2025-12-10 23:03:18
The image was grotesque.
In March, a camera-ready Kristi Noem posed in front of a group of shirtless, shaved, tattooed men crammed inside a metal holding cell in a foreign prison. The photo-op (and video message) was taken during the Homeland Security secretary’s tour of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, where the Trump administration had sent more than 230 Venezuelan migrants on flimsy evidence. Noem’s performance at CECOT was a triumphant show of ruthlessness as well as a warning: If you’re an immigrant unlawfully present in the United States, you too could end up shipped off to another country and held in one of the world’s worst prisons—perhaps indefinitely.
The message is clear: No immigrant living in the United States is to feel safe or welcome. No one will be spared.
The administration’s apparent satisfaction in arranging the CECOT ordeal has been emblematic of the second Trump term’s ever-increasing callousness toward immigrants and willingness to treat the constraints of the law as mere suggestions. Last month, Human Rights Watch and the watchdog organization Cristosal documented evidence that the Venezuelans removed to El Salvador endured “torture” and “enforced disappearance.” (As we reported after their release, and confirmed by the report, men said that following Noem’s visit, they received more beatings and had their food taken away by the prison guards.)
That image of Noem and the saga of the Venezuelans the US government exiled to a notorious gulag—without a semblance of due process—should be seared into America’s collective memory. But in the months since it happened, and as those men are made to live with the trauma inflicted on them, I’ve wondered whether it will.
Displays of inhumanity were a normalized phenomenon in 2025. A peril of having punitive theater as a central tenet of governance is that, eventually, the shock factor and public outrage risk wearing out. The horror may never fully register. When there’s a barrage of previously-unbelievably-unconscionably-legally dubious acts and brutal policies, how does one begin to wrap their head around each uniquely reprehensible episode, let alone a year’s worth of anti-immigration cruelty?
Think of all you’ve seen this year. The same month as Noem’s video, a Tufts University student was descended on by masked men and sent to detention for the grand offense of co-writing an op-ed critical of Israel. An unknown number of people have been dragged out of cars, chased down streets, and forced to the ground during immigration raids. We’ve all watched the videos. But there are simply too many examples to keep track of; the recordings start blending into each other. The impact of individual stories starts to dilute in an overwhelming news cycle where everything is “unprecedented” and too horrific to contend with. We look away.
But the sheer volume does not stop Trump’s war on immigrants from raging on in full force. And it is vital to look at just how wide and encompassing this assault has been: This year, the White House routinely made the lives of immigrants—all immigrants—and their families in the United States hell.
This is an imperfect attempt to take stock of it.
As previously mentioned, the Trump administration disappeared hundreds of Venezuelan men to CECOT—a gulag that has elicited comparisons to a concentration camp—in brazen defiance of court orders. Noem admitted in a declaration filed last week in response to an ongoing inquiry by a federal judge in Washington, D.C. into possible criminal contempt that she made the decision to continue to fly the men to El Salvador despite a ruling blocking their transfer. (The Justice Department all but dared the judge to pursue a referral for prosecution.)
Then there is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The administration enabled ICE—now the most well-funded police force in the country—to snatch people up with little accountability and authorized the agency to make arrests at and near hospitals, churches, and courthouses. Masked agents began to show up at hearings and routine check-ins. The agency started recruiting so-called “Homeland Defenders” to go after immigrants for a $50,000 signing bonus. (The FBI recently issued a warning about instances of criminals impersonating ICE agents.) “Collateral arrests” of people who have lived in the United States for decades became common occurrences.
At the same time, Trump stripped immigrants of legal protections, making them newly deportable. The administration has taken away protected status from hundreds of thousands of people in what amounts to the largest de-legalization push in recent US history. They arrested, detained, and deported Dreamers—immigrants brought to the United States as children—despite valid protection from said deportation.
It goes on: Trump further gutted refugee resettlement, with the notable exception of South Africa’s white Afrikaners; banished immigrants to third countries and nations where they face potential harm (in flagrant violation of the international law principle of non-refoulement); purged the immigration courts and weaponized them as a deportation-first tool; tried to take away the citizenship of American-born children; dispatched a militarized border patrol and other federal agencies with camera crews to terrorize Democrat-led cities; and instituted a policy of mandatory detention designed to break people’s will to fight their cases. (One lawyer I talked to recently recounted a client telling him he would rather spend 10 years in prison in Venezuela than another 10 days in US immigration detention.)
Many of those measures made headlines and elicited outcry. (I’ve failed to list other events of note, I am sure.) But there are countless other ways immigrants across the United States are quietly bearing the brunt of an administration that—fighting a self-perceived battle for the survival and presevation of a blood-and-soil idea of America as a nation—demonizes entire communities and casts foreign-born people as an existential threat. (An exception? If you have $1 million lying around to purchase a “Gold Card” fast-track visa and path to residency to “unlock life in America.”)
