Mother JonesModify

2025-12-31 06:20:17

You may have heard of the biggest story on CBS News’ 60 Minutes this year. It was a report that the show never aired. The network’s editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, pulled the segment, about what happened to migrants deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, less than 48 hours before it was supposed to air.

Now, editors-in-chief often, annoyingly, ask for changes in stories. I was one, and I did it. But what no editor in her right mind will do is yank a piece at the last minute, after it has been reported, vetted, fact-checked, lawyered, greenlit for publication, and promoted for several days. For if you do that, the issue will no longer be the reporting. The issue will be your management. (You will also, because of the Streisand Effect, draw much more attention to the story than it otherwise would have gotten. The yanked 60 Minutes segment quickly became available in a million places on the internet, including a transcript here.)

There are only two ways for people to read a decision like this. One: The editor believes her team is so incompetent, they were about to air a story that would do irreparable harm. Two: The editor is willing to throw her team under the bus to curry favor with the powers that be.

In CBS News’ case, we might have a rare instance where both are true: The editor, who has been hired to curry favor with the powers that be, also truly believes that her team is incompetent.

Five days into the debacle, Weiss wrote a memo to staff to explain why she had yanked the story. It lectures her colleagues about basic journalistic fairness: In order to gain viewers’ trust, she says, journalists need to “work hard.” (Why, yes.) “Sometimes that means doing more legwork…And sometimes it means holding a piece about an important subject to make sure it is comprehensive and fair.”

How to ensure that a story is “comprehensive and fair”? In another memo, Weiss elaborated that the CECOT story didn’t try hard enough to show the “genuine debate” about the legality of the deportations. Producers had already requested comment from the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the White House, to no avail. But, Weiss wrote, they needed to ask again. “I tracked down cell numbers for [border czar Tom] Homan and [Stephen] Miller and sent those along.”

Weiss is right, of course, that journalists should work hard to capture “genuine debate.” But the CECOT segment was not about the legal issues around deporting people to the prison. It was about what happened to them once they got there: food deprivation, stress positions, isolation. Torture.

Was Weiss saying that there is a “genuine debate” about whether these things happened? How would Stephen Miller’s view help us assess that?

If it’s hard to follow the journalistic logic here, it makes sense to look at another kind—the brutal logic of corporate media in Trump’s America. And the best way to understand that one is a quick timeline.

October 31, 2024: Five days before the election, Donald Trump files a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS over its routine editing of an interview with Kamala Harris.

January 22, 2025: Two days after Trump takes office, the Federal Communications Commission—which has the power to approve or deny the sale of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to billionaire father-and-son team Larry and David Ellison—opens its own investigation of the Harris interview.

April 21, 2025: The longtime head of 60 Minutes resigns, saying he has “lost independence” from corporate.

July 2, 2025: Paramount settles Trump’s lawsuit with a $16 million payment.

July 11, 2025: News leaks that David Ellison has been talking with Weiss about acquiring her startup, The Free Press, and giving her a leadership role at CBS if he buys Paramount.

July 24, 2025: FCC approves Paramount sale to Ellison.

October 6, 2025: Weiss installed as CBS News’ editor-in-chief.

October 16, 2025: Claudia Milne, CBS’s head of standards and practices—the executive whose job it is to make sure the newsroom abides by its legal and ethical rules—resigns.

December 8, 2025: David Ellison launches a hostile bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which also owns CNN. The sale would require approval from the FCC. Ellison reportedly has told the Trump administration that he would make sweeping changes at CNN if the sale goes through.

December 16, 2025: Trump lashes out at Ellison and CBS, saying they have “treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover’ than they have ever treated me before.” He specifically calls out 60 Minutes.

December 18, 2025: Weiss screens the 60 Minutes segment about CECOT and, according to producers, gives some comments, which are integrated into the script. Newsroom leadership greenlights the segment for broadcast.

December 19, 2025: Around midnight, Weiss lets the producers know that she has more concerns. Running the story as is, she says, would be “doing our viewers a disservice.”

December 21, 2025: 60 Minutes airs without the CECOT segment.

