2025-11-22 02:01:38
You should be paying attention to Tennessee.
The congressional race in the state’s seventh congressional district, which includes Nashville, is where cracks in Donald Trump’s base are starting to show. Democrat Aftyn Behn is facing off against Matt Van Epps, a Republican West Point grad who had been strongly favored to win.
Both parties have bombarded the state ahead of the special election on December 2. Trump held a telephone rally for Van Epps, and super PACS from both sides have flooded the race with money, including $1 million from one allied with Trump, according to the New York Times.
“This is a predominately Republican district,” Behn told me. “It was drawn that way.” Indeed, Republicans never intended for it to become a battleground, but the special election has given Democratic voters in the state who are fed up with Trump’s agenda an opening.
Despite Tennessee being one of the lowest turnout states in the country, Democratic lawmakers—sensing an opportunity during a special election that’s activated voters facing an affordability crisis—have shown up big. Former Vice President Kamala Harris recently campaigned for Behn, along with Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin and Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas).
“We have a state government that has inhibited the city of Nashville from addressing the rise of the cost of living,” Behn said. “We have a federal government that is in chaos and cannot address the cost of living.”
The special election is on December 2. Stay tuned.
2025-11-22 01:33:11
Earlier this week, a new page titled “Vaccines and Autism” appeared on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. Contrary to previous CDC guidance, the page alleged, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism,” adding that “studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.” Those claims aren’t supported by evidence, but they do reflect talking points regularly promoted by anti-vaccine activists—of which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a leader.
I spoke with five CDC staffers on Thursday and Friday to find out their reactions to the announcement. While they declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, they all said that they and their colleagues were shocked and dismayed by the misinformation put forth on the new page. “It’s horrifying, it’s embarrassing, it’s scary, it’s heartbreaking—it’s all of those things,” said a staffer at the CDC’s Injury Center. “To see our agency being used to spread lies and misinformation is a gut punch,” a CDC communicator with the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease wrote in a message. “People will be harmed by this—parents will decide not to vaccinate their kids because of false information, and kids will get sick and die as a result.”
Another longtime CDC employee who works in communications said, “The best way I can put it is it feels like we’re on a hijacked airplane.”
Several employees noted that there had been no warning about the new page before it was posted—in fact, said the NCIRD staffer, even department leadership had “only learned about it today when somebody saw it the same way everybody else did.”
Others doubted the new page had gone through the agency’s rigorous protocol for vetting public-facing information, which the longtime communications staffer said, “can be clunky and take a long time. It is the bane of many people’s existence who work at CDC because it is so laborious and it requires so many different stages of review.” The new page, on the other hand, “popped up without going through CDC clearance processes.”
“I don’t even know who is updating these web pages, or if anyone at CDC has anything to do with any of that,” said another staffer who works on immunizations. Department supervisors told employees that “their understanding is that these updates to the website are not coming from CDC. Somebody at the HHS level is going in and changing these pages.”
HHS did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.
“I think people are starting to see that we can’t fulfill our mission here, like I think it’s that is becoming more and more clear and loud and unavoidable with each day.”
The concerns about the Autism and Vaccines page are only the latest blow to morale at the CDC. First came the appointment of Kennedy, who formerly ran an anti-vaccine activist group. Then there were the waves of layoffs, and after that, a record-breaking government shutdown. Several of the people with whom I spoke, some who had been with the CDC for years, said that morale at the agency was so low that they and most of their colleagues were currently looking for new jobs. “I changed my mind 20 times over the course of one meeting about whether I’m going to quiet quit and look for something else while still collecting a paycheck as long as I can, versus lean in and fight and try to protect the possibility of doing good work in the future,” said the Injury Center staffer. “I think people are starting to see that we can’t fulfill our mission here, like it’s becoming more and more clear and loud and unavoidable with each day.”
On the other hand, the longtime communications staff member said, “We’re still getting really important health information out, and if I leave, that will stop, and I don’t want to leave CDC when so many experienced people have left—or been forced out.”