Looking at the immigration system as a whole, virtually every part of it has been made harder and riskier, as if repurposed only to punish people for one of the most universal experiences there is: migration.
Every day, immigrants are being penalized for interacting with the legal immigration system. The Trump administration has gotten out of its way to make the citizenship civics test harder to pass while also increasing scrutiny through the expansion of a values-based “moral character” standard. They have eliminated the automatic extension of employment authorization for people renewing their work permits. Under the guise of restoring “integrity” to the system and making the country safer, they expanded the enforcement authorities of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of visas and other immigration benefits, empowering special agents to make arrests.
The State Department has revoked thousands of student visas and is tightening vetting for fact-checkers and workers in the disinformation field. Following the shooting of two National Guard members in D.C. by an Afghan immigrant, the administration halted all asylum decisions, shortened the duration of work permits for various groups from five years to 18 months, ordered the review of approved green cards for immigrants from “every country of concern,” and began canceling naturalization ceremonies. Unsurprisingly, a growing share of immigrants with legal status, and even naturalized US citizens, report worries about immigration enforcement.
The message is clear: No immigrant living in the United States is to feel safe or welcome. No one will be spared. Not a college freshman visiting family on Thanksgiving. Not even the mother of the White House press secretary’s nephew. “The distinction between legal and illegal immigration becomes meaningless when both can destroy a country at its foundation,” a spokesperson for USCIS said in a press release email that landed in my inbox in November.
Much of the current immigration policymaking—if this rampant clampdown and unleashing of brutalizing force can be called that—seems to be now distilled to a simple modus operandi: we do it because we can. Little does it matter if families are separated again or if US children with cancer end up being removed from the country. Any means fit for this end: to get as many people out as possible and stop others from coming.
Every disturbing news report about a wrongful deportation or military-style raid of an apartment building should come as a reminder that the US government is using its prosecutorial discretion—it is choosing—to normalize casual cruelty and overt racism. And it’s doing so ostensibly in the name of “protecting” the American people.
2025-12-10 20:30:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Pattie Gonia, the drag queen and environmentalist, arrived in San Francisco on Friday afternoon and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge with $1 million more than when she set out on her journey last week.
The diversity and inclusion advocate completed the 100-mile trek from Point Reyes national seashore to San Francisco in full drag with her voluminous red wig and smokey eye. The effort was part of a campaign she launched to raise $1 million for eight nonprofits that aim to expand access and make the outdoors a more “equitable place.”
“Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you can’t make a difference,” she wrote on social media after completing the journey. “When I started being Pattie, everyone told me I was crazy. When I told people I wanted to do this fundraiser, [they] laughed in my face.
“Seven years later and I hope I can be a little bit of proof to you that combining who you are and what you’re good at to fight for the change you want to see in the world works.”
Pattie Gonia has become one of the most visible drag queens in the US in recent years. In 2024, Donald Trump’s campaign used footage of her with Kamala Harris as part of an attack ad against the then vice-president. Earlier this year she helped organize a demonstration at Yosemite, where LGBTQ+ climbers hung a trans pride flag on El Capitan.
“We flew the Trans pride flag in Yosemite to make a statement: Trans people are natural and Trans people are loved,” she said in a statement at the time. “We are done being polite about Trans people’s existence. Call it a protest, call it a celebration—either way, it’s giving elevation to liberation.”
Recently, she playfully challenged the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to a pull-up competition in a video that contrasted footage of her lifting herself with ease with video of Hegseth appearing to struggle through the exercise.
For the last week, she was on a solo trek on the California coast, getting in drag daily and setting up camp each night, while filming videos documenting the journey. She is set to perform her final show of the year in San Francisco on Saturday, “That is, if I can make it in time,” she said. Video posted to social media on Friday evening showed her strutting across the Golden Gate Bridge and ending her journey with cake.
By Friday, a GoFundMe for the project had raised more than $1 million from almost 35,000 individual donations.
2025-12-10 19:00:00
Democrats’ resounding victories in the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races got most of the headlines, but the most dramatic results in last month’s elections were downballot. In Virginia, Democratic challengers flipped 13 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, to secure their largest majority in the chamber in four decades. New Jersey Democrats grew their margin in the assembly by five seats—winning their largest majority since Watergate. Coupled with the party’s string of upset victories and double-digit shifts in special elections last year, the results have some party leaders dreaming big.
How big? A new post-election analysis from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which supports Democratic candidates in statehouse races, argues that the current electoral climate presents the best chance in years for Democrats to consolidate power in blue states, flip battleground chambers, and loosen Republicans’ grip on power in solidly red states like South Carolina and Missouri.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power.”