Bottom line: Weiss was plucked from running a small, conservative-leaning newsroom and installed atop CBS when the network’s owner, David Ellison, was currying favor with the Trump administration. Then, right as Ellison needed Trump regulatory approval to merge, she yanked a story that the administration was bound to have complaints about.

Maybe someday a revised CECOT piece will air (to, probably, a smaller audience than the millions who have watched the leaked version online), perhaps with some on-camera comment from Stephen Miller about how “third world” immigrants deserve what they get. But whatever we learn from the story at that point won’t tell us as much as what we’ve already learned.

In authoritarian regimes, you sometimes find independent reporting and public expressions of dissent. Even in the old Soviet Union, they let some of that slide. But “letting it slide” is the point. You are meant to know that what you are allowed to see has been approved by the people in charge.

So too, now, with CBS News. There are still great journalists working there, and great stories being published. But now we know that these stories will only be seen when the bosses allow it. And not all those bosses are working at CBS News.

If I were not part of a nonprofit, reader-supported newsroom, that melancholy note might be the one to end on. But luckily, because I work for Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting, I get to say one more thing: We—you, me, millions of other Americans—don’t have to settle for this. We can have news that isn’t in thrall to billionaires, administration water-carriers, or corporate honchos. Mother Jones is an example of how journalism can stay independent and free even, and especially, now.

We run on donations from readers who trust us to dig up the truth and report it without fear. And right now, we are pushing up against a big end-of-year deadline. A lot of the support that determines whether our newsroom can go full bore next year comes in during the month of December. So if you can see your way clear to pitching in, again or for the first time, thank you so much.

2025-12-31 02:35:02

On Tuesday, the Israeli government announced that it would suspend the aid work of several humanitarian organizations that provide lifesaving aid to Palestinians in Gaza living through what Amnesty International and other groups labeled as a genocide.

Israel has claimed that the organizations failed to meet new vetting guidelines. However, as the Associated Press reported, some of the affected organizations have argued that Israel’s rules are arbitrary and could endanger people working for the non-governmental organizations.

The suspensions affect 37 organizations, including Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, Humanity & Inclusion, the International Rescue Committee, and Action Aid. In addition to working to meet the healthcare and other needs of Palestinians, many of these organizations and those involved in them have been vocal about the horrible conditions Palestinians have endured, including in interviews with Mother Jones. A Humanity & Inclusion employee told Sophie Hurwitz and me in 2024 that “one of the saddest things we hear on a regular basis” is that some children who are now amputees “think that their legs may grow again.”

Following the announcement, foreign ministers of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom released a joint statement condemning this decision.

“Deregistration could result in the forced closure of [non-governmental organizations’] operations within 60 days in Gaza and the West Bank. This would have a severe impact on access to essential services, including healthcare,” they wrote. “Any attempt to stem their ability to operate is unacceptable. Without them, it will be impossible to meet all urgent needs at the scale required.”

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières said in a statement to Mother Jones that while they have not gotten any official decision about their ongoing registration applications, if they are prevented from providing services, the impact will be devastating for Palestinians. “In Gaza, MSF supports around 20 percent of all hospital beds and supports the delivery of one in three babies,” said a spokesperson.

H&I told Mother Jones that its registration to operate in Palestine will be suspended, effectively tomorrow. “This decision comes amid an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, with massive and urgent needs among the civilian population, particularly in Gaza,” said an H&I spokesperson. “[H&I] is currently consulting with other affected humanitarian organizations to analyze the implications of this decision and determine the appropriate next steps.

While a ceasefire started on paper at the beginning of October that involved Hamas returning the remaining live hostages and bodies of the deceased to Israel, Palestinians in Gaza have still faced grim conditions. As of December 9, Palestinian officials have reported that 360 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the ceasefire.

This past October, the International Rescue Committee emphasized the importance of continuing aid into Gaza, with IRC CEO and President David Miliband saying that “with 55,000 Palestinian children suffering from acute malnutrition and 90 percent of the population displaced, what is needed now is a dramatic surge in the amount of aid going into Gaza.”

