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.

Over the weekend, Covid-cautious individuals shared clips on social media of Jon Stewart punching down on people who are masking, who are presumably doing so to protect themselves from Covid, the flu, and other infectious diseases that are spreading across the United States.

On the December 11 episode of the podcast The Weekly Show With Jon Stewart, guest Tim Miller of The Bulwark said there have to be at least two people at fellow guest Jon Favreau’s workplace wearing masks because it’s a progressive organization. Stewart responded, “There’s always two, and you always say, ‘Oh, are you sick?’ And they go, ‘Uh, I don’t want to talk about it.'”

Disappointed to see Jon Stewart & co joke about masking in public. I do it for my medically fragile daughter (Batten Disease). People not masking properly led to her getting pneumonia, which led to her being on life support, which led to me getting price quotes on her cremation just in case.

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— Philip Palermo (@palermo.bsky.social) December 28, 2025 at 7:31 PM

First of all, asking people why they are masking is invasive behavior. No one randomly owes you information about their health, their loved one’s health, or, understandably, just wanting to avoid Covid, which is the only way to prevent Long Covid. As I’ve also previously reported, disabled people in New York’s Nassau County have reported being harassed after the county passed a mask ban. Cancer patients have also told their stories of being questioned about why they’re masking. Even before the start of the Covid pandemic, populations including cancer patients and organ transplant recipients have been encouraged to mask by healthcare professionals.

“Sad that Jon Stewart and friends have become just more white liberals who enjoy punching down at marginalized people who are just doing our best to survive,” Karistina Lafae, a disabled author and essayist, told me. “Those of us who have Long COVID, who have watched family and friends die of COVID, we are being mocked for taking common-sense precautions against illness and further disability.”

Research also shows that Long Covid is very much a working-class problem. A study looking at people in Spain found that workers who had close contact with colleagues at their job, did not mask, and took public transit to and from work are more likely to have Long Covid, thus also highlighting Covid as an occupational problem. The United States Census Bureau also reported in 2023 that Black and Latino adults were more likely to report experiencing Long Covid symptoms than white people.

Some people have also pointed out the hypocrisy of his work supporting 9/11 first responders and how he is talking about masking now. Epidemiologist Gabrielle A. Perry posted on BlueSky that Stewart has “some absolute fucking NERVE to be making fun of Long COVID survivors and people still masking” when “he’s seen UP CLOSE the government deny healthcare and resources for 9/11 survivors who breathed in toxic air and are suffering decades later.”

Jon Stewart has some absolute fucking NERVE to be making fun of Long COVID survivors and people still masking on his piece of shit podcast when he’s seen UP CLOSE the government deny healthcare and resources for 9/11 survivors who breathed in toxic air and are suffering decades later. What a psycho

— Gabrielle A. Perry, MPH (@geauxgabrielle.bsky.social) December 27, 2025 at 5:29 AM

Justine Barron worked a few blocks from the World Trade Center in 2001. “On top of exposure that day, I was exposed for a year and developed extremely severe breathing and skin issues, as well as immune dysfunction,” Barron told me. Barron acquired Long Covid in 2020, and her doctors believe that her 9/11-related conditions made her more susceptible to developing Long Covid.

Barron is part of a 25-year World Trade Center Health Commission study, including hundreds of thousands of participants. “More recently, there have been questions related to Covid and Long Covid indicating that the commission is also aware of this connection,” Barron said. “My point is that you can’t be supportive of the 9/11 responders without also being supportive of Long Covid. Both environmental harms cause similar issues in people, and there are many of us that are double victims.”

Elon Musk took to his social media site on Friday to decry New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s pick to lead the city’s fire department, claiming that she couldn’t do the job. The commissioner-to-be, Lillian Bonsignore, is a 31-year FDNY veteran who led the department’s emergency medical services during the Covid-19 pandemic. She will be the second woman to hold the position and the first openly gay person to lead the department. 

That was enough for Musk to weigh in. “People will die because of this,” he wrote, adding, “Proven experience matters when lives are at stake.”

As Gothamist reported, before her retirement in 2022, Bonsignore was both the highest-ranking uniformed woman in FDNY history and the first woman to achieve a four-star rank. At the press conference announcing her appointment, Mamdani praised Bonsignore, saying that “her record speaks for itself,” before detailing her career in the city that spanned from before 9/11 through the worst of the pandemic. 

“I know the job,” Bonsignore said this week. “I know what the firefighters need, and I can translate that to this administration that is willing to listen. I know what EMS needs. I have been EMS for 30-plus years.”

Musk is the richest person on the planet and a rabid opponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion measures, or DEI. He appeared to be claiming that the new head of the FDNY was a diversity hire. He’s written: “Time for DEI to DIE,” “DEI has caused people to DIE,” “DEI is a Civil Rights Act violation,”  “DEI kills art,” “DEI puts the lives of your loved ones at risk,” and “DEI is just another word for racism,” amongst his other previous observations about these efforts.

DEI kills art https://t.co/LG9lmDSHjF

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2024

This isn’t the first time Musk, who is not a resident of New York, has weighed in on Mamdani or his campaign. 

A day before the mayoral election in November, Musk endorsed Mamdani’s leading opponent in the race, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo had resigned in disgrace after the state’s attorney general reported that he had sexually harassed nearly a dozen women. (A later DOJ investigation put that number at 13.) In Musk’s endorsement post, he called the soon-to-be-mayor-elect “Mumdumi.”

