hadn’t committed a crime being tracked down through license-plate readers? I don’t think so. But what is happening is that pregnancy is justifying the imposition of law enforcement on people’s movements.
How does the reproductive rights side fight this potential deluge of criminal cases?
Part of what we are doing as an organization is incorporating lessons from the wrongful conviction space. So you can’t convict someone on bad science. If you see in the placenta or umbilical cord that there was clearly an infection that led to pregnancy loss, you can’t blame substance use, because that’s not how it works. You can’t have snitches—people working in hospitals or homeless shelters—calling child protection services and telling them, with no grounds, that a woman has a mental health issue and then have CPS separate that child from their parent. You can’t randomly drug test people when they go in for labor and delivery for no reason other than that they’re pregnant.
We’re seeing the same kind of issues in these pregnancy-related cases as in other criminal justice cases, but with none of the legal checks. Partly because these cases are very, very unseen. They move really fast. If someone’s pregnant, they don’t want to be in jail. There is deep judgment in our society about what good mothers are supposed to be, and anyone who is using drugs is immediately a bad mother. And keep in mind who is getting targeted. We’re not talking about someone in her very fancy apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York City taking Percocet and drinking wine. No one’s sending CPS after the father-to-be who is clearly high. The people being affected are mostly poor women. [In our recent report] white women are the majority in drug cases, Black and brown women in cases involving pregnancy loss like stillbirths and miscarriage.
We know what the history is in this country. We know how criminalization works. And the only thing that is different now is that there is one group of women who the state wants to have more babies because they are in an irrational panic around the demographic shift. And there’s another group of women over which the state wants to continue its rampant overcriminalization and overpolicing of bodies.
Even with everything you’ve talked about, the idea of viability feels very entrenched in how we think about pregnancy and motherhood in our culture. So how do you convince people that viability limits don’t protect abortion rights—that they are, in fact, a contraction?
My colleagues at Patient Forward have a lot more data on this, but from what I understand of polling on this issue, viability limits are not popular with voters. What seems to be happening is that voters are approving what is put in front of them. So we believe, based on research data, that they would have supported ballot measures without viability limits, too. The polling shows overwhelming rejection of government interference throughout pregnancy.
“We should not be putting ourselves out there supporting this idea of bad and good abortions. Either we want people to have access or we don’t. If you want them to have access, let them have access.”
I think people understand why patients have later abortions: because they can’t get time off work, they can’t find folks to watch their other kids, their car is busted, or they don’t have money to get enough gas to get care. Maybe they have an abusive partner, or they didn’t know they were pregnant until they were already at five months, or because they don’t want to have a kid, or because they simply cannot afford another kid. People understand these realities. And as a movement about reproductive justice, we should not be putting ourselves out there supporting this idea of bad and good abortions. Either we want people to have access or we don’t. If you want them to have access, let them have access.
People shouldn’t have to travel from New York City to Colorado to get the care they need. I don’t know how to make it any clearer, any more simple than that. I think that some repro advocates have so internalized these talking points about the political risks of viability lines that they’re not able to get past them. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t say, “Listen, this is complicated.” I know people have complicated feelings and that if that’s what you have for yourself, okay. But your complicated feelings are not what should be driving legislation.
We’ve lost. Roe is gone. And we have people right now in the federal government who are implementing Project 2025, which wants to provide fetuses with 14th Amendment protections. If that happens, all abortion access will be gone. So the repro movement can have its feelings. But we are losing. We can keep woe-is-me-ing our way through what is happening. Or we can step up and fight. Passivity is not going to work. We cannot appease the other side. They’re not appeased—they’re taking, taking, taking.
Everything is burning down. This is the moment for the repro movement to rebuild in a way that serves everybody.
2025-06-30 18:00:00
This story was produced by the independent, nonprofit newsroom Canary Media and co-published by Mother Jones.
Gary Yerman, 75, sat nervously in a noisy ballroom in Virginia Beach, Virginia, counting down the minutes until he could shed his ill-fitting double-breasted suit for a sun shirt and blue jeans. He introduced himself as a fisherman of 50 years to a stranger seated next to him at the banquet table.
“That sounds really hard,” the other man replied.
“Not as hard as it’s going to be to go accept this award and talk to a room full of people,” joked Yerman. Moments later, his name was called, and he walked onto a professionally lit stage to accept a small crystal trophy from the Oceantic Network, a leading trade group for the burgeoning multibillion-dollar US offshore wind industry.
It was an unlikely sight. America’s fishermen have long treated wind developers as their sworn enemies.