In an internal memo from earlier this week shared with Mother Jones, HHS leadership outlined 16 “strategic initiatives” for the agency, including “Evaluating funding support for jurisdictions,” “invigorating the CDC workforce,” and “enhancing scientific rigor at CDC.” In the comments section, employees expressed skepticism about the initiatives. “Additional clarification on initiative #4 (enhancing scientific rigor) would be appreciated, given recent updates to the public-facing webpages that did not follow the agency’s clearance guidelines,” one comment read. In response to the goal of invigorating the workforce, another commenter wrote, “This leaves me very confused and with many questions since the cadre of our colleagues new in their careers and in probationary status were summarily dismissed earlier this year.”
Everyone with whom I spoke emphasized that the new page does not reflect the work or viewpoints of the vast majority of CDC employees. “The bulk of staff who work here still believe the same science and want to do the same good public health,” said someone with the CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. They emphasized that their actual day-to-day work had not been compromised, though some worried that it soon could be.
When asked if the CDC was still a reliable source of public-health information, the employees said that most of the public-facing information remained unchanged. A critical problem was that there didn’t appear to be a good way for the public to discern the difference between accurate and politicized messaging. “I don’t know how they would distinguish that,” the Chronic Center staffer said. “There’s not a disclaimer saying posts were approved by political appointees and not by career scientists, so I don’t know.”
“It’s really easy from inside the agency to know what is real information and what has just been added there for political reasons,” added the longtime communications staffer. “But I can see that it would be really hard if you’re outside the agency to know the difference.”
2025-11-21 23:52:40
President Donald Trump’s quest to gerrymander red states so that the Republican Party cannot lose the House of Representatives in 2026 hit a snag on Tuesday when a federal district court blocked Texas’ redrawn map from taking effect. Republican state legislators designed the infamous map to give their party five new congressional seats. Its passage in August made Texas the first state to sign on to Trump’s gerrymandering demands. But Texas Republicans, aided by the Trump Justice Department, pulled off this political heist so poorly that they have endangered the keystone achievement of the president’s anti-democratic attack on the midterm elections.
“They didn’t just grab what was on the shelves—they decided to break into the cash register, too.”
The case now heads immediately to the Supreme Court, which will quickly rule on whether to allow Texas to use its new map in the 2026 midterms or let stand the lower court ruling and keep it on ice. This decision will force Chief Justice John Roberts and the other Republican-appointed justices to pick between enforcing the gerrymandering rules they created and their evident loyalty to the GOP.
Over the past few years, the Roberts’ court has made excessive gerrymandering easier to get away with—even though it is both unconstitutional and incompatible with the basic premise of democracy. In 2019, Roberts ruled that gerrymandering undertaken for political gain could not be challenged in federal court. The decision, Rucho v. Common Cause, let legislators rig maps to protect their own party. Then last year, Justice Samuel Alito authored an opinion in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP that made it easier to sort voters by race—even though doing so deliberately is also unconstitutional. If a redrawn map hurts minority voters but legislators can plausibly claim it was drawn for partisan gain, Alito wrote, courts must presume that “the legislature acted in good faith” and rule in their favor. The decision combined with Rucho’s greenlight on partisan gerrymandering to create a roadmap that legislatures could use to bypass the constitution’s prohibition on racial gerrymandering.
“What a message to send to state legislators and mapmakers about racial gerrymandering,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent in Alexander. “Go right ahead, this Court says to States today… It will be easy enough to cover your tracks in the end: Just raise a ‘possibility’ of non-race-based decision-making.”
Thus, in two decisions that pitted Republican versus Democratic appointees, the GOP-aligned majority created a blueprint for getting away with unconstitutional gerrymandering. “They did leave a path open for people who are not inclined to live up to their constitutional responsibilities,” says Justin Levitt, a voting rights expert at Loyola Law School.
He outlines an analogy to explain: “They said ‘You shouldn’t shoplift—and we’re leaving the store unlocked and turning around and walking out.’”
So when Trump demanded that Texas embark on a mid-decade redistricting mission, the state’s Republicans could have kept to saying they were doing it to maximize partisan gain. Under Rucho, that couldn’t be challenged in federal court. And under Alexander, they could likely even get away with using racial data to do it, as long as they didn’t say they were doing so. This wasn’t a perfect plan, because it might involve admitting to an excessive partisan gerrymandering scheme that technically remains unconstitutional. But, due to the mess this Supreme Court has made, it’s an unconstitutional scheme they could get away with.