Then, on the morning of Election Day, Musk shared a false claim that because Mamdani was listed under both the “Democratic” and “Working Families” party lines on the NYC ballot, the election was a “scam!” But in New York, candidates can appear more than once on a ballot if they are nominated by multiple political parties. Musk also pointed to the layout of the ballot as a problem, since Cuomo’s name appeared in a lower spot on the ballot than Mamdani’s. He failed to mention that this took place because the former governor lost in the Democratic primary and chose to run as an independent later in the election season. 

The New York City ballot form is a scam!

– No ID is required
– Other mayoral candidates appear twice
– Cuomo’s name is last in bottom right pic.twitter.com/676VODWFRI

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2025

Despite his recent interest in the FDNY’s leadership, Musk’s work during his time with the federal government imperiled some of NYC’s firefighters. His DOGE team threatened cancer research funding for firefighters who responded to the World Trade Center attacks and were exposed to toxins.

Back in February, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, tried to cancel a $257,000 contract for 9/11-related cancer research. At the time, according to CBS News, “FDNY confirmed researchers working on the career firefighter health study received notice of the CDC contract termination.” Days later, after public backlash, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention restored the contract.  

As he spoke about the FDNY during his commissioner announcement, Mamdani called the first responders, “the heroes of our five boroughs,” who “save lives at a moment’s notice.”

“They deserve a leader who cares about their work,” he continued, referring to Bonsignore, adding, “because she did it herself.”

The Supreme Court blocked President Trump on Tuesday from deploying National Guard troops in Chicago as part of his campaign to use the military to police the streets of Democratic-led cities.

The Trump administration had argued that Chicago was in chaos—referring to protests against immigration enforcement—but the Supreme Court’s order reads, “At this preliminary stage, the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.”

In October, Trump called 300 members of the Illinois National Guard into federal service to protect federal agents enforcing immigration policies in Chicago under a federal law that allows the president to federalize members of the Guard if they are “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States” or if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion.” He federalized members of the Texas National Guard the next day. 

The state of Illinois and the city of Chicago challenged the deployment in court, arguing that Trump abused that federal law to punish his political opponents. 

Lower courts ruled against Trump. On October 9, U.S. District Judge April Perry said she “found no credible evidence that there is a danger of rebellion” and issued a temporary restraining order in favor of the state.

The Supreme Court agreed with the decision, saying that the president can only call on the National Guard if regular military forces couldn’t restore order.  

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented. 

“There is no basis for rejecting the President’s determination that he was unable to execute the federal immigration laws using the civilian law enforcement resources at his command,” Alito wrote.

Trump has also tried to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Portland. 

A federal appeals court ruled last week that the National Guard deployment in Washington can continue, but a federal judge blocked Trump from sending the National Guard to Portland in November, and another judge ordered the National Guard to leave Los Angeles earlier this month.

The Trump administration has often gone to the Supreme Court for help when its policies have been blocked by lower courts. In this case, Trump is trying to normalize military policing of protests against him. 

This is the first time the high court has weighed in on the president’s use of the National Guard to enforce immigration policies. While the decision only applies to Illinois, it will likely support similar challenges from other cities.

In another assault on reproductive rights by the Trump administration, the US Department of Veterans Affairs sent out a memo on Monday announcing that it will no longer provide abortion or abortion counseling.

This change stems from a Department of Justice legal opinion on December 18 that reinstated exclusions on abortions and abortion counseling that the Biden administration had removed in 2022. That Biden-era ruling expanded abortion access for veterans in cases of rape, incest, or threats to life and health, even in states with bans. 

The DOJ cited a rule the VA proposed in August that argued Biden demonstrated federal overreach by expanding abortion access just months after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. But, according to the VA, Biden’s decision forced taxpayer funding for abortion.

“Pregnant Veterans and VA beneficiaries deserve to have access to world-class reproductive care when they need it most,” Denis McDonough, Biden’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs, said in 2022, calling it “a patient safety decision.”

The new directive, obtained by Mother Jones, states that it won’t prohibit care to “pregnant women in life-threatening circumstances, including treatment for ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages.” However, these exceptions often do not work. According to Jessica Valenti, a writer on feminism and politics, exceptions “are deliberately crafted to be impossible to use” and only exist “to make Republicans seem a little less punishing.” 

Half of the states in the country protect the right to abortion. The VA’s ban will also apply in those states.

The Department of Veterans Affairs did not respond to Mother Jones’ questions about the removal of exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or health emergencies and the usurping of state laws.

The scale of this issue is significant. According to the VA’s own numbers, there are more than 700,000 family members who are eligible for its care. There are over 2.1 million women veterans and thousands of transgender men and non-binary veterans who may need abortion care. 

The VA’s memo also states that employees may request to opt out of providing “any aspect of clinical care based on their sincerely held moral and religious beliefs, observances, practices, or exercises,” which could leave the door open for more discriminatory lawmaking in health care access.

For the Trump administration, that is the point. Project 2025 recommended that the Veterans Health Administration “rescind all departmental clinical policy directives that are contrary to principles of conservative governance starting with abortion services and gender reassignment surgery.” Roughly half of the president’s judicial nominees have anti-abortion records.

Former Vice President Mike Pence poached over a dozen senior officials from the Heritage Foundation to join his own conservative think tank in the latest sign that all is not well in right-wing politics.