To top it all off, there has been intense rain and flooding in Gaza, displacing Palestinians living in tents who were already displaced from their homes.

2025-12-31 01:23:22

More artists have canceled their performances at the Kennedy Center after its Trump-acolyte-dominated board’s recent vote to add the president’s name to the performing arts center earlier this month. 

The latest includes The Cookers, a jazz ensemble, which called off their New Year’s Eve show on Monday. 

The band did not explicitly mention the name change, but in a statement wrote, “Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice. Some of us have been making this music for many decades, and that history still shapes us.”

“We are not turning away from our audience, and do want to make sure that when we do return to the bandstand, the room is able to celebrate the full presence of the music and everyone in it,” they continued. “We remain committed to playing music that reaches across divisions rather than deepening them.”

The group’s drummer, Billy Hart, told the New York Times that the Kennedy Center’s renaming “evidently” played a role in the decision. The move follows Chuck Redd’s decision to drop out of a Christmas Eve concert, prompting Richard Grenell, the center’s interim president and former acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, to threaten a $1 million lawsuit against Redd over what Grenell blasted as a “political stunt.” Other artists to cancel upcoming events include folk singer Kristy Lee and Doug Varone and Dancers, a dance company based in New York City.

The center’s board, most of whom were handpicked by Trump, voted earlier this month to rename the Kennedy Center to “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” The decision has proved deeply unpopular, with one poll of more than 1,500 US adults conducted from December 20–22 by the Economist and YouGov finding only 18 percent approved. It has since sparked legal concerns, with many pointing to President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of a law that designated the arts institution as a “living memorial” to the late President Kennedy. Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio member of the center’s board, has since filed a lawsuit against Trump, claiming that renaming required an act of Congress. 

In a social media post, Doug Varone and Dancers said that though they had opposed Trump’s move to fire board members who didn’t align with the president’s views in February, they decided to move ahead with an April 2026 performance to honor the “dance audiences in DC.”

“However, with the latest act of Donald J. Trump renaming the Center after himself, we can no longer permit ourselves nor ask our audiences to step inside this once great institution,” the dance company wrote on Monday. “The Kennedy Center was named in honor of our 35th President, who fervently believed that the arts were the beating heart of our nation, as well as an integral part of international diplomacy.”

“The artists who are now canceling shows were booked by the previous far left leadership,” Grenell wrote in a lengthy rant on X posted on Monday. “Boycotting the Arts to show you support the Arts is a form of derangement syndrome.” 

2025-12-30 20:30:00

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.

In early April, as the planet’s richest man chainsawed apart the livelihoods of thousands of hard-working Americans, I was back in Princeton, New Jersey, where I once attended high school, to visit my dad and cover the local “Hands Off” protest against President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions.

Michael Lewis was speaking at the university that week, along with Dave Eggers and journalist Casey Cep, to promote a new book titled, Who Is Government? Lewis had recruited these and other authors to profile unsung heroes toiling behind the scenes in the civil service. These were talented, selfless, innovative, people whom nobody ever would have heard of, but who had nonetheless done incredible things on behalf of the public—improving services, saving money and lives, and generally making America greater.

So we went to the event. Lewis, colorful as always, set about telling the story of his main character, when all of a sudden, it struck me: I know these people!

His protagonist had grown up in Princeton and I’d been to his house many dozens of times. Christopher Mark was the eldest brother of a kid I hung out with regularly. My friends and I used to sit around in their living room, listening to music, smoking pot, and pilfering his dad’s liquor. I don’t think I ever met Chris, and certainly never knew he’d ended up working for the federal government, where his out-of-the-box thinking led to a way of reducing mine cave-ins that has saved countless lives in the United States and around the world.

We rarely hear these stories, in part because they get drowned out by the small-government, anti-labor rhetoric of the right. Instead, when we think about civil servants, we often think about inefficiency, DC gridlock, maybe some imagined IRS auditor—or the tired DMV clerk who barely acknowledged our presence that time.

It’s easy to depict a faceless bureaucracy as a monster. Historically and otherwise, the Republican Party has aimed to do just that—and the Trump-era scapegoating amounts to extreme assholism. But the right-wing haters have got it wrong.