By the group’s calculations, Democratic candidates over-performed the partisan leaning of their districts this fall by an average of 4.5 points—a shift that would put as many as 651 state legislative seats in play across the country in a midterm election year, and position the party for a bit of long-awaited payback.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” said DLCC president Heather Williams. While the November results have many Democrats talking enthusiastically about a repeat of the 2018 blue wave, Williams goes back further: “We are looking at the makings of an environment that looks more like 2010 in reverse.”
That year, powered by fallout from the Great Recession and the tea party wave, and assisted by tens of millions of dollars in spending down the stretch, Republicans picked up nearly 700 seats and flipped 22 state legislative chambers. Because those legislatures would go on to control the decennial redistricting process, Republicans were able to not just seize power, but hold onto it for a decade—or longer. The stakes for redistricting this time around are not as clear-cut, but still very much real. For the time being, thanks to Texas’ decision to redraw its maps at President Donald Trump’s request, and California’s own retaliatory effort, every legislative session is a potential redistricting session. In response to Republican efforts earlier this year, the DLCC pushed for Democrats to “go on offense” on redistricting in states they control.
“At the end of the day, it is state legislators who are drawing these maps,” Williams says. “This mid-cycle process has both put a spotlight on that, but it’s also sort of clarified the fact that the way that you prevent this from happening in the future—or the way that you get Democrats in this room to have this conversation—is you elect them first.”
When I last spoke with Williams, in 2024, the DLCC’s map looked quite a bit different. That year, facing the same headwinds that doomed Democrats at all levels, the organization went into the fall hoping to flip five legislative chambers but ultimately picked up none and—with the exception of an unsuccessful effort to break a Republican supermajority in Kansas—largely confined its efforts to presidential battleground states.
This time around, it’s aiming to compete in 41 chambers in 27 states. That includes efforts to break Republican supermajorities in both chambers of the Florida and Missouri legislatures; the Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio, and South Carolina houses; and the North Carolina senate (where Republicans have been able to override some of Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s vetoes). In November, Democrats already succeeded in breaking Republicans’ supermajority in the Mississippi Senate, after a court struck down the existing legislative maps for violating the Voting Rights Act. The goal, Williams says, is to get more state parties out of the “superminority” status and “into a place where you are at least in the negotiating room.”
“Democrats in the states lost a lot of ground in 2010 and in the couple of elections after that, and in that rebuild process, the map changed a lot,” Williams says. “What we are saying in this update to the target map—and frankly, our broader strategy—is that we must show up in these red states. When you think about the long term trajectory of Democrats and our success as a party, we need to recognize these moments of power, and these states where Republicans have been competing, and we need to show up for voters.”
But there are also a lot of chambers up for grabs. Part of what makes the map so encouraging for Democrats, Williams argues, is how thin the line currently is between conservative governance and Democratic rule.
“Flipping just 19 seats on this map could establish four new Democratic trifectas and six new Democratic majorities,” she said. “The path there is not complicated—it’s really crystal clear.”
The DLCC has its eyes on potential governing trifectas in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. And the group sees potential for new Democratic supermajorities in 10 chambers across eight states—both chambers of the legislature in Colorado and Vermont; the lower levels of the legislature in Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington; and the senate in New York; Oregon; and Washington.
In at least one way, though, this will be nothing like the tea party wave. This year, the DLCC is aiming to spend $50 million on its national effort in 2026—which the group is billing as the its largest-ever single-year sum. When Republicans swept the table in 2010, the DLCC spent just $10 million.
2025-12-10 19:00:00
The second Trump administration has made tearing down parts of the federal government a priority. And some of those efforts have been literal. In October, President Donald Trump ordered the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for the construction of a massive 90,000-square-foot ballroom. He’s also given the White House a gilded makeover, bulldozed the famed Rose Garden, and even has plans for a so-called “Arc de Trump” that mirrors France’s Arc de Triomphe.
So what’s behind all of this? Art historian Erin Thompson—author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments—says that whether it’s Romans repurposing idols of leaders who had fallen out of favor or the glorification of Civil War officers in the American South, monuments and public aesthetics aren’t just about the past. They’re about symbolizing power today.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.“The aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present,” Thompson says. “It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not.”On this week’s More To The Story, Thompson sits down with host Al Letson to discuss why Trump has decked out the White House in gold (so much gold), the rise and recent fall of Confederate monuments, and whether she thinks the Arc de Trump will ever get built.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
Al Letson: What is an art crime professor?
Erin Thompson: Well, someone who’s gone to way too much school. I have a PhD in art history, and was finishing that up and thought, “Oh, I’m never going to get a job as an art historian. I should go to law school,” which I did, and ended up back in academia studying all of the intersections between art and crime. So I studied museum security, forgery, fraud, repatriations of stolen artwork. I could teach you how to steal a masterpiece, but then I would have to catch you.