The Heritage Foundation is arguably the most prominent conservative think tank in America. Pence, meanwhile, started his competing think tank, Advancing American Freedom, to promote “exactly what the Trump-Pence Administration did every day.” Many prominent Republicans framed this to the Wall Street Journal as a return to conservative fundamentals, blocking out “what they see online.” 

As my colleague Anna Merlan recently reported, MAGA is eating itself alive. Pence’s move came after the Heritage Foundation’s leader, Kevin Roberts, defended Tucker Carlson for hosting white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes on his show, according to the Journal. 

The Heritage Foundation notably published Project 2025, the policy document that detailed Trump 2.0’s slash-and-burn approach to governance. But this specific beef dates back to October, when Carlson, a high-profile conservative political commentator, interviewed Fuentes.

Fuentes asserted that we need “to be pro-white,” promoted conspiracy theories of “organized Jewry in America,” and decried Christian Zionism. There was immediate outrage within the right: US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to name a few. Roberts disagreed, describing the criticism as an attempt to cancel Carlson. 

“Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington,” he said. 

Roberts’ remarks led to further fallout. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) countered, “Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats.”

That’s when top Heritage Foundation members began resigning. John Blackman, who stepped down on Sunday, wrote that the think tank had abandoned its principles and conformed to President Trump and a coalition of the right’s “rising tide of antisemitism.”

“Heritage has always welcomed debate, but alignment on mission and loyalty to the institution are non-negotiable,” Andy Olivastro, the foundation’s chief advancement officer said in a statement to the Journal. “A handful of staff chose a different path.”

All of this calls into question what the future of the Republican Party will look like after Trump. Turning Point USA, which showed signs of unraveling during this past weekend’s convention, has its hopes pinned on JD Vance, but other factions of the political party may have a different idea come 2028. 

It’s not a secret that Donald Trump has taken inspiration from several famous authoritarians of both the past and the present. Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Xi Jinping, all of whom the president has openly praised, have shaped Trump’s leadership style in one way or another.

But I really didn’t think that The Hunger Games’ President Coriolanus Snow, leader of the fictional country of Panem, would eventually find his way onto that list.

In a video announcement Thursday, Trump declared that, to ring in the United States’ 250th birthday, the nation will host the first-ever “Patriot Games,” an “unprecedented four-day athletic event” featuring high school athletes, one boy and one girl, from each state and territory.

He also made sure to add in a dash of his signature transphobia: “But I promise there will be no men playing in women’s sports. You’re not going to see that.”

Now, if you think this sounds just like Suzanne Collins’ hit young adult novels, you’re not alone. All across social media, people are drawing comparisons between the dystopian young adult book series and the president’s latest bit of American pageantry.

"And so it was decreed that, each year, the various districts of Panem would offer up, in tribute, one young man and woman to fight to the death in a pageant of honor, courage and sacrifice." (The Hunger Games, 2012) https://t.co/fCx32lUMYb pic.twitter.com/3FJw4boQLv

— Democrats (@TheDemocrats) December 18, 2025

The games, will be hosted by Freedom250, a newly established subsidiary of the National Park Foundation, as part of a wider Trumpian 250th anniversary extravaganza, to include a prayer event at the National Mall—meant to “rededicate our country as one nation under God”—and the debut of an “Arc de Trump,” a landmark designed to resemble France’s Arc de Triomphe, only bigger.

I’m assuming that there will be no killing in Trump’s “Patriot Games,” but I guess we’ll have to wait until fall to see.

Relatedly, the Trump-appointed board of Washington’s Kennedy Center just voted to rename the famed theater the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

With health care premiums on the verge of skyrocketing, unemployment rates rising, and the Trump administration still rapidly slashing social safety nets, I can’t imagine that any of the president’s passion projects are going to help his dwindling ratings.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump once again found it acceptable to use the r-word, directing it towards Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in a Truth Social post which also attacked Somali immigrants in the state.

“The seriously [r-tarded] Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both,” Trump posted.

For Republican Indiana State Senator Michael Bohacek, Trump’s most recent use of this anti-disability slur was “the final straw” in his decision not to support Indiana redistricting in support of Republicans winning more seats. On Friday, Rep. Bohacek posted the following on Facebook:

Many of you have asked my position on redistricting. I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter. Those of you that don’t know me or my family might not know that my daughter has Down Syndrome. This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences. I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.

In a Facebook comment, Bohacek’s wife, Melissa, said she supported her husband, writing, “for families like ours, hearing the same mocking, derogatory language from our president isn’t abstract. He didn’t almost say or do something hurtful, he did.”

According to the Indy Star, the Indiana State House of Representatives is set to meet on December 1 to discuss a redistricting map, and the Indiana State Senate is supposed to vote on the map on December 8.

As I’ve previously outlined, Trump has a long history of making ableist statements and holding deeply harmful ideas about disability. In October 2024, at a dinner for Republican donors, Trump referred to then-Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris the r-word. He also has a pattern of referring to people he doesn’t like as “intellectually disabled” in a negative way, underlining his ableist views.

The National Down Syndrome Society also condemned Trump’s latest use of the r-word, writing that “as the language used by our leaders carries significant weight in shaping actions and societal attitudes toward individuals with disabilities, we are dismayed and disheartened that President Trump used this harmful term in a recent social media post.”

After teasing a plan by President Donald Trump to extend Affordable Care Act premium subsidies—currently on track to end within weeks—the White House has indefinitely delayed the announcement under pressure from congressional Republicans, MS NOW reported on Monday.