Federal workers are, as a whole, heroes.

From staving off pandemics to tracking down loose nukes to compiling key economic data to predicting the paths of killer storms, they serve thousands of critical functions that we—as least until the Trump administration started breaking them—have taken for granted. They are also our neighbors, scattered all over the country—the vast majority work outside the DC area. We need them and their talents. They shouldn’t have to deal with all this bullshit.

Let’s rewind a bit. The conservative establishment has railed against the federal government since at least the mid-1970s—too big, too bloated, etc. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan said in his 1981 inaugural address, adding that America’s woes “parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.”

“It’s not my intention to do away with government,” Reagan went on. “It is rather to make it work…Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”

In fact, it is the government that needs smothering, said Reagan acolyte Grover Norquist, who founded the antitax group Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 (at Reagan’s request, he claims), and later launched the Reagan Legacy Project to memorialize him. “I don’t want to abolish government,” Norquist told NPR’s Mara Liasson in 2001. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

That’s where we’re at now: The bathtub drowning.

The federal workforce actually increased by 195,000 (about 7 percent), under Reagan, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those gains were wiped out during the 1990s, mainly under President Bill Clinton. The civil service began to grow again on President Joe Biden’s watch, but as Trump took office in January, federal workers still comprised just 1.8 percent of the US labor force, versus 2.5 percent at the end of Reagan’s presidency.

And then came the chainsaw.

Past Republican politicians assailed the size and scope of government but were generally respectful of its employees—despite griping that a federal job was a “job for life,” as Newt Gingrich put it. It was too hard to hire and fire, they said. “The civil service system,” New York University expert Paul Light told the Washington Post in late 2016, after Trump announced plans for a federal hiring freeze, is “very slow at hiring, negligent in disciplining, permissive in promoting.”

These are fair criticisms, and ones that federal workers also would like to see addressed.

I spoke not long ago with Max Stier, CEO of Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit whose mission is “building a better government and a stronger democracy.” Every year, his organization conducts a massive survey of workers across the federal government—more than a million participate—and “employees think that poor performers are not dealt with effectively,” he told me.

I had reached out to talk about the Trump administration’s assault on federal workers, rhetorical and actual, which was unprecedented—and the onslaught of egregious management behavior: Loyalty tests. Creepy DOGE demands that distracted people from their work. Mass firings by email and tweets. And an utter lack of transparency about what was happening and who was calling the shots.

Improving hiring and promotion, and dealing appropriately with bad apples and deadwood—these are solvable problems. But broadly demonizing public employees, of whom the majority care deeply about their missions, and who work as hard as anyone—often for low pay and certainly with less recognition—is no solution.

Try telling that to Russell Vought. As Trump fended off lawsuits and criminal charges (with mixed results) en route to his second term, Vought, Trump’s former (and current) Office of Management and Budget director, was hatching a diabolical plan.

In speeches unearthed by ProPublica, he called Trump’s candidacy a “gift of God” and spoke of changes that would facilitate mass layoffs of workers who enjoyed civil service protections. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said, a tad gleefully. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

Other Trumpy conservatives embraced similarly hateful vibes. As Mother Jones‘ Anna Rogers notes in her recent story about resistance from public sector unions:

Amid DOGE’s assault, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went on a nonsensical tirade suggesting that federal jobs are not “real jobs” and federal workers “do not deserve their paychecks.” Such sentiments were pervasive long before Trump’s minions started kneecapping the federal workforce. In a May 2024 proposal to reduce federal employee benefits, House Republicans asserted, “The biggest losers in this system are hardworking taxpayers who are forced to subsidize the bloated salaries of unqualified and unelected bureaucrats working to force a liberal agenda on a country that does not want it.”

Musk, shoving empathy into a wood chipper, suggested that slaving away for billionaire owners is somehow a higher calling than government service.