The conflict started in the early 2000s, when the first plans for New England’s offshore wind areas were sketched out. In packed town hall meetings that often devolved into shouting matches, fishermen claimed the projects would make it harder to earn a living: fewer fishing grounds, fewer fish, damaged ocean habitat.
Few of these predictions have come to pass in places like the UK, which has already built over 50 offshore wind farms in its waters. Wind areas there are thriving with sharks and serving as a surprising habitat for haddock. But even today, fisher-led groups in the US are spearheading lawsuits aiming to halt at least two offshore wind farms under construction on the East Coast. One former offshore wind executive told Canary Media that the amount of pushback from fishermen in America has made offshore wind investments riskier than in Europe.
“Everyone knows that fishermen hate offshore wind companies. Well, guess what? Offshore wind companies hate fishermen.”
Yerman was one of the first fishermen in the US to cross this bitter divide. He’s become the reluctant face of a group of over 100 fishermen and fisherwomen who go by the name Sea Services North America. They’ve decided to work for offshore wind farms—not against them. Doing so supplements their income from scalloping, a centuries-old bedrock of the New England fishing economy that has seen revenues dry up.
Pursuing work in wind power has come at a cost. After the awards event, back in blue jeans and with a celebratory beer in hand, Yerman recounted the exact word New England fishermen used when he and his crew first crossed the Rubicon.
“They called us traitors,” he said.
Those tensions have become supercharged with the election of President Donald Trump, who has called offshore wind “garbage” and “bullshit” and, in the weeks leading up to his inauguration, pledged that “no new windmills” would be built in the US during his presidency. He’s backed up those words with action since taking office, stopping new projects from proceeding and attempting to block some of the country’s eight fully permitted offshore wind projects, too.
Yerman and his crew are left wondering if the industry they’ve bet their livelihood on—and work they’ve risked their reputations for—will all come crashing down.
Many of the fishermen who work through Sea Services voted for Trump. And if the president fulfills his promise to halt the industry, it would be devastating not only for the Northeast’s climate goals and grid reliability—but for thousands of workers in the region, from electricians to welders to Sea Services’ fishermen.
One of Sea Services’ captains, Kevin Souza, put it simply: The impact would be “big time.”
Six years ago, Yerman was like the others—angry with offshore wind developers, particularly Danish giant Ørsted, which had set up shop in his hometown of New London, Connecticut.
Concerned that wind turbines might push his son out of the scalloping business, he pulled one of the only levers he could think to pull and contacted his state senator at the time, Paul Formica, a Republican who owned a local seafood restaurant.
Formica wanted to see the two sides get along. He arranged a meeting between Yerman and an Ørsted executive named Matthew Morrissey, who happened to be a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the most lucrative commercial fishing port in America.
Yerman found in Morrissey a sympathetic ear, and in turn, he listened to what the executive had to say—that Ørsted was open to partnering with fishermen. Morrissey had seen, with his own eyes, fishers working for and coexisting with Ørsted in a tiny port in Kilkeel, Northern Ireland. The energy firm had a team of about two dozen marine affairs employees, Morrissey relayed, who could help make something like that happen in America if Yerman was on board. He pitched it as a win-win.
“Everyone knows that fishermen hate offshore wind companies. Well, guess what? Offshore wind companies hate fishermen, too,” Morrissey, who no longer works at Ørsted, told Canary Media earlier this year. “Our goal here is to spread the understanding that these two industries can and do and will work together.”
The idea intrigued Yerman. In the US, profits from scalloping have fluctuated from year to year, and, following a crash in the 1990s, scallop numbers remain unpredictable. In his view, if offshore wind companies were moving into their waters—like it or not—they might as well make some money from it.
Yerman got to work.
His first call was to Gordon Videll, a longtime friend and affable small-town lawyer, who knew things about contracts that Yerman didn’t. The two flew to Kilkeel—on their own dime—to see the model for themselves. Videll noticed that some of Kilkeel’s fishermen were driving cars nicer than his. He and Yerman were inspired.
When they returned to Connecticut, Yerman recruited about a half dozen of his commercial fishing buddies, and Videll started putting together the paperwork. They dubbed themselves Sea Services North America and in 2020 landed their first small contract, with Ørsted. It was a pilot, said Morrissey, to see if this arrangement would work here in America.
“Everyone was skeptical,” recalled Morrissey with a laugh. “Because their boats were in such poor safety condition. But you know what? They pulled it off.”