So is it fair to say that The Thomas Crown Affair is one of your favorite movies?
No. Least favorite, opposite-
Really?
… because they make it seem like it’s a big deal to steal things from a museum, but it’s really, really easy to steal things from museums, as the Louvre heist just proved.
I was just about to say, I think the thieves at the Louvre would agree with you.
It’s hard to get away with stealing things from museums, which is why they got arrested immediately.
So how did you move from studying museum pieces and art crime into monuments?
Well, so my PhD is in ancient Greek and Roman arts, and when monuments began being protested in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, people were commenting online, “Civilized people don’t take down monuments. This is horrible.” And I was thinking, “Well, studying the ancient world, everything that I study has been at one point torn down and thrown into a pit and then buried for thousands of years.” Actually, as humans, this is what we do. We make monuments and then we tear them down as soon as we decide we want to honor somebody else. So I thought I could maybe add some perspective. And then having my skills in researching fraud, I started to realize that so many of the most controversial monuments in the U.S. were essentially fundraising scams where a bunch of money was embezzled from people who wanted to support racism, essentially, by putting up giant monuments to white supremacy. So I thought, maybe that’s some interesting information for our current debates.
They got got, as they should.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
As somebody who grew up in the South, I would just say as a young Black man growing up in the shadow of these monuments, watching them go down felt like finally, finally this country was recognizing me in some small way. And I was completely unsurprised at the uproar from a lot of people who wanted to keep these monuments up. But when you dig into why these monuments were placed down, a lot of them were done just … Especially when we’re talking about Civil War monuments in the South and in other places, they were primarily put there to silence or to intimidate the Black population in a said area.
Yeah, I call them victory monuments. They’re not about the defeat of the Confederates, they’re about the victory of Jim Crow and other means of reclaiming political and economic power for the white population of the South.
Yeah. And so talk to me a little bit about the monuments themselves and how a lot of those were scams. I had never heard of that before.
So for example, just outside of Atlanta in Stone Mountain, Georgia is the world’s largest Confederate monument, a gigantic carving into the side of a cliff of Lee and Jackson and Jefferson Davis. And that was launched in 1914 by a sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, working with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The Klan enthusiastically embraced the project. They stacked the board. They took a bunch of the donations. Essentially, no progress was made for years and years and years until the 1950s when as a sign of resistance to Brown v. Board, the state of Georgia took over the monument and finally finished it. So it wasn’t finished until the 1970s. And to me, the makers said it should be a shrine to the South. It’s more like a shrine to a scam.
The Klan leaders who led the project even fired Borglum at a certain point because they thought he was taking too much money. But he landed on his feet because he persuaded some Dakota businessmen to sponsor him to carve what turned into Mount Rushmore. So he defected from glorifying the Confederacy to carve a monument to the Union. So he didn’t really care about the glory of the Confederacy, he just wanted to make some money.
So in the United States, how have monuments historically been funded?
Well, the American government, both state and federal has always been a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to putting up public art. So most monuments that we see were actually privately fundraised, planned, and then donated to local governments. So they’re not really public art. They were put up by small groups for reasons. If you look, for example, at the Confederate monument that used to be in Birmingham, Alabama, this is a little weird that Birmingham had a Confederate monument in the first place because they were founded as a city well after the close of the Civil War. And the monument went up in two parts, both of which were in response to interracial unionization efforts. So the leaders, the owners and managers of the mines, when the miners were threatening to strike said, “No, no, no, no, no, no. We need to remind our white workers that they have to keep maintaining the segregation that their fathers or grandfathers fought for, so let’s put up this Civil War Monument.”
So monuments don’t tell you very detailed versions of history, but also even thinking about history is kind of leading you on the wrong track when you look at, well, who is actually paying for these monuments top people put up and what did they actually want from them?
So tell me, just pulling back a little bit, what’s the relationship between monuments and society?
Monuments are our visions of the future. We put up a monument when we want people to aspire to that condition. We put up monuments to honor people to inspire people to follow their examples. So that sounds good and cheerful, right? It’s nothing wrong with having models and aspirations, but you have to think about, well, monuments are expensive. So who has the money to pay for them? Who has the political power to put them in place permanently? And you’ll often see that monuments are used to try and shape a community into a different form than it currently has. I live in New York City, for example, and almost all of the monuments put up until the last few decades are of white men. And what kind of message does that send to this incredibly diverse community of who deserves honor?
And you said earlier that throughout time we have erected monuments and taken them down. Can you talk that cycle through with me?
Yeah. Well, take the Romans, for example. Roman emperors would win a victory at war and put up a big victory monument, a triumphal arch or portraits of themselves. And then after the emperor died, the Senate would vote and decide, was this a good one or a bad one? Do we want to decide officially that they have become a deity and are to be honored forever, or do we want to forget their memory? And it was about a third, a third, a third. A third was no vote, a third were deities, a third were their memories were subjected to what we call damnatio memoriae. And if that happened to you, they would chisel the face off your statues and carve on your successor. The Romans were thrifty that way. They reused sculptures-
Wow. So they recycled.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wow.