Fast forward to this week, when two judges on a three-judge panel found the Texas map was likely an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, and blocked the state from implementing it. The reason Trump and Texas Republicans lost is that they didn’t stick to the Supreme Court’s roadmap. The state’s problems began in July, when Harmeet Dhillon, the top civil rights official at the DOJ, attempted to offer a legal rationale for redrawing the map. In a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, she warned that the department had found Texas’ 2021 map contained unlawful racial gerrymanders. The letter falsely claimed that a 2024 circuit court opinion, Petteway v. Galveston County, meant Texas must dismantle three “coalition districts” where nonwhite majorities had been created by combining multiple minority groups together, and threatened to sue the state if it did not. Abbott quickly obliged, adding redistricting to the legislature’s agenda “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
As the panel ruled this Tuesday, if either the DOJ or Abbott or his fellow Republicans in the legislature just admitted that this was a partisan scheme instead of targeting the districts over false claims about the legality of their racial composition, their case would be much stronger. “Had the Trump Administration sent Texas a letter urging the State to redraw its congressional map to improve the performance of Republican candidates, the Plaintiff Groups would then face a much greater burden to show that race—rather than partisanship—was the driving force behind the 2025 Map,” federal district judge Jeffrey Brown wrote, because of Rucho‘s hall pass on partisan gerrymandering and how Alexander makes proving race was used impermissibly very difficult.
The reason Trump and Texas Republicans lost is that they didn’t stick to the Supreme Court’s roadmap.
Texas might also have had a stronger case—even after they admitted they aimed to eliminate districts where minority voters held sway—had they also increased the GOP’s advantage by redrawing majority-white Democratic districts into Republican districts. But Texas Republicans not only said they picked their targets based on race, Brown found that they had left a majority-white Democratic district intact. According to figures Brown cited in his opinion, they transformed coalition districts into districts where a single racial group held the majority with almost exactly 50 percent—an improbable outcome unless race was used to shuffle voters. They even deconstructed a coalition district that votes Republican, which wouldn’t have happened if they had simply been engaged in partisan gerrymandering.
“If you like my shoplifting metaphor,” Levitt says, “they didn’t just grab what was on the shelves, they decided to break into the cash register, too. Which the court never said was okay.”
The weakness of the DOJ letter and the Petteway excuse should not have been news to Texas Republicans. As my colleague Ari Berman has pointed out, the Texas legislature heard testimony that the DOJ’s legal arguments the coalition districts were illegal and needed to be dismantled were unsound. Even the state’s Republican-run attorney general’s office pushed back on Dhillon’s letter, insisting that the 2021 Texas’ map that created the coalition districts was legal because it was drawn for partisan gain without considering race.
“That letter was hot garbage,” says Levitt, who worked on voting rights in the Obama Justice Department and Biden White House. Brown, a conservative Trump appointee, piled on in his opinion, slamming Dhillon’s letter for containing “so many factual, legal, and typographical errors.”
Once the new map was challenged and Texas needed to defend it in court, they changed their tune and said it was a partisan gerrymander all along. Brown and another district judge, Obama appointee David Guaderrama, didn’t believe them. Instead, Brown laid out legislators’ statements from the August special session about sorting voters based on race, and found that the evidence “overcomes the presumption of legislative good faith” otherwise required by Alexander. In a dissent that shocked legal observers for its personal attacks and ranting tone, Judge Jerry Smith of the 5th Circuit held that the new map likely was a partisan gerrymander and that it should be allowed to stand under Rucho and Alexander.
Now Roberts and the Supreme Court’s GOP-majority will decide whether to excuse Texas’ blundering in order to let its new Trump-advantaging map go into effect for next year’s elections. “The real question for Roberts and rest of the justices is, ‘Do I save you from your own idiocy without, by the way, a legal reason to do that?’” says Levitt. They shouldn’t, he says, but “I wish I were more confident in the result.”