Since taking office in January, President Trump has launched an all-out assault on the offshore wind industry.
Today, Sea Services operates like a co-op and has brought 22 fishing boats up to certified safety standards. With Videll at the helm as part-time CEO, the group has completed over 11 contracts in eight different wind farm areas, from Massachusetts to New Jersey. Instead of hiring ferries or work boats, developers rely on Sea Services fishermen to provide safety and scout services for offshore wind vessels.
It’s important work: making sure, for example, no fishing gear, like crab traps, is in the way of cables, monopiles, or survey operations. If necessary, Sea Services fishermen move gear—with the owner’s approval. When not cleared, these obstacles have caused days and sometimes weeks of costly delays for developers, according to Morrissey.
Sea Services was an “indispensable partner” in helping to build South Fork Wind, which went online last year and became America’s first large-scale offshore wind project, wrote Ed LeBlanc, a current Ørsted executive, in an email to Canary Media. The firm has since contracted the group for other projects, in no small part because of their expertise about local waters, he added.
Cooperation between these two sides—offshore wind and commercial fishing—does exist elsewhere in America. For example, Avangrid and Vineyard Offshore, the codevelopers of the Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, have paid out $8 million directly to local fishermen unaffiliated with Sea Services for similar safety jobs over the past two years.
But Sea Services is unique. Today the group offers an expansive network of 22 partner vessels based in six states and is led by a commercial fisherman. Videll brought on new technology, allowing developers to track their work remotely. He said they adopted a co-op model to maximize the amount of money going into participants’ pockets.
Receiving the Oceantic Network award in late April was a big deal for the collective, said Videll. It’s an example of how successful the venture has been in a short period of time—and, more importantly, it should be good for business. Industry awards mean visibility. More visibility could mean more Sea Services contracts.
But, right now, the Sea Services business faces headwinds that no award can help overcome.
Since taking office in January, President Trump has launched an all-out assault on the offshore wind industry. On his first day in office, he halted new lease and permitting activity and called for a review of the nine projects that already had their federal permits in hand. In March, his Environmental Protection Agency chief revoked a key permit for Atlantic Shores, a fully permitted project that has since been called off in part due to roadblocks created by the administration.
The most eyebrow-raising step came in April, when Trump’s Interior Department issued a stop-work order for Empire Wind 1, two weeks after the project had begun at-sea construction.
It was a wake-up call for Sea Services, which works for Norwegian energy giant Equinor on the project. Videll, Sea Services’ CEO, said at the time that the cessation of Empire Wind would be a crushing blow that could cost the co-op a total of $9 million to $12 million worth of work.
In May, the administration suddenly lifted the stop-work order. Sea Services’ contract was safe, at least for the time being. But it was the most bracing illustration yet that the business, in spite of all its success, now faces very choppy waters under the Trump administration.
On a cloudless late-February day at the New Bedford port, 57-year-old Souza hovered over a checklist and laptop in the captain’s quarters of the Pamela Ann. Souza is the captain of the boat, and he needed to make sure everything was in order before he and his crew left New Bedford that afternoon. They’d be at sea for 10 days, working in many of the spots Souza had fished in for decades.
Those 10 days at sea would not be spent dredging up scallops from the seafloor and tallying their catch, however, but conducting safety operations for the Revolution Wind offshore wind project, which is being built off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
The hulking scalloping boat, with its ebony-painted hull and wood-paneled interior, was bustling ahead of the journey. In the galley, Souza’s 25-year-old son, one of the three mates onboard, sorted through the food they’d need. Jack Morris, a 73-year-old scalloper and Sea Services manager, paced around the Pamela Ann checking in on its recently updated safety assets, like a new tracking beacon and safety suits.
Trips like these have become a lifeline for Souza, his crew, and an increasing number of fishermen who depend on the struggling scalloping industry.
Today, there are roughly 350 vessels sitting in ports from Maine to North Carolina that have licenses to harvest sea scallops. For several decades, East Coast scallopers managed to eke out a comfortable middle-class lifestyle on scalloping alone. Morris said that “years ago” he’d pull in $200,000 to $300,000 of profit annually as a scallop boat captain.
“Yeah, those days are gone,” scoffed Morris.
While the price of scallops remains high, making it one of the most lucrative US fisheries, rules passed over the last 30 years have restricted when and where scallopers can harvest, resulting in fewer days at sea, fewer scallops caught—and less money for the entire industry.
Souza has mixed emotions about the regulations.
