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This story was originally published by Grist in partnership with Chicago Public Media, and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Renee Costanzo cranked on the rusty pulley with both hands, watching the greenhouse roof creak open in sections. A breeze of spring air swept over 12,000 seedlings lined up in plastic trays in the Kilbourn Park greenhouse. Costanzo, […]

It was the final quarter of a US men’s national wheelchair basketball game at the Tokyo Paralympics against Turkey in 2021. Josh Turek was benched for most of the game. Fouled soon after coming in, Turek sank both his free throws to widen the US’ two-point lead in a game it went on to win. […]

Utah political consultant Gabi Finlayson was driving out of a canyon last week when she got the news that she had been accused of being a Chinese government operative.  She was driving to a speaking engagement in central Utah with her colleague, Jackie Morgan. When their car climbed out of the canyon and back into […]

Donald Trump last year amassed one big beautiful rap sheet of scandal and criminality, with multiple instances of corruption that made Teapot Dome look quaint. But the president’s bogus new “settlement” with his own administration’s IRS, which he had sued in January for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns in 2020, hits scorching new heights of depravity. The deal’s contours were bad enough when it looked like Trump was simply going to take a small fortune of taxpayer money and line his own pockets. But that was last week: The new plan is for $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to be set aside as a slush fund, which Trump will effectively control, to pay out to January 6 insurrectionists and political cronies that he believes were wronged back when the Department of Justice wasn’t his mobbed-up plaything. Some of the worst people in America are already lining up for payouts.There are plenty of ways to describe this arrangement. Call it cartoon villainy. Call it criminal. For certain, call this an utterly impeachable offense. Also call this very worrisome: There is a non-zero chance that Trump will simply get away with it, now that corrupt elites dominate American life with absolute impunity. For those with any vested interest in restoring democracy and clearing out the Augean stables of Trumpism, how we respond to this is very important.The Trump White House is a kleptocratic organ, pure and simple—one that increasingly resembles authoritarian regimes around the world. “This new slush fund is no different than what we see in other kleptocracies,” Casey Michel, frequent TNR contributor and author of the forthcoming book United States of Oligarchy, told me. “It’s a ruling figure creating a new pot of wealth that they can use for whatever they want—in this case, paying off a bunch of insurrectionists who Trump can now transform into his own personal paramilitary, without any oversight or checks whatsoever. It’s something we’ve never seen in U.S. history—but is perfectly familiar to those who study autocracy around the world.”There is, however, a key distinction between Trump and the scores of foreign kleptocrats that Michel has spent years studying: “The only difference here is that most foreign kleptocrats at least try to hide their tracks—instead of broadcasting them to the world, like we’re seeing with Trump.” While most criminals endeavor to keep the newspapers from finding out about their intention to commit crimes, Trump does it in plain sight—either because he’s incredibly stupid or because the Supreme Court has told him he’s wholly immune from prosecution. (It’s probably both.)But the newspapers’ early coverage of the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund is troubling. If sanewashing was last year’s problem in the political press, sinwashing might be the au courant media malady. The initial coverage from The New York Times suggested that the scheme merely “could funnel money to Trump allies,” even though this was its expressed purpose. The news department also couldn’t bring itself to call it a slush fund, instead drafting “critics” to say what is plainly and objectively true (the paper’s editorial board at least named it appropriately). Elsewhere, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal found a useful euphemism, referring to the settlement’s arrangement as merely “unusual” instead of nakedly criminal. (TNR’s headline, if you’re keeping score, nailed it: “Trump Just Launched a Taxpayer-Funded $1.8 Billion MAGA Slush Fund.”) So I’m concerned that when Democrats return to power, the media will either be an impediment or an enemy to any effort to put things right. But at least that effort is kicking off right away. Representative Jamie Raskin told TNR’s Greg Sargent he is planning to “introduce a bill that would block the fund and other future efforts like it.” He’ll be doing so with the full support of party leadership, who will seek to bring the vote to the House floor over the Republican majority’s objections via a discharge