If the Supreme Court allows the new map to take effect, handing Republicans up to five seats, it will be tossing the roadmap it set out with Rucho and Alexander—one that lets politicians push through racial gerrymandering as long as they don’t say what they are doing out loud. Letting Texas get away with it after politicians not only said it, but appeared to implement it, would raise the question of whether the Court has any rules it won’t let the GOP blow past for political gain.
Hanging over the case is the political reality that Texas is not the only state engaged in gerrymandering ahead of the midterms. Its new map set a national arms race in motion, with California countering by redrawing its own map.
But California, by contrast, followed the court-sanctioned path for getting away with gerrymandering that might otherwise be found illegal. After Texas kicked things off, California’s legislature passed a map to give Democrats an additional five seats, and voters approved it in November elections. The legislature and governor framed their map as a response to Texas’—an obvious partisan motivation. Official ballot materials sent to voters stressed the partisan reasons for the new map. In other words, it is precisely the kind of partisan gerrymander that Rucho and Alexander should protect, unless it can be proven that it was primarily achieved through impermissible race-based map-drawing. In an ironic twist, the California GOP and the Justice Department are suing to block the map by claiming it was motivated by race. The facts—and the same precedents working against Texas’ map—make that a very tough case.
The California map increases the political stakes of the justices’ pending Texas decision. If they block the Texas map, knowing the California one is on much stronger legal footing, they will be handing Congressional Democrats a leg-up. That would be contrary to the political goals exhibited by the court’s GOP-aligned majority, which has demonstrated its willingness to cast the law aside in order to protect Trump and his party.
And so Texas hands the Republican majority yet another test of their integrity: will they uphold the gerrymandering rules they created? Or will they let Texas’ racial gerrymandering slide?
2025-11-21 20:40:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
More than 5,500 toxic sites nationwide could face coastal flooding by 2100 due to rising sea levels, according to new research.
The study, published on Thursday in Nature Communications and led by scientists at the University of California, warns that if heat-trapping pollution continues unabated, rising seas will flood a wide range of hazardous facilities including those handling sewage, toxic waste, oil and gas, as well as other industrial pollutants.
The analysis relies on projections of a 1 percent-annual-chance flood—commonly called a 100-year flood—under two emissions scenarios: a high-emissions scenario and a lower-emissions scenario.
After examining 23 coastal states and Puerto Rico, scientists found that flood risk is far from evenly distributed. Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas account for nearly 80% of the hazardous sites expected to be at risk by 2100.
By examining over 47,600 coastal facilities across the US, more than 11%, or 5,500 facilities are projected to be at risk of a 1-in-100-year or more frequent flood event by the end of the 21st century.
The study also noted: “Restricting greenhouse gas emissions to the low emissions scenario makes little difference in terms of the number of projected sites at risk in the near term (2050) but would reduce the number of at-risk sites from 5,500 to 5,138 (a reduction of 362 or 7% of sites) in the long term.”
“Flooding from sea level rise is dangerous on its own—but when facilities with hazardous materials are in the path of those floodwaters, the danger multiplies.”
Moreover, it found that most of this risk is already locked in due to past emissions. By 2050, nearly 3,800 hazardous facilities are projected to face flooding threats.
The study found that under a high emissions scenario, over a fifth of coastal sewage treatment facilities, refineries and formerly used defense sites, roughly a third of power plants and over 40 percent of fossil-fuel ports and terminals are projected to be at risk by 2100.
In addition to mapping toxic sites vulnerable to flooding, the study examined communities living nearby. It found that under a high-emissions scenario, neighborhoods with one or more at-risk facilities contain higher shares of renters, households in poverty, Hispanic residents, linguistically isolated households, car-less households, older adults and non-voters than neighborhoods without such sites.
The study added: “Racial residential segregation and the inequitable distribution of stormwater infrastructure further contribute to racialized patterns of flood risk across US cities.”
Pointing to the many health risks posed by floodwaters contaminated with industrial waste and sewage, Sacoby Wilson, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, outlined a range of symptoms during a press briefing about the study. These include rashes, burning eyes, headaches, fatigue and respiratory issues, as well as longer-term dangers such as cancers and organ damage to the kidneys and liver.