On the one hand, scallops are no longer being overfished. A 2024 third-party audit of the fishery said it “meets the requirements for a well-managed and sustainable fishery.” In fact, for over a decade, US sea scallops sold on grocery store shelves have carried a little blue-check label—the mark of a seafood certified by the Marine Stewardship Council.
But most scallop fishermen are now limited to an extremely short window of time during which they can harvest scallops—in 2025, it was just 24 days. Some of their favorite fishing grounds are regularly closed for scallop recovery. There are simply fewer scallops to go around. Souza estimates that captains who stick to scalloping alone are making half of what they did in years past: “They’re probably lucky to make a hundred [thousand].”
Offshore wind work has helped fishermen like Souza and Morris ease the sting of that lost income.
“You’ll have the lobster guys and they’ll say shit to you—like, ‘traitor.’ Or ‘Trump’s gonna shut that down, ha ha ha.'”
Across Revolution Wind’s two-year construction window, Souza expects to make over $200,000 as a part-time boat captain. For the younger generation, who Souza said as deckhands can expect to make only around $30,000 per year from scalloping, offshore wind work makes it possible to keep earning a middle-class wage.
In the past year, Souza has recruited to Sea Services both of his sons, his nephew, and a few other young folks from longtime fishing families who might have otherwise left the scallop industry if not for the supplemental income.
“This wind farm business is the number one way for scallop guys, captains, mates, deckhands, to make extra money,” said Morris.
It’s also helping to revitalize the port of New Bedford, a city of 100,000 that is not only the most valuable fishing port in America but also a place of tremendous historic importance to the industry. It was once the epicenter of the whaling world and serves as the backdrop for the opening scenes of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”
In just 10 years, the offshore wind industry has ushered in a transformation the city hadn’t seen “since the whaling era,” according to Jon Mitchell, the city’s mayor since 2011.
The companies building Vineyard Wind now stage their offshore wind infrastructure in New Bedford. Their presence has brought a flood of public and private funding to the city, with over $1.2 billion already invested and pledged to help give the terminals, docks, and harbor a facelift, according to Mitchell.
For all the money offshore wind has brought to the city—and into the pockets of locals like Souza and Morris—offshore wind remains highly controversial among many commercial fishermen in New Bedford.
That’s in spite of Mitchell’s insistence that, when push comes to shove, New Bedford’s local government will always side with scalloping.
Still, Mitchell, one of New England’s fiercest offshore wind defenders, remains unpopular with many down at the boat docks. “I’ve put myself in the loneliest place in American politics, which is right in the middle. Between offshore wind and commercial fishing,” he said.
The fishermen who take part in Sea Services also float in that lonely place.
It’s not uncommon for them to face harassment from other fishermen over the radio when out on the water, Yerman said. One time, he said a Sea Services fisherman was turned away from a Rhode Island dock, in what Yerman characterized as an act of revenge.
The hardest part of Yerman’s job is overcoming this cultural aversion and getting fishermen to the table, convincing them that working for the offshore wind developers is a way to sustain a livelihood whose viability has begun to fade.
“You’ll have the lobster guys and they’ll say shit to you—like, ‘traitor.’ Or ‘Trump’s gonna shut that down, ha ha ha,’” Souza said, imitating the taunts he receives over the marine radio bolted to the wall near the helm of the Pamela Ann.
The lobstermen have a point regarding Trump. As frustrating as their remarks may be, the biggest threat to offshore wind is not snipes from colleagues, but the actions of a president who many Sea Services members—including Souza—voted for.
As Souza prepared to leave the New Bedford port in February to go help Ørsted build giant wind turbines in the ocean, something Trump swore would not happen during his term, he explained his support for the president.
“Trust me, I want Trump to ‘drill, drill, drill.’ I’m all for it,” said Souza of the president’s plans to expand oil and gas production.
But he still thinks offshore wind is necessary to get more power onto New England’s grid and lower energy costs. Experts say that the federal permitting process for offshore wind in America takes too long—about four years. But, in the Northeast region, according to energy analyst Christian Roselund, finishing the deployment of the offshore wind projects already in the permitting pipeline will be much faster than starting up new nuclear or fossil-gas power plants.
“Once we ‘drill, drill, drill,’ you’re still gonna need more electricity,” Souza said. “Where are you gonna get it? My electric bill at my house is stupid high!”
“When you put that first wind turbine up there,” Avila recalls other fisherman saying to him, “we’re going to hang you from it!”