petition. While such a maneuver will require some GOP support, Republicans in the House have in recent weeks broken ranks on the disclosure of the Epstein files—and a few have defected from the party line on funding Trump’s grifty ballroom, as well, likely killing the $1 billion that Republicans had planned to allocate to it in their ICE-funding reconciliation bill. Meanwhile, HuffPost’s Jen Bendery reports that Senator Chris Van Hollen will be launching a similar effort in the Senate, amending the reconciliation bill to prevent January 6ers—some of whom assaulted the Capitol Police officers who protect these politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike—from obtaining money through this slush fund. Taken as a whole, these efforts tick a lot of boxes for those, like me, who bemoan Democrats’ institutional timidity. If successful, this will force Republicans to take a hard vote and sign their name to this calumny. And regardless of success, it provides fodder for a massive media campaign to wreck the GOP in a midterm election year, creating a savage contrast between the president’s inattention to ordinary Americans’ financial struggles and his desire to enrich criminals with those Americans’ tax dollars.  As Sargent noted, “Independents famously react badly to corruption.” According to a 2025 battleground survey conducted by End Citizens United, “Democrats’ journey to the majority begins with showing voters the consequences of Republican Corruption” because the topic was extremely animating for both independent voters and turnout voters. “Democrats should focus on telling the story of how honest Americans are losing their shot at the American Dream because of the corruption wealthy insiders have unleashed,” the study affirms, reaching the same conclusion that most of the political media had after the defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.What can I say? It turns out that accountability really matters. Trump and his inner circle have been like the raptors testing the bars at Jurassic Park: They’ve found weaknesses in the system, exploited them for criminal ends, and when they skate, they only redouble their efforts to find more flamboyant crimes to commit. That we’re now living with the prospect of a corrupt president cutting checks to his favorite thugs and miscreants is a humbling low for this nation.Anyone out there treating this as normal or permissible business—or who believes that once this president is ousted from power we should overlook his sins in the name of “looking forward”—is just as guilty as anyone else interconnected with this web of sleaze.This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Donald Trump deliberately warps reality around himself to create the image he wants. This goes far beyond simple propaganda or spin; this level of distortion literally commands everyone, to quote George Orwell’s words about the president in 1984, to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was his final, most essential command.” The MAGA base has decided that the truth is whatever Trump says it is, and Republican leadership has been purged of anyone who might gainsay that.The latest evidence of this can be found in a kind of silly but actually instructive poll by YouGov that asked people who would win in a physical fight: themselves or Donald Trump. More Democratic women than Republican men thought they could win a fight with Donald Trump.The president is 79 years old. He struggles to walk in a straight line, much less climb stairs. He has massive edema around his ankles, which is often a sign of congestive heart failure. There are mysterious bruises on the backs of his hands constantly now. He lives on Big Macs and Diet Coke and believes exercise is bad for you. He doesn’t listen to his doctors and takes too much aspirin. He brags constantly about passing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which is generally only given to people suspected of having dementia and features “very tough” questions like identifying a picture of a lion, a camel, and a giraffe. There have long been rumors that he is incontinent, and he may even have been caught on video audibly soiling himself.This is the party that prided itself on containing the manliest of manly men during the 2024 election. Of rural dudes who don’t believe in pronouns, lesbians, or unnatural hair colors. Yet somehow, after a decade of being fed slop images of Trump as a ripped Rambo, as a UFC fighter, and even as buff Jesus, Republican men have bought into the notion that Trump is a superman. This polling gets even weirder when you compare it to another poll—also by YouGov—asking Americans if they thought they could win a fight with various animals. Men in this poll were overconfident in their ability to win a fight with a chimpanzee. Though the poll did not include political affiliation, it seems a good bet that Republican men would be more likely to say they’d win than Democratic ones.The 22 percent of men who think they could win a fight with a chimpanzee are very mistaken: A chimpanzee will easily and preferentially tear