It’s not that business principles shouldn’t be used to run government better, Stier told me. They should. Yet government can’t—and shouldn’t—be run like a business, because it has “phenomenally large” constraints that don’t exist in the private sector. Thanks to shifting politics, for one, agency budgets change abruptly and funding often isn’t appropriated on time. (We spoke well before the latest shutdown.) Also, as I pointed out to my colleague Garrison Hayes a while back, the government performs all kinds of services whose value cannot be quantified on a balance sheet.

Federal agencies are massive, and the talent to run them does exist in the private sector, Stier says, but it’s a “small subset” of leaders who can grapple with that shift in context—leaders who “know what they don’t know, and know they need to learn, and know they need to rely on the people who are there to succeed.”

More often, especially under Trump, the people who come in are more like Musk: “He doesn’t understand context. He doesn’t understand the difference and doesn’t care. He’s the one trick pony, and that trick I don’t think really worked in the private sector, and it doesn’t work at all in government. Breaking things is not actually the road to productivity, and it has very large public consequences,” Stier says.

Part of our problem is weak PR: Political leaders within agencies are terrified of criticism, so they control access to their workforce in ways that prevent good news from getting out. (Trump’s agencies tend to just pump out trollish propaganda.) But Stier, who has come to understand the federal workforce better than just about anyone, gets to see the positive aspects. And contrary to Trumpian rhetoric, “the reality of the culture of the place is one of service. They’re not clock watchers. They’re not lazy. They’re people who are there for purpose. If they’re in NASA, it’s because they want to explore the universe. If they’re at the VA, it’s because they want to serve veterans,” Stier says.

“And the place where the federal workforce exceeds private sector norms is around that sense of purpose, the willingness to go the extra mile,” he continues. “Where they fare most poorly against the private sector is around the quality of leaders, and that’s a longstanding problem created by the fact that the people in the top don’t care about management—and that has huge implications for the entire organization.”

That is, when things go wrong, it’s often the political bosses fucking them up.

Since January, for instance, Trump has had seven different people—seven!—overseeing the IRS. The latest acting commissioner is Scott Bessent, who is also Treasury Secretary—because managing enormous agencies is so easy, you can just double up.

For his second term, President Barack Obama appointed as IRS chief John Koskinen, who had deep experience turning around large organizations in the private sector. Koskinen spent his first three and a half months on the job visiting two large IRS offices every week, holding lunches and town hall meetings with rank and file staff. “My theory has always been, if you want to know what’s going on in an organization, go talk to the people doing the work,” he told me back in April. “And I was just delighted with the level of [commitment].”

By contrast, three and a half months into Trump’s second term, tens of thousands of IRS workers had read the tea leaves and accepted a DOGE buyout. This exodus would include “a significant number of very experienced managers and executives,” Koskinen predicted. “Over 30 percent of the IRS has always been eligible for retirement, but they don’t retire, because they’re committed to the mission. When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership. You’re losing guidance and mentoring. You really are disabling the IRS.”

Trump’s deputies also fired nearly all IRS employees hired under President Biden, again decimating the agency’s ability—only recently regained—to pursue wealthy tax cheats and complete sophisticated audits of billionaires and private partnerships with opaque ownership structures.

This is gonna cost us dearly. In late 2023, Democratic members of the congressional Joint Economic Committee cautioned (unsuccessfully) against IRS enforcement cuts, noting that every dollar spent auditing high-income Americans brings in $12 in revenue. Under Trump, the agency’s unstable leadership, decimated workforce, and gutted budget—not to mention the prospect of his toadies illegally weaponizing the IRS—bode poorly for revenue collections and for the prospect of a smooth 2026 tax season, with Americans getting refunds on time.

This was all a management failure that would never be tolerated in the private sector. “Having spent 20 years doing turnarounds of large, failed enterprises,” Koskinen told me, “the last thing I ever thought was: Well, let’s starve the revenue arm! The salespeople—cut them back!“

When our government screws up, we freak out—and yet we rarely bother to recognize the career people who work tirelessly, and without any fanfare, to keep things functioning as they should. “I would say the vast majority of people rely on social programs, some of which they don’t even realize are funded by the federal government,” Koskinen told me. “All of those are at risk. When you cut park rangers, suddenly there are long lines trying to get into a park.”