Or they would break things up or melt it down and make it into a new statue. So this was a pretty common strategy of, just like we do it in a much more peaceable form, when a new president is elected, you take down the photo of the current president from the post office and put up the successor, etc, etc. So in the ancient world they had a more intense version of this, but you can think about the tearing down of statues of Saddam after his fall or the removal of statues of Lenin across the Soviet satellite states. This is something that we do when there are changes in power, and usually we don’t notice it because it’s more peaceful. There’s an official removal of the signs of the previous regime and a substitution with the others.
So what was special and different about the summer of 2020 was the change came from below. It was unofficial. We mostly saw people not tearing down monuments with their bare hands, that’s obviously hard to do, but modifying monuments by adding paints, signage, projections, etc.
And that’s exactly like what you looked at in Smashing Statues is the shift that, to me, in a lot of ways had been a long time coming. There had been movements here and there that were kind of under the radar for most people. But then after George Floyd, it’s like it got an injection of adrenaline, and suddenly all over the country you start seeing this stuff happening.
Yeah, and I think people lost patience. What wasn’t obvious to a lot of observers was that changing a monument or even questioning a monument is illegal in most of the U.S., or there’s just no process to do so. So I interviewed for the book Mike Forcia, an indigenous activist in Minnesota, and he had been trying for his entire adult life to get the state legislator to ask why is there a statue of Columbus in one of the cities with the largest concentrations of an urban indigenous population in the world? And all of his petitions were just thrown away. So he eventually had to commit civil disobedience, I would describe it, by pulling down the statue. There’s no other way to have that conversation.
Let me ask you, just to go back a little bit, how do these monuments shape and perceive history? Because you saying that this is what we’ve always done and the Romans would switch out faces and statues, that’s totally new to me. And so as somebody who grew up with Confederate statues around or Confederate names always around, I think it’s shaped the way I view the world. And also as they were coming down, not knowing that in the long arc of history that this is what we always do, it challenged the perceptions, I think of a lot of people.
Monuments are inherently simple. You can’t tell a full historical story in a couple figures in bronze. So I think they communicate very simple messages of this is the type of person that we honor. And they speak directly to our lizard brain, the part of us that sees something, “Oh, something big and shiny and higher than me is something worthy of respect.” So you can’t tell them a nuanced story in a monument, and that is used as a strength. I also think it’s a strength that they become boring. They fade into the background of our lived landscape, and then we don’t question their messages if we just think of the monument as something, oh, we’re going to tell each other, “Meet at the foot of this guy for our ultimate Frisbee game,” or something. So it is these moments of disruption that let us think, “This is supposed to stand for who we are as a people. Do we really want that guy up on the horse telling us who we are?”
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and these statues and monuments are coming down or they’re being defaced, my little sister lives in Richmond, Virginia and I went to visit her. And I’ve been to Richmond several times. And I think I’d seen pictures of the monuments in Richmond being graffiti on them, but I had not seen them in real life up close. And it was kind of stunning to me. Also, what was stunning about it, because in Richmond, if you’ve never been to Richmond, Richmond has like this … I don’t know what street it is, but this long row-
Monument Avenue.
Monument Avenue, thank you. Has Monument Avenue with all of these different monuments. After George Floyd, they were spray painted, and people were gathering around these monuments in a way that I’d never seen before.
I think those monuments went up to create a certain type of community. Monument Avenue was designed as a wealthy neighborhood, and how do you prevent the quote, unquote, “wrong type of people” from moving into your nice neighborhood? Well, put up some nice monuments celebrating Civil War generals. So it’s not-
You tell them they’re not welcome.
Yeah, exactly. So it’s a community created by exclusion, is what these monuments were put up for. And we actually see that again and again. In Charlottesville as well, the sculpture of Robert E. Lee that was recently melted down was put up to mark the exclusion of people from a neighborhood that had formerly been a neighborhood of Black housing and businesses, which they were condemned by eminent domain and turned into a cultural and park space that was intended to be whites only in the 1920s. So monuments are a powerful course for creating community. But you’re absolutely right that the removal can be a powerful force for creating community as well. And what saddens me is if you go to Richmond today, some of the bases of those monuments are still there. The Civil War monuments have been removed from Monument Avenue, but all of the graffiti has been scrubbed off. There’s no more people gathering there. It looks just like a traffic median again. And that’s true of almost everywhere in the U.S. The authorities are always a bit nervous about this type of spontaneous use of public space, I would say.