off your face, hands, feet, and testicles. At the same time, 25 percent of Republican men cannot all be wheelchair-bound invalids in hospice, which is roughly what it would take to lose a fight with Trump.This state of shared unreality is something that Donald Trump has ruthlessly encouraged since before his first term. He was a prominent “birther” about Obama secretly being born in Kenya. The first thing that he forced Sean Spicer to do as White House press secretary was to march out onstage and tell the world that Trump had set an attendance record at his inauguration. This was a bald-faced lie, of course, but was also a flex to break Spicer and emphasize that the price of admission to power was to always make reality conform with whatever Trump said it was, even if it constantly shifted from moment to moment.At one time there were Republicans willing to call Trump out. At this point, however, they’ve either been purged from the party (Denver Riggleman) or were from a different generation and have passed on (Senator John McCain). Today, no Republican can survive long if they do not echo Trump’s insanities. Most of them choose to be amplifiers of this reality-distortion field, insisting that the 2020 election was “stolen” and that the people who raided the Capitol and wanted to hang Mike Pence were merely peaceful protesters.When Trump goes too far, many of them feign ignorance. This is particularly true of Speaker Mike Johnson, who almost always pleads ignorance when confronted by the press about Trump’s misdeeds or the consequences of things Trump has done. Trump is literally the alpha and omega of Republican thought: The party platform in 2020 and 2024 boiled down to “whatever Trump thinks it should be at this instant.”The media is culpable, as well. Once upon a time, far-right-wing media was limited to A.M. talk radio, Fox News, and Breitbart. Today, there is an entire ecosphere of insanity that’s only getting worse. Pseudo-intellectuals like Ben Shapiro are fading, and Nazi-brained nutjobs like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens are ascendant. The MAGA population that started out uninformed is now living in a separate reality that has nothing to do with our own. This reality is crafted by Trump, confirmed by Republicans, and further amplified by the media.Previously, traditional media outlets could be counted on to at least pretend to be centrist. They are now under assault, or already institutionally captured by Trump’s billionaire associates. Viktor Orbán advised Republicans to “get their own media,” and they have done so. Larry Ellison’s CBS News is being run into the ground by Bari Weiss. The Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post has eaten itself alive and is now primarily an editorial vehicle singing the praises of the billionaire class. The New York Times has written a slew of concern-trolling hit pieces on transgender people, without disclosing the beliefs of hate groups it cites, and is sanewashing the administration.Social media sites and AI-generated content take the news and further warp it for the American public. Meta, TikTok, and X all favor conservative rage-bait articles, and seeing nonsponsored content is becoming rare. The algorithms carefully curate a separate reality where rampaging transgender people in bathrooms and immigrants stealing elections and murdering their way through a terrified public are the most crucial issues facing the U.S. today. The odds of a conservative man seeing something on social media that contradicts his priors is roughly the same as of King Charles abdicating and becoming a roadie for a heavy metal band. The result is a country where a third of the population live in their own reality, supporting the administration no matter what. Another third are either uninterested or don’t know what to believe, so they no longer try. And the final third who understand what is happening are mostly powerless to do anything to prevent the slide of the U.S. into Idiocracy-style oblivion. When Mythbusters host Adam Savage quipped, “I reject your reality and substitute my own,” it was funny. It’s much less funny when a right-wing authoritarian party of know-nothings is gaslighting the United States into oblivion. Your average Democratic woman could kick Donald Trump’s butt, but getting MAGA to reconnect to Planet Earth is another thing entirely given the entire multibillion-dollar system built to warp reality around Trump’s delusions.

The 911 system functions as a sort of promise: Call for help and someone will be there to respond quickly. But in many American cities, it’s a broken promise. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Thanks in part to a widespread understaffing crisis across 911 dispatch centers, hundreds […]

They must know how valuable it is—how I would do anything to retrieve it.

The framework would defer nuclear enrichment talks until there is a deal to end the war and open the Strait of Hormuz, a senior Iranian official told Drop Site.

Zeteo's weekly round-up, documenting the growth of authoritarianism in Trump's second term.