“Based on this research, we see that you have underlying vulnerabilities that drive risk…Think about those communities that are overburdened by those industrial hazards…or agricultural hazards like CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations],” Wilson said. “And so you have compounding vulnerability when it comes to their socioeconomic status, in some cases, the role of racism…and also you have a hazard vulnerability, plus you have the geographic vulnerability based the proximity to the hazard.”
Researcher Lara Cushing of UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health said: “Flooding from sea level rise is dangerous on its own—but when facilities with hazardous materials are in the path of those floodwaters, the danger multiplies. This analysis makes it clear that these projected dangers are falling disproportionately on poorer communities and communities that have faced discrimination and therefore often lack the resources to prepare for, retreat, or recover from exposure to toxic floodwaters.”
Rachel Morello-Frosch, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, said there were potential solutions “if policymakers are ready to move forward. And there is a clear need for disaster planning and land-use decision-making, as well as mitigation strategies to address the inequitable hazards and potential health threats posed by sea level rise.”
Thursday’s study comes as a number of the US’s east coast cities including New York, Baltimore and Norfolk are sinking, with subsidence linked to groundwater extraction, natural gas, and building weight pressing into the ground.
It also follows a June study by the Union of Concerned Scientists that found rising sea levels, driven by climate warming, will threaten nearly 3 million Americans across 703 coastal communities. Critical infrastructure including affordable and subsidized housing, wastewater treatment facilities, schools, and hospitals could face monthly disruptive flooding by 2050, the study found.
2025-11-21 03:07:28
Remember the horrifying text messages that caught a Border Patrol agent bragging about shooting someone in Chicago last month?
Well, it seems that those texts—and the looming release of even more potentially damaging messages—are now prompting federal prosecutors to move to dismiss their charges against the woman, who prosecutors had accused of assaulting an officer.
A bit of a refresher on the case: On October 4, Charles Exum, a supervisory Border Patrol agent, shot Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, multiple times and accused Martinez of ramming her car into his vehicle. Martinez was part of what the government alleged was “a convoy of civilian vehicles” that had been trailing the federal agents during their immigration enforcement operations. A lawyer for the government said Martinez had been broadcasting the incident on Facebook Live for a couple of minutes before the shooting.
As I wrote earlier this month:
When Exum got out of the car, Martinez allegedly drove her car “at” him, and the officer then fired five shots at her.
Martinez has pled not guilty, and contests the government’s allegations. In her account, Exum sideswiped her car, and fired the five gunshots at her “within two seconds” of exiting his vehicle, according to court documents filed by her lawyer. After driving about a mile from the scene, Martinez took an ambulance to a hospital, where she was treated for gunshot wounds and later arrested. She has been released from custody on $10,000 bond; a jury trial is scheduled for February.
This all occurred as federal officials were conducting immigration raids in the Chicago area, as part of an action dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Soon after, court documents revealed Exum expressing pride over the shooting. As I wrote:
In one exchange, the agent sent an article from the Guardian describing the shooting, adding, “5 shots, 7 holes.” In another, he clarified that he was explaining his pride of his abilities as a marksman: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” (Reuters reported that, when asked about these messages at a court hearing on Wednesday, Exum said: “I’m a firearms instructor and I take pride in my shooting skills.”)
In other messages, Exum wrote: “I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out’” and “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.”
According to CNN, Martinez’s lawyer, Christopher Perente, asked Exum about another text, in which Exum wrote about the incident: “I have a MOF amendment to add to my story.” Exum explained ‘MOF’ meant “miserable old fucker,” a term meant to refer to someone trying to one-up others, per CNN’s account. Exum explained the text by saying: “That means illegal actions have legal consequences.”
Following that explosive hearing, a federal court directed the government’s lawyers to provide the agent’s unredacted texts to the judge for her private review. Then, on Monday, the judge told the government’s lawyers they needed to provide the texts to Martinez’s lawyer, which would wind up making them public. But rather than do that, the government on Thursday moved to dismiss the case entirely, just hours before another hearing was scheduled to take place.