Yeah. Listeners to this podcast have heard me say this 101 times because it’s my thing, but I just believe that America is a pendulum, that it swings hard one way and then it comes right back and swings the other way. Which means that in the long-term, America sees progress in inches, but the swings are where you can see exactly where the country is right now. And so I think if we look at what happened after George Floyd died, that was a hard swing the other way. I’m curious if what we see right now coming from the Trump administration, and not just like in military, he’s reverting the names or changing the names of military bases back to people whose names have been taken off these military bases, all of that type of stuff, but also he’s planning to put an Arc de Trump in D.C., the East Wing Ballroom, all of that stuff, do you feel like that is the opposite swing of what we saw during George Floyd’s death?
Oh, yeah. And even literally, recently the Trump administration said that they were going to reverse removal of statues. So they re-erected a Confederate general statute in D.C., and they’ve said that they’re going to put up the Arlington Confederate Monument, which would cost millions and millions and millions of dollars to put up. So we will see if that actually happens. But just declaring that you’re going to do it is enough of a propaganda victory, I think, in this situation.
Right.
It might seem silly or not worthy of attention to look into the Trump administration’s aesthetic decisions, all of the gold ornamentations smeared all over the Oval Office and ballrooms and Arc de Trumps, and etc, but the aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present. It’s a way to rally people’s energies. It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not. I think he hasn’t really changed Washington in the way that he’s told his base he’s going to change. The elite are still in control of political power and wealth, but he is literally changing the White House by tearing part of it down. And you can channel people’s attention into rooting for that type of change instead of actual change.
And the style choices that he’s making are very congruent with his political message, in that he’s appealing to a vision of the past, which is greater than the present. But in both his political message and his aesthetic style, this vision of the past, you can’t pinpoint it. It’s not an actual time. It’s a fuzzy, hand-wavy, things were prettier and nicer than. And so you can’t fact-check that type of vision. You can’t see if we’ve actually gotten closer to it. And so putting up a gilded tchotchke counts as progress towards that, and he can claim the credit, which he’s happy to do.
Yeah. And I think that’s intentional, because if you can’t land on the specific time period, you can’t be held accountable for how that time period played out for the disenfranchised.
Or for the powerful of that time period.
Right. Right, exactly.
Appealing to making the White House look like Versailles. We all know what happened to the French kings, but apparently we’re not paying much attention. And there’s another current right tendency to appeal to the glory of Caesar. Everybody wants to be like Julius Caesar when that’s really not a good life choice, if you want to end up like him.
I think the other thing when I think about Trump’s aesthetic, so I grew up in the South but I am originally from New Jersey, and I remember Trump when I was really young, primarily because my dad was from Pleasantville, New Jersey, which is right outside of Atlantic City. And so there were conversations that I didn’t understand as a kid, and Trump was a part of those because he had his casinos and all of that type of stuff. And I just remember being a little kid and seeing a commercial for, I guess either it was Trump’s properties or it was a casino or whatever. And I just remember looking at it on the TV and seeing gold everywhere. That was his thing, gold. And the older I get, the more I realize that the way Trump sees gold and all the fittings that he has around, really is like him surrounding himself what he perceives of as wealth, and what people who don’t have wealth perceive of as wealth.
But the actual uber-rich, usually from what I’ve seen, do not decorate their houses in all gold, do not flaunt. Their wealth is present but quiet, whereas Trump’s wealth is present but loud. And that speaks to a lot of people who do not have the wealth. And in a sense, him putting gold around the White House is a secret, in my opinion, aspirational message to poor folks who do not have that, “One day you can have.” I don’t know, it’s just like a theory that I’ve been cooking in my head since I was a little kid.
I think absolutely. We have the proverb, “All that glitters is not gold” because people keep needing to be reminded. And yeah, again, in our primitive lizard brains, we think shiny equals good and I want that, and we don’t look below the surface. And I think that Trump’s focus on glitzing up the White House, on making these new constructions now in his second term is not accidental, because you often see populist leaders focusing on aesthetic projects towards the end of their political life. In Hitler’s last days in the bunker, he was still pouring over models for a museum that he was building in his hometown of Linz, in which he was planning to put all of the masterpieces seized from victims of the Holocaust from other museums across Europe. It was going to have 22 miles of galleries, all stuffed full of the artistic wealth of the world.
And I think there’s a comfort in this idea. Like, if I make something spectacular and beautiful enough, all of the cruelty that went into making it will be justified. I will be forgiven. So when I’m feeling depressed about the world, I think maybe this focus on the gold now is such an obsession because he recognizes that he’s on his way out.
What does it mean to a society that some of the tech leaders are now turning their attention towards building statues? You were just talking about how leaders when they’re beginning their twilight are … I guess they’re thinking about their legacy, and so they’re putting up these monuments and doing other things. But what does it mean for us when we have these tech bros that are doing it now?