The last-minute change of plan signals the GOP’s priorities: the party has fought to cut or repeal the ACA since it entered law in 2010, and was uncompromising in opposing the subsidies during the record-breaking government shutdown that ended earlier in November.

“I don’t see how a proposal like this has any chance of getting majority Republican support,” an anonymous House Republican told MS NOW. “We need to be focused on health care, but extending Obamacare isn’t even serious.”

Unless a deal is reached, Affordable Care Act tax credits expanded during the Biden administration are set to expire at the end of 2025, which would lead to the largest-ever annual spike in ACA premiums. The enhanced credits led to more signups for health insurance through the ACA marketplace: Nearly 25 million Americans in 2025, more than double the roughly 11 million who used it in 2020, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The last thing Republican elected officials want to see, the Center for American Progress’ Bobby Kagan posted on social media Monday, is a deal that protects ACA subsidies.

“That’s why they didn’t extend them in OBBBA, and that’s why they kept calling them a ‘December problem’ even though open enrollment began on November 1,” Kagan, the group’s senior director for federal budget policy, wrote.

It’s because congressional Republicans want the enhanced subsidies to expire. That’s why they didn’t extend them in OBBBA, and that’s why they kept calling them a “December problem” even though open enrollment began on November 1.

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— Bobby Kogan (@bbkogan.bsky.social) November 24, 2025 at 10:36 AM

Extending the enhanced ACA credits does have support among everyday Republicans: A November poll by KFF found that, among Republican and Republican-leaning independents, 72 percent who didn’t identify with MAGA—and almost half of MAGA supporters—wanted ACA tax credits to continue.

If Trump doesn’t sign legislation by December 15 to extend ACA tax credits, millions of Americans will be forced to pay far more—often several hundred dollars a month—for health insurance, or forgo it altogether.

Back in February, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) went to great lengths to justify his decisive vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary.

Cassidy, a physician and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, demanded, among other things, that if confirmed, Kennedy would ensure the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website did not edit a webpage stating that vaccines do not cause autism.

Of course, under Kennedy’s leadership, the CDC did just that this week, as my colleague Kiera Butler covered:

Among other dubious assertions, [the new webpage] informed readers, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Also, it asserts, falsely, “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”

Despite Kennedy’s flagrant flouting of this apparent agreement with Cassidy, the senator still cannot seem to directly criticize him, or own up to the fact that he played a key role in elevating a conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic with no medical training to head the country’s health agencies.

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Cassidy refused to face the facts when host Jake Tapper said, “Dr. Cassidy, he lied to you.” Instead, Cassidy doubled down on the very message that Kennedy is undermining: “Vaccines are safe,” he insisted. “That’s the most important message.”

After Tapper pressed him, asking if he was worried about the impact the CDC website could have on Americans’ decisions whether or not to vaccine, Cassidy conceded that the messaging was a problem, but still refused to name Kennedy as its source or express regret over confirming him. “Anything that undermines the understanding, the correct understanding, the absolute scientifically based understanding that vaccines are safe and that, if you don’t take them, you’re putting your child or yourself in greater danger, anything that undermines that message is a problem,” Cassidy said.

Tapper: "You were the deciding vote that allowed RFK Jr. to ascend to the role of HHS secretary…You just said that you've never met anybody other than pediatricians who read the CDC website, but back then you were talking about the important of the CDC website. Did you give RFK… pic.twitter.com/EQXkxml6BO

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) November 23, 2025

He proceeded to downplay the importance of the website, claiming that he has “never met any parent who wasn’t a pediatrician as well who actually reads the CDC website”—even though, as Tapper pointed out, Cassidy made it a condition of Kennedy’s confirmation that he would not edit the website. After more tough questioning from Tapper, Cassidy conceded: “[The changes to the website] are important, because you need to send the consistent signal that vaccines are safe.” He then pointed to an asterisk that remains on the site, which says: “The header ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ has not been removed due to an agreement with [Cassidy] that it would remain on the CDC website.”

So, in case you’re confused about all this hair-splitting: Yes, the updated webpage now dismisses the claim that vaccines do not cause autism—contradicting the site’s own (correct) heading. This is apparently the extent to which Cassidy managed to reign Kennedy in.

Changes to the CDC website were not the reason Kennedy made even more headlines this week. There was also the heartbreaking essay from his cousin, Tatiana Schlossburg, published by the New Yorker on Saturday, in which she revealed her terminal cancer diagnosis and excoriated Kennedy for defunding cancer research and clinical trials and attacking vaccines and medications she benefitted from. The 35-year-old mother of two and daughter of former Ambassador Caroline Kennedy—who last year urged the Senate not to confirm Kennedy as HHS Secretary—wrote that she “watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government.”

TAPPER: RFK Jr., according to his own family, is causing real damage to the health of the United States of America. You don't seem willing to criticize him by name at all, unlike members of his family.

CASSIDY: So, Jake, clearly, clearly, this conversation, you want me to be on… pic.twitter.com/tm44jalKWZ

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) November 23, 2025

Faced with Schlossburg’s unflinching criticism of her own family member, Cassidy still refused to directly criticize Kennedy. “Clearly, this conversation, you want me to be on the record saying something negative,” he told Tapper.

“I know it’s titillating,” Cassidy said later, “but I think we need to move beyond the titillation and actually what matters to the American people.”