So what do those additional texts say? For now, we don’t know. Neither the lawyer representing Martinez nor spokespeople for the Department of Justice and Border Patrol immediately responded to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Thursday afternoon.
But for the government to drop the case entirely, there’s a good chance they are even more embarrassing for Exum than the previous texts were. And they likely add to a disturbing trend our reporting has repeatedly revealed: The federal agents the government claims are helping the supposedly terrified residents of American cities are, in fact, posing a danger to residents themselves. And sometimes, they’re even bragging about it afterwards.
2025-11-21 02:43:56
It’s been a week of Donald Trump outrages—he barked at a female reporter, “Quiet, quiet, piggy,” and during a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, he denigrated Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was slain and dismembered by Saudi operatives, allegedly on bin Salman’s orders. But perhaps his most horrendous transgression, so far, is his amplification of a call to execute Democratic members of Congress.
Yes, the president of the United States endorsed hanging senators and representatives.
This distinctly Trumpian episode began with a video made by six Democratic lawmakers who each served in the US military or the intelligence community: Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona (Navy) and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan (CIA), and Reps. Chris DeLuzio of Pennsylvania (Navy), Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire (Navy Reserve), Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania (Air Force), and Jason Crow of Colorado (Army).
Addressing members of the military and the intelligence community, these legislators noted that the Trump administration “is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.” They pointed out, “Like us, you swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution,” and they stated that “right now the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad but from right here at home.”
Then the Democrats presented a dramatic reminder to service members and intelligence officers: “You can refuse illegal orders.” In fact, the six noted, “You must refuse illegal orders.” They acknowledged that this could be “hard” and that “it’s a difficult time to be a public servant.” But they added, “We have your back.” The video ended with a plea to stand up “for our laws, our Constitution” and the message, “Don’t give up the ship.”
The video was posted on social media on Tuesday, and within two days it had 12 million views and had made national headlines.
Republicans immediately howled about the video. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “Stage 4 [Trump Derangement Syndrome].” On Fox News, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said, “It is inconceivable that you would have elected officials that are saying to uniformed members of the military who have taken an oath that they would defy the orders that they have been given to execute their mission.”
And Trump went ballistic.
On Thursday morning, the president, on his Truth Social account, posted a link to an article about the video and wrote, “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT.”
Trump went further and reposted messages from other users of his social media platform decrying the video as “treason” and “insurrection,” calling these Democrats “domestic terrorists,” and urging their arrest. Among the posts Trump boosted was one that exclaimed, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!”
Trump was spreading a call for deadly violence against members of Congress. Then Trump put up his own post directly suggesting these Democrats deserved execution: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
Besides behaving like a tyrant, Trump was also showing his ignorance. Insurrection or sedition involve the use of force. It does not include encouraging anyone to disobey an illegal order.
This is not the first time Trump has endorsed the execution of a critic. Two years ago, he suggested that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a traitor who deserved to be executed. And he pardoned violent January 6 rioters, some of whom had chanted “Hang Mike Pence” while they attacked the US Capitol.
Trump has long been a purveyor of violent rhetoric, and he has been accused of stochastic terrorism—the demonization of a foe so that they might become targets of violence. In recent days, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who earned Trump’s wrath by pushing for the release of Epstein files held by the Justice Department, has bitterly complained that Trump branding her a “traitor” has led to death threats against her. No surprise, Trump brushed aside a question from a reporter about violent threats Greene has received: “I don’t think her life is in danger. I don’t think. Frankly, I don’t think anybody cares about her.”
Elevating and echoing an explicit call for killing senators and representatives is a new high—or low—for Trump. For years, he has gotten away with horrific conduct that exacerbates and encourages political division and that could fuel violence. His supporters don’t recoil, and Republicans rarely say boo. Noting that Trump “just called for Democratic members of Congress to be executed,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), posted, “If you’re a person of influence in this country and you haven’t picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a fucking side.”
Trump promoting a death threat should not be dismissed as just one more of his excesses. When a wannabe autocrat aligns himself with a call to execute political foes, it’s not just another Trump social media post. It’s another warning.
UPDATE: Slotkin responded to Trump’s death threat with her own video.
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