Well, we’ve always seen this. Think about the Pantheon in Rome, that big circular temple. Across the front of it, you can still see the shapes of the letters that it used to have that was erected not by an emperor, but by a wealthy Roman who was doing so in service of the imperial cause. So big donors making big, splashy public projects have always been realizing that this is a good way to get in with the regime to shape things, to get loyalty from the public to their point of view as well. So today you look at people’s reactions to Elon Musk is very similar, I think to what you were talking about, the idea of, “I can also have this splashy level of wealth maybe someday, so I will follow somebody who I could see as a model of getting wealth, rather than someone who is actually going to do anything that’s actually good for me.”
Do you think that the Arc de Trump will ever be built?
That’s the thing about these Trumpian aesthetic actions, you can just put out the promise, you can release a picture of the renderings and claim victory, even though you haven’t actually done anything. I very much doubt that this arch is going to go up for a huge variety of reasons, but if it would go up, I don’t understand how it can be justified to spend that much money. When on the one hand you’re saying we are trying to cut government expenditure, there’s no justification for having tens of millions probably going on an arch to yourself.
2025-12-10 05:49:48
Three South Carolina voters with disabilities, represented by the NAACP, filed a lawsuit on Friday against the state’s election commission and Republican attorney general Alan Wilson to challenge rules that limit how disabled voters can receive voting assistance, and who is eligible.
South Carolina only allows voters “who are unable to read or write or who are physically unable or incapacitated from preparing a ballot” to receive ballot assistance, limiting that assistance to an immediate family member or “authorized representative”—and imposes felony penalties on any individual who helps more than five voters by either requesting or returning an absentee ballot.
The three voters challenging the law currently live in nursing homes, where many residents rely on staff members they trust to help them vote.
They contend that South Carolina’s draconian voting restrictions violate Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, which commits to protecting the right for “any voter who requires assistance to vote by reason of blindness, disability, or inability to read or write” to receive such assistance from a person they choose.
The Voting Rights Act has come under consistent attack by GOP-governed states, particularly in the wake of Republican upset losses and near-losses; those attacks have largely been upheld by the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, which has gutted some of the act’s crucial provisions and opened the door for an unprecedented wave of anti-voter state statutes.
The new suit calls for the court to permanently block South Carolina from enforcing these limits and order the state’s election commission to oversee the revision of voter guidance to comply with the VRA.
The South Carolina attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment; the state’s election commission said that it does not comment “on active legal matters.”
As my colleague Julia Métraux wrote last year, polling stations are failing disabled and chronically ill voters in both Democratic- and Republican-leaning areas: “What may be accessible to some disabled people may not be for others. That’s why it’s crucial to move towards more accessible options.”
2025-12-10 05:40:29
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in a case that could unravel the final remaining limits on the ultra-rich writing unlimited checks to their preferred federal candidates, opening the door even wider to political corruption. The liberal justices were clearly opposed to further weakening campaign finance rules, a path long-favored by the court’s Republican wing and that the Democratic-appointed judges have been dragged down kicking and screaming. Today’s oral arguments were no exception. If the court’s majority is going to make it even easier for the Elon Musks of the world to buy elections and reap the rewards, the dissenters will at least call it out.
Every few years, the GOP majority pushes us closer and closer to a system of election by oligarchs.
The Federal Election Campaign Act limits how much money individuals can give to federal candidates in hopes of limiting quid pro quo corruption—deals like, for example, I give you a million dollars and you give me a subsidy. Likewise, FECA limits the amount that parties can spend in coordination with a candidate, an acknowledgement that unlimited coordinated spending would effectively greenlight large donations to the candidate from a single source. For this reason—despite the court’s steady erosion of campaign finance law—for now unlimited donations must go to vehicles like super PACs, which are technically barred from coordinating with candidates, while donations to parties and candidates remain subject to Congressionally-set limits.
In 2022, the Republican Party arms that work to elect Senate and House members, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, alongside then-Senate candidate JD Vance and another Ohio Republican candidate, challenged these coordinated spending limits as a violation of the party’s First Amendment free speech rights.
The case is a partisan brawl. The Republican litigants are opposed by Democratic committees seeking to keep the limits in place. Republicans have recently relied more heavily on the unlimited spending of super PACs; a decision in their favor would allow the party to bring that massive but uncoordinated super PAC spending in-house and let donors write large (but still limited) checks to the parties to spend in open coordination with GOP candidates.
Elon Musk, for example, used his own PAC in 2024 to funnel upwards of $300 million to Republican candidates, mostly Donald Trump. In return, he got to spend months dismantling the federal government, investigations against his companies were dropped, and new contracts were awarded. If Republicans win the case, next time, Musk could donate some of that directly to the GOP to spend in direct consultation with Musk’s preferred candidates.