Someone may want to tell him that includes protecting vaccines.

Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee released a flotilla of Epstein emails—more than 20,000 in total. The revelations created a tidal wave of news. In perhaps the most famous email, Jeffrey Epstein claimed Trump “knew about the girls.” Epstein also called Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours at my house” with a sex trafficking victim.

A trove of that size would ordinarily be difficult and time-consuming to sort, but this digital dump was especially cumbersome: packaged in oddly titled folders, and tossed with a random assortment of unsearchable detritus and system files.

What if you were able to just… read them like emails?

That’s the simple premise behind “Jmail,” a re-skinning of the documents programmed to look and feel like an everyday Gmail account, with all the design details impeccably parodied and emails displayed in sequential chains, just like your own inbox. It even includes a working search function. Its release this week created it’s own internet storm.

It's at https://t.co/bA2ikCiWjz. Made by @lukeigel and me

— Riley Walz (@rtwlz) November 21, 2025

The uncanny execution—a boon to journalists, but so realistic it can leave you disturbed, as if slipping directly into Epstein’s life—was created by two Bay Area internet wizards.

The San Francisco Standard identified the duo as Luke Igel, an AI engineer, and Riley Walz, whom they describe as the city’s “favorite internet rascal.” Before Jmail, he was famous for, among other pranks, creating a website showing the exact locations of the city’s parking police by reverse-engineering the municipal ticket system to reveal, in almost real time, where tickets were being issued (an endeavor that worked for just four hours, according to The New York Times—enough to cement Walz’s internet stardom).

“Many people have made fun of how weird and quirky the whole delivery method was,” Igel told The A.V. Club, describing the Congressional email release. “Someone made an amazing indexed database of those emails using Google Journalist Studio. Problem is that once you click on this beautifully indexed document, it’s really hard to read a PDF. So we just decided to do that, to fix that.”

As The A.V. Club recounts:

To fix it, Igel and Walz used an LLM to convert the plain text in the PDFs back into an email format. Then, once the data was prepped, they used an app called Cursor, which, according to Igel, is an ‘amazing tool that allows you to use AI to code really, really fast,’ to ape Gmail’s aesthetics for a web app.

The two creators selected a list of commonly occurring senders and listed them on the site of their web app: Michael Wolff, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, and Ken Starr among them. The inclusion of a “Random Page” button sweeps you into a random portion of the chronology.

While we wait for exactly what gets released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which the president signed into law this past week, you can check out Jamil here. And of course, don’t forget Mother Jones’s investigation in which Leland Nally called everyone in Epstein’s notorious “little black book.”

What will Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) do after her shock resignation from Congress in January, announced on Friday? Good question.

President Donald Trump, for one, already seems to be reversing course on their breakup. Not long after (again) calling her a “traitor” on Truth Social on Saturday, the president told NBC News he would “love to see” her revive her career in politics. (Ever one to put the feelings of others ahead of his own, Trump first advised, “she’s got to take a little rest.”)

But Greene is aggressively shutting the rumors of her return down. In response to a Time story claiming that Greene was considering running for president in 2028, the congresswoman wrote today on X: “I’m not running for President and never said I wanted to and have only laughed about it when anyone would mention it. If you fell for those headlines, you’re still being lulled everyday into psychosis by the Political Industrial Complex that always has an agenda when it does something like this.”

“Running for President requires traveling all over the country, begging for donations all day everyday to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, arguing political talking points everyday to the point of exhaustion, destroying your health and having no personal life in order to attempt to get enough votes to become President all to go to work into a system that refuses to fix any of America’s problems,” Greene continued. “The fact that I’d have to go through all that but would be totally blocked from truly fixing anything is exactly why I would never do it.”

Ever prone to seeing conspiracies everywhere—despite her recent mea culpas—Greene also said she doesn’t believe she would be allowed to ascend to the pinnacle of American political power even if she tried to: “The Political Industrial Complex has destroyed our country and will never allow someone like me or you to rise to power and actually solve the crises that plague all of us,” she wrote. “That would go against its business model.”

Earlier this year, Greene appeared to be considering a Senate run. But Trump claimed, in one of his break-up texts, he had dissuaded her from doing so, which Greene denied last week on CNN’s State of the Union. “I don’t want to have anything to do with the Senate,” she said last week. “I think the past two months of the government shutdown should have shown America exactly why I would never want to be there.”

For now, this is Greene’s story—that she’s done with politics—and she and her allies are sticking to it. A person close to Greene told NBC News: “It’s safe to say she’ll probably take a step back and be a private, normal person again.”

Time will tell.

Remember the horrifying text messages that caught a Border Patrol agent bragging about shooting someone in Chicago last month?

Well, it seems that those texts—and the looming release of even more potentially damaging messages—are now prompting federal prosecutors to move to dismiss their charges against the woman, who prosecutors had accused of assaulting an officer.

A bit of a refresher on the case: On October 4, Charles Exum, a supervisory Border Patrol agent, shot Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, multiple times and accused Martinez of ramming her car into his vehicle. Martinez was part of what the government alleged was “a convoy of civilian vehicles” that had been trailing the federal agents during their immigration enforcement operations. A lawyer for the government said Martinez had been broadcasting the incident on Facebook Live for a couple of minutes before the shooting.

As I wrote earlier this month:

When Exum got out of the car, Martinez allegedly drove her car “at” him, and the officer then fired five shots at her.