That was a prescient example. On December 16, the Washington Post wrote about an internal Forest Service report showing that public lands are now rapidly deteriorating as a direct result of the Trump administration’s decimation of staff.

Earlier that week, too, the Post had reported that the VA planned to abruptly eliminate 35,000 open positions for doctors, nurses, and other medical roles, bringing VA staff cuts to 65,000 for the year—about 10 percent of its workforce.

The administration claimed the positions were superfluous, but one mental health the Post interviewed said that veterans in her area were already waiting 60 to 90 days for an appointment, and that she and her colleagues were desperate for backup: “We are all doing the work of others to compensate.”

Back in 1981, during his inaugural speech, Reagan had said something else: “Those who say that we’re in a time when there are not heroes, they just don’t know where to look.” 

We sure do now.

2025-12-30 20:30:00

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.

It seems like a relic now. But Donald Trump’s presidency once saw some of the culture’s most high-profile rappers grab their mics to condemn the president’s authoritarian policies. There was Ice Cube, dropping songs like “Arrest the President,” Childish Gambino shaking the world with the provocative music video for “This is America.”

But for some of those very same artists, Trump’s return to the White House is suddenly sounding copacetic, even good. The worst offender? Nicki Minaj.

There she was last week, a surprise guest at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, where, sitting next to Erika Kirk, Minaj praised JD Vance as an “assassin” and called Trump “dashing” and “handsome.” That was roughly one after Minaj accepted the Trump administration’s invitation to speak at the United Nations, only to parrot Trump’s false claims that the Nigerian government is purposefully ignoring the persecution of Christians by Islamic extremists in the country.

“Churches have been burned,” Minaj said sorrowfully. “Families have been torn apart…simply because of how they pray.” After her speech, UN Ambassador Mike Waltz awarded Minaj a UN hoodie in her signature Barbie pink.

Indeed, Minaj’s recent appearances have been difficult to square with her former self. Take Minaj’s 2016 song “Black Barbies,” a remix of Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles,” in which Minaj condemned Trump’s immigration policies.

“Island girl, Donald Trump want me go home,” she rapped, mentioning the president’s 2016 immigration crackdown. “Still pull up with my wrist like a snowcone.” In another lyric: “Half a milli on the Maybach Pullman, boarded
Now I’m prayin’ all my foreigns don’t get deported.”

In 2018, she shared her own story about immigrating to the US from Trinidad as a child on Instagram. “I came to this country as an illegal immigrant at 5 years old,” Minaj wrote in a now-deleted post. “I can’t imagine the horror of being in a strange place and having my parents stripped away from me at the age of 5.”

She then pleaded with Trump to halt the deportations, writing, “Please stop this. Can you try to imagine the terror & panic these kids feel right now? Not knowing if their parents are dead or alive, if they’ll ever see them again.”

When it comes to immigration, the situation today is markedly worse. As the Trump administration rolls out a brutal policy to deport the 11 million undocumented families living in the United States, has Minaj grown comfortable with family separations?

But it isn’t just a reversal on immigration. Minaj has spent 2025 gushing about Trump and his wife, Melania, reposting a now-deleted video of the couple dancing to a mashup of Minaj’s hit song and the 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” She regularly tweets in support of Trump and his cronies, even granting conservative television host Piers Morgan “clearance to fly through Barb Airspace”—whatever the hell that means.

The GOP has since embraced Minaj. “Nicki > Cardi,” Vice President JD Vance tweeted, while the Team Trump TikTok account posted the following video celebrating Minaj’s MAGA metamorphosis:

Minaj is also now beefing with Democrats and engaging in transphobia, with the rapper committing to a multiday Twitter battle with Gavin Newsom over the California governor’s comments about protecting trans kids’ rights to health care.

But Minaj isn’t the only rapper to make a right-wing rebrand this year. 