Most of the fishermen in New Bedford are Trump supporters, he insisted. Morris, who also voted for Trump, agreed. Overall, Trump won 46 percent of the city’s votes in last November’s election—a much higher proportion than his Massachusetts statewide total of 36.5 percent. The “TRUMP 2024” flags flown from the dozens of scallop boats docked across New Bedford’s port underscored the point. A few of those Trump flag-flying boats even work for the offshore wind companies, Morris claims. ThePamela Ann, for its part,does not have a Trump flag.
“I support Trump even though I know he’s against wind. … I believe this will still be around,” said Souza, gesturing toward the ocean, where somewhere over the horizon an array of wind towers was being erected. “He’s gonna see the light.”
Trump, of course, has not seen the light—though he did revoke his stop-work order against Empire Wind.
After being grounded for a month, Sea Services fishermen began operations on Empire Wind again in early June, when the project resumed at-sea work. The co-op’s members are helping Equinor’s construction vessels lay boulders on the seafloor to stabilize all 54 wind towers that will be raised over the next two years and eventually supply much-needed carbon-free power to New York City.
But nothing is certain. When the Trump administration unpaused the project, it left open the door to stopping it again—or killing it altogether. A May letter from the Interior Department to Equinor noted that it is still conducting an “ongoing review” to determine if the project’s permits were “rushed” and therefore illegitimate in the eyes of the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, a coalition of a dozen fishing companies and several anti-offshore wind groups typically allied with Trump sued the administration on June 3, just days before Empire Wind restarted at-sea construction, in an attempt to reinstate the stop-work order. The move came weeks after wind opponents asked Trump to also pause Revolution Wind, one of the more lucrative contracts Sea Services holds.
In his opposition to offshore wind, Trump has positioned himself as a defender of the commercial fishing industry, claiming falsely at a May 2024 campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, for example, that the turbines “cause tremendous problems with the fish and the whales.”
But for the increasing number of fishermen working with offshore wind companies, halting the industry would not help—it would crush a financial lifeline.
Not long ago, in 2017, Sea Services captain Rodney Avila remembers being one of the only fishers in New Bedford willing to seize this lifeline. He recalled with a laugh what a long-time fisherman friend said to him then: “When you put that first wind turbine up there…we’re going to hang you from it!”
Times have changed. In New Bedford alone, almost 50 local fishing vessels have performed some kind of safety or scouting work for offshore wind projects. At least one captain lowers his MAGA-supporting flag before setting out to work on the projects the president has sworn to stop, according to Avila. He said politics has always been tangled up in fishing. And work is work.
“They don’t care whether it’s red, or blue, or whatever color…They don’t care,” Avila shrugged, while sipping coffee inside a Dunkin’. Five scalloping boats bobbed on calm water just beyond the parking lot.
“It’s money that they need to support their families, wherever it comes from.”
2025-06-29 23:56:55
As the dust settles in Venice, where some of the world’s richest gathered to bless the union of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, I’m wondering what to make of the multi-day affair. Plenty has already been written about the blinding tackiness of each event; in terms of ostentatiousness, it met my expectations.
But even as someone who enjoys celebrity news, I was struck by how activated my ever-eager algorithm was by the events in Venice, and the relentlessness with which it churned out constant glimpses of these nuptials. It was a gluttonous buffet of the in-your-face aesthetics that define this political and cultural moment, and it has since left me with the feeling of a trashy hangover.
There were the Kardashian-Jenners, whose outfits seemed designed to send algorithms into overdrive. Sydney Sweeney and Oprah Winfrey. A newly single Orlando Bloom nearly chomping at the bit at the prospect of fresh skin. The over-the-top Vogue spread. The flood of reactions to the Vogue spread. Jerry Seinfeld, Gayle King, Usher. Many of these guests were seen waving to onlookers as they departed on little boats to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, as though they had been unaware that the city hated their guts.
Leonardo DiCaprio is a MOOD in Venice for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez's wedding
— hunter harris (@hunteryharris) June 27, 2025https://t.co/8wfYNmTwG1
One guest who did not wave was Leonardo DiCaprio, who instead arrived with a black baseball cap pulled down to cover his face. Some speculated that DiCaprio, a self-fashioned environmentalist, did not want to be seen attending the environmentally noxious affair. (Nearly 100 private planes reportedly landed in Venice for the weekend.) But that’s a generous guess, one that presumes a capability for shame. The truth is that no one in attendance cares about what you and I will ever think.
I’m feeling icky, but they’re flying high on their jets back home. Meanwhile, thanks to the father of another guest, Ivanka Trump, they stand in spitting distance from even higher levels of wealth.