Martinez has pled not guilty, and contests the government’s allegations. In her account, Exum sideswiped her car, and fired the five gunshots at her “within two seconds” of exiting his vehicle, according to court documents filed by her lawyer. After driving about a mile from the scene, Martinez took an ambulance to a hospital, where she was treated for gunshot wounds and later arrested. She has been released from custody on $10,000 bond; a jury trial is scheduled for February.

This all occurred as federal officials were conducting immigration raids in the Chicago area, as part of an action dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Soon after, court documents revealed Exum expressing pride over the shooting. As I wrote:

In one exchange, the agent sent an article from the Guardian describing the shooting, adding, “5 shots, 7 holes.” In another, he clarified that he was explaining his pride of his abilities as a marksman: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” (Reuters reported that, when asked about these messages at a court hearing on Wednesday, Exum said: “I’m a firearms instructor and I take pride in my shooting skills.”)

In other messages, Exum wrote: “I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out’” and “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.”

According to CNN, Martinez’s lawyer, Christopher Perente, asked Exum about another text, in which Exum wrote about the incident: “I have a MOF amendment to add to my story.” Exum explained ‘MOF’ meant “miserable old fucker,” a term meant to refer to someone trying to one-up others, per CNN’s account. Exum explained the text by saying: “That means illegal actions have legal consequences.”

Following that explosive hearing, a federal court directed the government’s lawyers to provide the agent’s unredacted texts to the judge for her private review. Then, on Monday, the judge told the government’s lawyers they needed to provide the texts to Martinez’s lawyer, which would wind up making them public. But rather than do that, the government on Thursday moved to dismiss the case entirely, just hours before another hearing was scheduled to take place.

So what do those additional texts say? For now, we don’t know. Neither the lawyer representing Martinez nor spokespeople for the Department of Justice and Border Patrol immediately responded to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Thursday afternoon.

But for the government to drop the case entirely, there’s a good chance they are even more embarrassing for Exum than the previous texts were. And they likely add to a disturbing trend our reporting has repeatedly revealed: The federal agents the government claims are helping the supposedly terrified residents of American cities are, in fact, posing a danger to residents themselves. And sometimes, they’re even bragging about it afterwards.

After months of MAGA infighting and an unusual Republican break with President Donald Trump, the GOP-controlled House on Tuesday is expected to overwhelmingly pass a bill seeking to force the Justice Department to release a huge trove of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

The bill’s passage—now seen as a foregone conclusion—appears to mark a rare legislative loss for Trump, who, after months of efforts to kill the measure, reversed course this weekend. Faced with certain defeat, he attempted to save face by directing House Republicans to back the bill after all. “Sure,” he even said when asked if he’d sign the legislation should it pass both chambers of Congress.

But Trump’s sudden acquiescence, as he stares down yet another humiliating news cycle tying him to a notorious pedophile, seems little more than a facade. The president’s own comments, just hours before the vote, betrayed significant anger.

“Quiet! Quiet, piggy,” Trump snapped at a female reporter on Monday when asked about the Epstein files. (The official White House transcript, which does not appear auto-generated, appears to skip the Epstein question, while leaving out “piggy” in Trump’s response.) Trump’s rage, wrapped in characteristic cruelty after failing to convince even his most loyal House supporters not to back the bill, was clear; this was not a man at peace.

“Quiet! Quiet, piggy,” Trump snapped at a female reporter on Monday when asked about the Epstein files.

Today, the GOP-controlled House is expected to overwhelmingly pass a bill seeking to force the Justice Department to release a huge trove of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. pic.twitter.com/h9NEkKKT3K

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 18, 2025

A similar frustration animated Mike Johnson this morning, when the House speaker announced that he, too, would support the Epstein bill. “The move is a remarkable pivot for Johnson, who had urged Republicans to reject the effort,” is how Axios characterized it. That’s true, from one angle. But the hostility with which Johnson announced his reversal reveals, like Trump, a man still seething. Hours before the vote, Johnson once again blamed Democrats for “forcing a political show vote” that his own caucus overwhelmingly backs. He also released a memo outlining the alleged legal problems with the discharge petition, including privacy concerns for Epstein’s victims, even though the bill explicitly addresses such concerns.

With the bill likely careening toward the Senate, Johnson’s comments could be seen as a potential blueprint should Majority Leader John Thune wish to prevent the files from being released. As for Trump’s “piggy” remarks, they once again reveal the anger of a man on the eve of a vote that could potentially reveal more ties to the notorious pedophile who was once Trump’s close friend.

President Donald Trump, who ran in 2024 on the promise to bring down prices “on day one,” has finally admitted that his tariffs do the opposite.

On Friday, the Trump administration announced that it would exempt a broad array of groceries—including staples like beef, coffee, and bananas—from the tariffs the president proudly implemented in April. While Trump, of course, did not concede outright that his tariffs have helped stoke sticker shock, the tariff reversal is a clear bid to ease the high prices currently plaguing American consumers. 

More than half of Americans said food costs were a “major source of stress.”

The Trump administration appears to be scrambling for an affirmative economic message in the wake of the GOP’s recent stinging electoral losses. Earlier this month, Republican candidates were defeated in not only the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, but also in a string of local races. Meanwhile, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani surged to victory in the New York City mayoral race on an affordability agenda. 

