Indholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2025 i Mother Jones

On the Cover The playful style of Utah-based Tyler Comrie mixes photography, typography, and illustration—and his cover for this issue, on Trump’s enemies list, scores a bull’s-eye. Contributors What do you want to see more coverage of in 2025? By the Numbers   To see our masthead, visit motherjones.com/about. For questions about your subscription or to make a tax-deductible donation to support our journalism, call (800) 438-6656. To advertise or for other questions, call (415) 321-1700.…

  IN AUGUST 2015, Donald Trump sat down with Bill O’Reilly to talk about two central campaign promises: the mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants and the rollback of birthright citizenship. “Our country is going to hell,” Trump said. “We have to start a process where we take back our country.” O’Reilly found the plan ridiculous. Such a colossal and expensive undertaking, the conservative host said, was just “not going to happen.” Perhaps the most obvious reason, he said, was the 14th Amendment. “If you’re born here, you’re an American—period! Period!” O’Reilly almost screamed. “You can’t kick Americans out.” Trump was unconvinced. “Many lawyers are saying that’s not the way it is,” he insisted. The president’s view then, and now, is that the American children of undocumented immigrants should…

Whistleblowers are likely to be targeted by the Trump administration. Mark Zaid has represented several of them, including the intelligence official who reported that Trump pressed Ukraine’s president to find political dirt on Joe Biden in exchange for military aid that Congress had already approved—a report that led to Trump’s first impeachment. EVERYTHING WE know about Donald Trump shows that he is prone to retaliate. The concern now is that the Supreme Court decision on the January 6 prosecution has given him near or full immunity for any presidential-type action. If he strips security clearances, he’s protected. If he orders an IRS audit of his critics, he’s protected. It is such a broad mandate that, hypothetically, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and he would be potentially legally protected…

Over her years as a civil rights lawyer and reproductive justice pioneer, Lynn Paltrow came to believe claims of fetal personhood posed the biggest threat to reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. Today, post-Dobbs, she predicts anti-abortion groups will be pushing for personhood harder as a way to take away pregnant people’s rights. What were the cases that made you understand the implications of the idea that a fetus is a separate legal person from its mother? There were two. The first was the criminal prosecution of Pamela Rae Stewart in 1986—a poor white woman near San Diego whose baby was severely compromised and died five weeks after birth. One factor in the charges was that she had allegedly used criminalized drugs during pregnancy—marijuana and amphetamines, but prosecutors ultimately admitted that…

DONALD TRUMP is assembling a government the likes of which the United States has never seen. He has tapped five reported billionaires for Cabinet posts: former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for interior secretary, hedge funder Scott Bessent for treasury secretary, Cantor Fitzgerald chief Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary, wrestling magnate Linda McMahon for education secretary (I know, just roll with it), and ex-Sen. Kelly Loeffler—wife of former New York Stock Exchange Chair Jeffrey Sprecher—for small business administrator. Those appointments are almost normal compared with the billionaires Trump is installing elsewhere. After Elon Musk spent a quarter-billion dollars to get him and his allies elected, Trump made the world’s richest man co-chair of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, where, despite being one of the government’s largest contractors, Musk…

The reelected former president has vowed to “APPOINT A REAL SPECIAL ‘PROSECUTOR’ TO GO AFTER” Joe Biden; arrest Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg; lock up Hillary Clinton; send Clinton’s longtime aide Huma Abedin to “jail!”; prosecute John Kerry; investigate MSNBC host Joe Scarborough; send former President Barack Obama to jail; send flag burners to prison; prosecute Kamala Harris; prosecute Nancy Pelosi for her husband’s stock market dealings; prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James for bringing a case alleging widespread fraud by Trump’s businesses; prosecute former FBI Director James Comey; prosecute former Trump attorney Michael Cohen “for lying and all of the tumult”; look into treason charges against former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley (noting that in the past “the punishment would have been DEATH!”); look…

MELISSA TURNAGE approached the 12-year-old girl with the imposing affect of a cop: arms crossed, lips pursed, badge visible, tone skeptical. “So, you don’t know how many times this has happened this week?” Taylor Cadle slouched on a couch, staring at her lap and picking at her nails. That morning, in the summer of 2016, she had gotten into a fight with her adoptive parents when they took away her phone on the ride to their church on the outskirts of Tampa, Florida. A minister’s wife, noticing Taylor’s tear-stained face, pulled her into an office to ask what was going on. Taylor hadn’t been planning to tell her everything, but it all came spilling out. The minister called the police, and now Turnage, a detective with the Polk County Sheriff’s…