Rick Ross, who in 2015 had his song “Free Enterprise” yanked from Walmart shelves over lyrics calling to “assassinate Trump like I’m Zimmerman,” not only performed at the president’s second inauguration, but he was also the headliner for this year’s Young Black Republicans Halloween Party. Even Snoop Dogg, whose 2017 music video for “Lavender” featured him aiming a gun at a clown dressed as Trump, showed he was willing to toss aside any existing animosity the second a fat paycheck came around. How else is there to interpret Snoop’s decision to reheat old hits for a room full of tech bros at the president’s Crypto Ball? There’s simply no way the money is that good, especially when the rest of us see clearly why Trump entertains our support: To secure the sweet votes of the Black community while actively dismantling the institutions designed to help us.

Look, I’m not expecting every rapper to be an activist. You don’t have to read James Baldwin to be a good musician. But to go from poignantly telling your own immigration story to full-throatedly supporting MAGA is something else entirely.

So I’ll end with a line from Dr. Karida Brown, author of The Battle for the Black Mind, about rappers claiming that Trump will make them rich, and why Black conservative leaders co-sign this. Here’s what she told me in March:

“In the case of conservative and billionaire boys club movements, they weaponize these tropes and tokenize people to parrot these tropes so that they can poison their own wells. And when they’re done with them, they discard them. What happens to tokens? They get spent.”

2025-12-30 06:25:07

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said that her defense of survivors of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and threat to disclose the identities of some of the men who abused them broke her relationship with President Donald Trump, who said his “friends will get hurt” if she went through with it. 

Greene’s claim came in remarks from two long interviews published Monday in the New York Times Magazine. After a closed-door meeting with Epstein victims in September and a subsequent news conference where she made the threat to share the names of some of the men, Greene said Trump rebuked her. 

“The Epstein files represent everything wrong with Washington,” the congresswoman told Robert Draper of New York Times Magazine, highlighting how Epstein went unpunished for decades and was allowed to continue to sexually assault girls and young women. 

Greene announced in November that she would resign on January 5, 2026, a year before her term ends. “Standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old, trafficked, and used by rich, powerful men should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States, whom I fought for,” she stated in the video.

Greene told the Times that the last conversation she had with Trump was when she requested that he invite some of the survivors to the Oval Office. Trump, she recounted, replied that they did not deserve the opportunity. 

The congresswoman committed to opposing Republican leadership in the House and Trump, joining Rep Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) in a bill that would force the Justice Department to release all of its documents on Epstein. 

Another breaking point was the fallout following Charlie Kirk’s assassination. She was shocked when Trump gave the “worst statement” possible at Kirk’s memorial service. “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them,” Trump said, noting it as the right-wing political activist’s weakness. 

This was un-Christian to Greene, and she realized that she was part of a “toxic culture” in Washington. 

“Our side has been trained by Donald Trump to never apologize and to never admit when you’re wrong,” Greene told the Times earlier this month. “You just keep pummeling your enemies, no matter what.”

This was a stark contrast to many of her fellow public figures on the far right, who blamed the left for Kirk’s assassination. As my colleague Anna Merlan wrote earlier this month, this has led to a MAGA rift, along with conflicts over antisemitism that I reported about last week. 

Since the disputes over Epstein and Kirk, Trump contributed to death threats made against her, she claims, including calling her “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Green (sic)” in a November Truth Social post.   

Greene told the Times that she understood that loyalty to Trump was just “a one-way street” that ends “whenever it suits him.” 

All of this calls into question whether Greene’s departure from Trump is genuine. She told the Times that she remains a steadfast supporter of the policies on which Trump campaigned. But these clearly have not worked. Greene’s departure also calls into question the future of the Republican Party. Turning Point USA has endorsed JD Vance, but where other groups in the Republican Party go remains uncertain. 

Greene’s rehabilitation has doubt attached to it, too, regardless of whether the angle is a campaign for another political position or not. As Mother Jones’ Julianne McShane reported, the congresswoman has still made attempts to reconcile with Trump. And as the Times pointed out, Greene admitted that she only spoke out against Trump when his attacks targeted her. 

There’s also the fact that we still live in a political climate ruled by elites. Greene herself is a wealthy co-owner of a construction firm. It’s not a “big tent”—it’s still people at the top conversing with other people at the top on the direction of the country.