On November 5, the day after the elections, Trump discussed affordability on Fox News, claiming that it was a “new word” being pushed by Democrats. While he insisted his administration has brought prices “way down,” he also said that Republicans don’t talk enough about affordability. That evening, he rehashed his argument on Truth Social: “AFFORDABILITY is a Republican Stronghold. Hopefully, Republicans will use this irrefutable fact!”

While inflation has come down from its Biden-era 2022 peak, federal data from September shows that grocery prices have risen since the start of Trump’s presidency, with costs climbing at the quickest annual pace since 2022. (October’s data has not been released, with the Trump administration saying its publication is unlikely after the government shutdown impaired collecting statistics.) In an August poll by AP-NORC, more than half of Americans said that grocery costs were a “major source of stress” in their lives.

Despite warnings from most economists and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Trump has repeatedly claimed that his tariffs do not raise prices. But if tariffs had no impact on consumer prices, then Trump would not now find the need to roll them back.

“We just did a little bit of a rollback on some foods, like coffee as an example, where the prices of coffee were a little bit high. Now they’ll be on the low side in a very short period of time,” Trump admitted to reporters on Friday. (Over the last year, coffee prices increased 19 percent. Much of the US’s coffee comes from Brazil, which Trump slapped with a 50 percent tariff citing, among other reasons, an ongoing court case against former President Jair Bolsonaro over his attempted coup.)

An October CNN poll found that less than a third of Americans believe Trump has lived up to his affordability promises. More than 60 percent said he’s made this country’s economic conditions worse.

For months, President Donald Trump begged America to forget about Jeffrey Epstein. But this week a House committee released a trove of the late sex offender’s emails, and Trump’s name was all over them. Now, he’s suddenly once again very interested in figuring out who enabled or even partook in Epstein’s prolific sexual abuse of underage women—as long as the only people being investigated for crimes are Democrats.

“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out.”

On Friday, Trump directed the Department of Justice, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them.” Bondi quickly hopped on the case, announcing on X that she had assigned a prosecutor to “pursue this with urgency and integrity.”

Trump, a friend of Epstein for many years, has strenuously denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. But his Friday directive reversed the Trump administration’s previous stance that there was nothing left to see in the Epstein case: In July, Bondi’s DOJ and the FBI released a memo claiming it had exhausted all of the evidence in the government’s possession and determined that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” That move was itself a stunning reversal, angering many of Trump’s supporters who believed he would fulfill his campaign promise to release all files from the government’s Epstein investigation. After the July announcement, Trump blasted his supporters who felt betrayed as “stupid” and “foolish” for still believing in the “Jeffrey Epstein hoax.”

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers emerged to push for the full Epstein files. Following the long-awaited swearing in of Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva on Wednesday, a Democrat whose support was needed to advance the release, the House will soon vote on a bill that could compel the DOJ to release what it has. 

The emails made public on Wednesday by the House showed that Epstein once referred to Trump as “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours” at his house with a sex trafficking victim.

But Trump would rather that you not pay attention to any of that. Instead, he ordered the government’s law enforcement apparatus to target former president Bill Clinton and his treasury secretary Larry Summers, who were also mentioned in Wednesday’s document release, along with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Democratic donor. It has been widely speculated that his administration could cite the newly-launched investigation in a coming battle with Congress to forestall making any further information public.

Trump’s about-face on releasing the full Epstein files has infuriated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-Ga.), once a staunch ally of the president. Their public feud escalated on Friday, with Trump calling Greene a “ranting lunatic” on Truth Social and announcing he would be “withdrawing his support and endorsement,” suggesting he would back a primary challenger to her if the “right person runs.”

Greene issued a lengthy response on X, claiming that it was their split over the Epstein files that “sent [Trump] over the edge.”

“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out,” she wrote.

A joyous, mocking menagerie of frogs, axolotls, and at least one giant pink hippo made its way down Seventh Avenue in Manhattan on Saturday, alongside thousands of others, in a defiant protest that formed part of the nationwide “No Kings” rallies.

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With limited visibility inside hot inflatable suits, the marchers’ steps were sometimes ginger. Amphibious, reptilian, and fantastical alike were repeatedly stopped by fellow protesters, photographers, and journalists like me—making progress slow and a bit hapless, adding to the general air of absurd exuberance.

“Solidarity with Portland!” said Denise Cohen, a 59-year-old dog groomer and podcaster from upstate New York who was peering out from inside a unicorn costume, alongside her husband Marty (in a dinosaur outfit.) “I wanted frogs, but nobody had frogs,” she said, referencing the original protesters who donned the inflatables in Portland in recent months.

“I tried to get a Portland frog outfit and they were sold out until November,” said Oscar Hernandez, 58, from Weehawken, New Jersey, dressed in a giant pink rhino costume and shuffling (or perhaps dancing—hard to tell) down the street. “You know, this is fun! This is, this is America. This is not a hate America rally,” he said, referring to how Trump and his team have been representing the mass gatherings.

Rather than wearing an inflatable, financial analyst Christopher Hardwick, 46, appeared in hastily constructed drag, clutching a McDonald’s coffee, and adorned with black and yellow accessories “to make it look a little Proud Boy-y.” His goal was to reclaim the word “antifa” from the Trump administration. “I’m a big antifa girl now!”

Keith Whitmer, 70, wanted to do the same. “I really don’t want the right-wing Republican Party to take antifa—the word antifa—and make it mean something bad, because it’s actually what we’ve been doing since the 1940s.”