BACK IN 2007, I visited San Quentin to see GRIP, a prison program created by my friend Jacques Verduin. The men had all been violent criminals, and all had been incarcerated for years, even for decades. I was a working journalist; I sat and listened, my reporter’s curiosity and detachment often replaced by a kind of awe. Unlike many prison programs, this one seemed to transform lives for good. I never imagined I would return, and not as an observer but as a member of one such group, Tribe 864. But in late September 2019, a month after my 26-year-old son, Ben, drove to the Golden Gate Bridge, vaulted over the 4-foot guardrail, and plunged to his death, Verduin suggested that I go back to San Quentin to work through…

EVERY MORNING, Nick Voyles jumps in his car and hustles to a methadone clinic in a nearby strip mall. As he walks up to the glass partition that separates him from the nurse—and his daily dose of America’s most regulated drug—his mind starts racing: What if this takes forever and I’m late for work? What if I can’t pee while I’m being watched? “I’m scared the entire time,” he says. “I’m called to the window and I’m just waiting to see what will happen.” For Voyles, the executive director of the Indiana Recovery Alliance, a harm-reduction organization based in Bloomington, methadone has been a lifesaver and a stabilizer. “I bought a house. I married the woman I love,” Voyles told me on a rainy day as we sat on mismatched…

In his first term, Donald Trump expanded immigration enforcement, including directing ICE to increase workplace raids. Geographer Leah Montange researches the effects of these raids on communities and is active in the immigrant justice movement in the Pacific Northwest. She explains how ICE tracked immigrants last time—and how the impact of such raids reaches far beyond immigrant enclaves. ICE WILL DO THIS groundwork. They identify an apartment building to pick people off, maybe as they’re going from their apartments to their cars or work. They put a pair of ICE officers at the port where people were harvesting shellfish—or outside the trailer park where undocumented people lived. And they wait. There was an incident in Washington state’s Pacific County that was particularly insidious—and part of what instigated community protection and…

In 2024, Trump repeatedly threatened to deport pro-Palestine students. “Any student that protests,” he told supporters, “I [will] throw them out of the country.” That would include Momodou Taal, a British Gambian PhD student in Africana Studies at Cornell. Last September, the university temporarily suspended him—which could have led to a revocation of his visa and deportation—after Taal and other students disrupted a career fair that featured weapons manufacturers that contract extensively with Israel. (The university alleged that Taal had shoved a police officer, a charge he denies.) After a public pressure campaign, Cornell backed down. But some conservative groups have said that Trump should still revoke his student visa and deport him. Here’s how Taal is thinking about the new administration. IN MANY WAYS, Trump is unpredictable. But given…

Remember “Sharpiegate”? Back in September 2019, then-President Trump appeared to alter the path of Hurricane Dorian—at least on paper, with a marker. Craig McLean, who had been at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for nearly 40 years, was the acting chief scientist and head of NOAA Research. Objecting to the controversy contributed to his demotion. He explains what he anticipates for Trump’s second term. DORIAN WAS A nasty hurricane. It took lives in the Caribbean and the Bahamas and was making a move toward the Florida Panhandle. Days out, there was a small chance of tropical storm–force winds in Alabama. The National Weather Service forecasted, correctly, that the storm was going to make a hard right turn and certainly not impact the people of Alabama. But Trump tweets something…

ON THE FIRST brisk night of fall in Los Angeles, the self-described surrealist blues poet aja monet emerges onstage at the El Rey Theatre, an art deco movie house turned concert venue, to rapturous applause. Flanked by a double bassist, a saxophonist, a keyboard player, and a drummer, monet stares out in disbelief at the packed room. “I can’t believe y’all came,” she says to the crowd of roughly 500 people, visibly humbled. Moments later, she kicks off the show with a poem titled “why my love?” which wends its way through a sumptuous jazz groove. About midway through the song, monet begins to cry out “why” on loop, evoking a distinctly different emotion with each repetition, oscillating from care to frustration to elation. With nary a phone outside a…