During oral arguments, attorney Noel Francisco, a former solicitor general during Trump’s first term, argued on behalf of the Republicans that eliminating the coordination limits would not increase the actuality or appearance of quid pro quo corruption, claiming no such corruption has ever occurred. Justice Sonia Sotomayor indignantly schooled him on the relevant history.
“You keep saying there’s no evidence of this kind of coordination resulting in a quid pro quo or the appearance thereof,” Sotomayor told Francisco. “But the whole campaign finance law is based on just such evidence… The dairy industry channeled millions of dollars to President Nixon through the Republican Party and its committees. The industry landed a $100 million subsidy from President Nixon in return. Was there a quid pro quo? There certainly was an appearance of quid pro quo. That’s what started the entire campaign finance reform legislation.”
“If there’s not direct evidence, it’s because our umbrella is working,” Sotomayor continued, referring to a famous dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in which she analogized striking down a law that works to block bad behavior to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
A few minutes later, Sotomayor noted the gobs of money that Trump and President Joe Biden both raised in 2024 through committees jointly run with the parties. When Francisco responded that this enormous fundraising didn’t lead to any—or even the appearance of—quid pro quo corruption, Sotomayor brought up an obvious rejoinder from that election: Musk.
The best argument the Republicans’ lawyer had was to pretend he didn’t understand the question.
“You mean to suggest the fact that one major donor to the current president, the most major donor to the current president, got a very lucrative job immediately upon election from the new administration does not give the appearance with pro quo?” she pressed.
Francisco feigned ignorance. “Your Honor, I’m not 100 percent sure about the example that you’re looking at, but if I am familiar, if I think I know what you’re talking about, I have a hard time thinking that his salary that he drew from the federal government was an effective quid pro quo bribery,” Francisco said with a chuckle. “Maybe not the salary, but certainly the lucrative contracts,” Sotomayor responded.
It was a striking moment. It appeared that the best argument that a talented lawyer had in the face of clear evidence of corruption was to pretend he didn’t understand the question. This refusal to see what is apparent will be likely resurface if the conservative justices decide to jettison yet more restrictions on billionaires influencing elections—even as it stares them in the face.
While the case was technically over the First Amendment and the definition of speech, there was very little talk about that. Instead, several GOP appointees voiced concerns that political parties have been weakened thanks to the rise of super PACs, and that allowing unlimited coordinated spending by parties would restore the parties’ power by encouraging donors to send their money there. Francisco embraced the argument. But it is obvious why this reasoning was maddening to the liberals.
First, that’s not a First Amendment determination, but a policy preference, and pushing one through is not what the court is supposed to do—though that isn’t likely to stop the GOP-appointed majority. Second, the only reason super PACs have so much money is that the Supreme Court lifted outside contribution limits, first in 2010’s Citizens United and, again, in a 2014 case called McCutcheon. Francisco’s argument that the court needs to unravel yet more of Congress’ rules because its meddling has already messed things up is not a strong one. It’s a bait and switch: Now that you gave us what we wanted, you actually have to give us more of what we want.
Indeed, Francisco acknowledged that if his GOP clients win and the limits are lifted, they will soon be back before the court asking for even more. And this time, the logic of any restrictions on campaign donations will be in Constitutional jeopardy.
Attorney Roman Martinez, whom the court appointed to defend the limits because the Trump administration declined to do so, called out that risk, and how this case would cascade into a total erosion of campaign finance law. “This wolf comes as a wolf,” he said, quoting a 1988 dissent by the late Antonin Scalia that is beloved by conservatives.
Francisco, Martinez said, “has basically told you that they’re going to keep litigating to knock down every single one of the restrictions, and that includes the limits on donors to candidates directly.” Martinez continued to lay out this dark future: “It’s going to leave the donor with the ability to give infinite money to the party… and then the party can make unlimited coordinated expenditures—which, by the way, aren’t just about speech. It’s paying the electric bill, it’s paying the florist bill, it’s paying the pizza bill. It’s any expense that the campaign wants.”
The Republican majority has a history of aiding the GOP, and this case may become just the next example. But several of the conservative justices were mostly mum on Tuesday, leaving the outcome a little unclear. It’s possible the court could, to avoid the appearance of another win for Republicans ahead of the midterms, dismiss the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing. But if the court continues as it has, both in its support for the GOP and its ultra-wealthy benefactors, then they will likely make it easier for the two to work together.
We started down this road with Citizens United, and every few years since, the court’s GOP majority has pushed us closer and closer to a system of election by oligarchs. The rich do not spend billions of dollars on elections out of the goodness of their hearts, but because presidents and representatives will return the favor. We’ve already seen it happen this year. We’re getting pretty close to where this road ends. Whether or not this case takes us another mile toward an oligarchic free-for-all, we’re already in the bad place.