Last summer, vying for the White House, Trump hailed himself as “the best president for the Black population.” A little more than a year later, this claim has become downright unbelievable, precisely because of what he’s done.

In this video, I highlight this week’s Washington Post report on the Trump administration’s decision to remove Black historical images and markers from national parks and museums. As someone who has covered the rise of Black support for MAGA extensively, it hit me hard: Where are those voters now that Trump is wiping this history from the books?

Watch:

When it passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in June, Congress handed nearly $75 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some $30 billion of that money will be spent on enforcement and deportation—hiring spree incoming—and another $45 billion will go toward new detention centers, including 50 by the end of the year.

The OBBB immediately supercharged President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which already had been terrorizing immigrant communities and sending asylum seekers to a hellish prison in El Salvador. But an important part of the detention state ramp-up has flown under the radar: ICE’s increased cooperation with local law enforcement agencies.

At the end of the Biden presidency, ICE had just 135 287(g) deals in place; now there are 1,001—a 641 percent increase.

On Friday, ICE hit a new milestone: The agency has now signed more than 1,000 so-called 287(g) agreements nationwide. These agreements, which deputize local police and jails to perform certain immigration enforcement functions, have exploded under Trump. At the end of the Biden presidency, ICE had just 135 287(g) deals in place; now there are 1,001—a 641 percent increase.

About half of these agreements are what ICE calls task force agreements, which allow state and local cops to essentially act as immigration agents while fulfilling their regular police duties. If these sound familiar—and familiarly problematic—it’s because they were discontinued in 2012, following a Department of Justice investigation the year before that found widespread racial profiling by Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, then led by the notorious Joe Arpaio. The Trump administration brought task forces back this year, and ICE has signed more than 500 of these particular agreements across 33 states.

As my colleague Laura C. Morel wrote in July, Florida has led the way in signing 287(g) agreements, as part of its larger push to be a leader in Trump’s deportation efforts (see also: the Alligator Alcatraz tent city). In fact, state legislators even passed into law a bill that requires county jails and the sheriff’s offices running those facilities to participate in 287(g). Local advocates told Laura they were worried about what all this would mean for immigrant communities across Florida:

Growing cooperation between ICE and police in Florida will affect the day-to-day lives of immigrant families. “It’s not just about [an immigrant asking]: ‘What happens if I have to have an interaction with a police officer in some sort of criminal context?’” Greer says. “Living your life and existing in this community is now an extreme risk to being able to come home and see your kids, being able to come home and see your family. It is incredibly frightening.”

State cooperation with federal immigration authorities can lead to “rippling harm” on the communities that police are meant to serve and protect, says Shayna Kessler, director of the Advancing Universal Representation Initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice. “It increases distrust in law enforcement. It increases fear in immigrant communities, it decreases the ability of immigrants to take care of their families, to support the economy, and to be strong and stable members of their communities.”

The federal government is already pumping billions of dollars into Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown, unleashing masked agents all across America. But in many places, undocumented immigrants will now also have to worry that any encounter with a police officer could lead to their deportation.

Subtlety is not one of Stephen Miller’s strong suits. Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, who alternately has been called the administration’s “attack dog” and “the president’s id,” has a well-known penchant for the kind of breathless, overheated language that would make the hackiest of hacks blush. Scroll through his X feed and you’ll find some real doozies, everything from “The entire Democrat party is now operating in service of a single issue and objective: unlimited mass third world migration” to “We are living under a judicial tyranny” to “The days of China pillaging America are over.”

So it came as no surprise that he went The Full Miller in the wake of the killing of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk earlier this week. As conservative leaders, right-wing influencers, and even the federal government promised retribution on the left for its supposed complicity in and celebration of Kirk’s shooting, Miller ratcheted up the rhetoric in his own uniquely toxic way.

On Thursday morning, the day after the shooting at Utah Valley University, Miller tweeted:

There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth. Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence — violence against those uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.

We see the workings of this ideology in every posting online cheering the evil assassination that cruelly robbed this nation of one of its greatest men. Postings from those in positions of institutional authority — educators, healthcare workers, therapists, government employees — reveling in the vile and the sinister with the most chilling glee.

The fate of millions depends upon the defeat of this wicked ideology. The fate of our children, our society, our civilization hinges on it.

Now we devote ourselves, with love and unyielding determination, to finishing the indispensable work to which Charlie bravely devoted his life and gave his last measure of devotion.

We’ve come to take this sort of demonization and incendiary language for granted. But: It is not, in any way, normal. As Current Affairs wrote in a June piece titled, “The Brainless Propaganda of Stephen Miller,” “Even by the standards of right-wing rhetoric, Miller’s public statements are uncommonly shameless. He treats his audience as stupid and gullible.”

Miller’s tweet, though, was just a warm-up. Appearing on Fox News on Friday night, he threatened “all the domestic terrorists in this country spreading this evil hate”:

Stephen Miller: "The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me … we are… pic.twitter.com/j0Gumd9V5i

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 13, 2025

The message here is clear: No matter the motives and political leanings of the suspected shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, Miller and the White House see Kirk’s death as an opportunity to go on the offensive against their perceived enemies.

How wide a net will they cast? For now, it’s still unclear. But a tweet on Saturday morning suggests Miller sees foes in every corner of American society:

In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority—child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov’t workers, even DOD employees—have been deeply and violently radicalized. The consequence of a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) September 13, 2025