Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2025 från Mother Jones

On the Cover London-based artist LOUISE ZERGAENG POMEROY mixes hand-drawn lines and digital color into stark, striking images—like this issue’s cover, on the grim promise of Trump’s return. Contributors Where do we go from here? 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.…

KEYES, CALIFORNIA, a working-class town 80 miles south of Sacramento, is not the kind of place where a Republican traditionally spends the precious final week of a close campaign. Yet six days before the election, John Duarte, the district’s incumbent GOP congressman, was there going door to door to make his case. About two-thirds of Keyes’ roughly 6,000 residents are Latino, and Duarte was hoping to capitalize on data showing their startling decrease in support for Democrats. The largely positive reception he got, and the ensuing election results, suggests he was right to try. In Latino-majority counties across the country, Donald Trump won—big. Along the US-Mexico border in Texas, he became the first Republican since 1896 to win Starr County, which is 97 percent Latino. Hillary Clinton and her Democratic…

DANIEL ESPINOZA first saw his future wife from across the room at a dim Las Vegas casino. It was New Year’s Eve 2014, and a beautiful woman with big brown eyes and dirty-blond hair was playing slots. Espinoza, a construction worker and party boy who was about to turn 30, sat down next to her. Julia was bubbly and confident, and, Espinoza soon found out, made her living as an escort. Their relationship quickly went from “zero to a hundred,” says Espinoza. A month after they met, she had effectively moved into his Las Vegas apartment. A couple of days later, she brought home two Chihuahuas: Skinny Mini for her and Fatty for him. Soon after, the couple traveled to the Mexican village where Espinoza grew up, and he introduced…

Trauma and Recovery Judith Herman’s 1992 classic argues trauma can’t be isolated from its social conditions, immersing readers in the feminist activism that raised awareness of the political context of rape and reformed the laws around it. What My Bones Know Stephanie Foo’s 2022 memoir guides fellow survivors through her healing journey, which includes understanding the context of her Chinese Malaysian ancestry and Asian diaspora upbringing. The End of Trauma George Bonanno’s 2021 book serves up a controversial take, backed by extensive data, that horrible experiences don’t usually traumatize us—and argues that we are already experts in moving forward.…

Al Letson: I had a good conversation with my [youngest] son, who is 20, and him and I were talking about who his friends were voting for. He was telling me that a lot of them like Trump…And I was like, “Why do they like Trump?” He said they like Trump because he’s tough, because he acts tough, because things like that picture of his mugshot or the picture of him getting shot at and him throwing his fist up in the air. For their generation, that’s like Tupac getting shot and throwing the middle finger in the air. For my generation, that was classic. That was defiance. That was like, “You can’t take me out.” And so, Trump basically kind of took a page from Tupac. Garrison Hayes: Yeah,…

Joel Langton, a 60-year-old Air Force vet, prepares to distribute newspapers to the border town of Del Rio, Texas. He started a weekly print version of the news site 830 Times to keep the community informed after the longtime local newspaper closed in 2020. According to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative, there are four counties within two hours of Del Rio that have no local news sources. Photographer Sara Hylton traveled to Texas to investigate how news deserts can undermine democracy.…

FOR DECADES, McLean Bible Church has served as the place of worship for many of DC’s Republican elite. The sprawling evangelical megachurch in Vienna, Virginia, boasts a roster of former parishioners that includes everyone from Ken Starr to Mike Pence. Donald Trump once dropped in after a round of golf. McLean Bible is also where, in 2017, a senior pastor named Dale Sutherland formed a nonprofit called Act2Impact, described in state records as an “auxiliary” of the church that would “preach the gospel” and “conduct evangelistic and humanitarian outreach.” That mission was short-lived. Two years later, Sutherland—once an undercover narcotics officer in DC—left McLean Bible and filed papers to rename Act2Impact. It became the Constitutional Defense Fund (CDF), which would “promote and secure” constitutional rights. “We aim to defend and…

LUCHIA BROWN USED to bomb around Denver in her Subaru. She had places to be. Brown, 57, works part time helping to run her husband’s engineering firm while managing a rental apartment above their garage and an Airbnb out of a section of the couple’s three-story brick house. She volunteers for nonprofits, sometimes offering input to city committees, often on transportation policy. “I’m a professional good troublemaker,” she jokes when we meet in her sun-soaked backyard one fine spring day. She’s also an environmentally conscious type who likes the idea of driving less. Brown bought a regular bike years ago, but mainly used it just for neighborhood jaunts. “I’m not uber-fit,” she says. “I’m not a slug, but I’m not one of the warriors in Lycra, and I don’t really…

IT FEELS STRANGE to suggest that the second-most memorable thing that happened on a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024 was the former and future president of the United States getting shot in the face. But after Donald Trump’s victory on election night, the image that was seared in my mind was that of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, jumping around the same stage a few months later—eyes weirdly vacant, a black MAGA hat perched awkwardly on his head, his legs and arms outstretched in the shape of a knotted and overgrown X. Musk had been a public Trump supporter since the summer, and a not-so-subtle conservative sympathizer for far longer. He was already pouring tens of millions of dollars into an unusual field campaign in key swing states.…

MR. SMITH, please come in, have a seat. Our records show you’ve been with the State Department for 17 years, the past five in the Bureau of National Security and Nonproliferation. Now it has come to our attention through an anonymous tip to the America First Compliance Program that you made a derogatory comment about the president. A subsequent internal investigation discovered your wife donated $125 to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Through further inquiry—with the assistance of the TrumpX social media team—we located a deleted post from your daughter’s timeline that included a photograph of her and your wife knocking on doors in west Philadelphia for Kamala Harris. Under the new Loyal Americans in Government executive order, we are terminating your employment as of this moment. As you might know,…

WITH THE ELECTION of Donald Trump, we’re in for a climate catastrophe. We know because we’re in that crisis now, already. We just don’t talk about it all that much, mostly because we don’t like to admit what it means. Many of us recognize on some level that we’ve moved into a world of superstorms and rising seas; droughts and failed crops; deluges and floods; megafires and orange skies full of gagging smoke; life-threatening heat waves and blackouts; invasive insects spreading infectious diseases, and the loss of native ecosystems. We may try to tune it out, but we know it’s bad. But what hasn’t sunk in is that we built this country for physical conditions that no longer exist. We’ve experienced a discontinuity with the past, a threshold where what…

THE FIRST THING the neighbors on Newport’s Bellevue Avenue complained about was the helipad. The 2-mile stretch of Rhode Island coast has long been a playground for America’s billionaires, lined with lavish, historic mansions. But for as long as most could remember, old money had meant an untouchable kind of peace, not the thunderous noise of a chopper. Now the New Yorkers who’d bought 646 Bellevue—a Gilded Age estate known as Miramar—had turned a patch of grass on their 8 acres of oceanfront land into their very own LaGuardia, and folks weren’t happy about it. “Having Sikorskys land in the neighborhood does seem contextually off, noisy, and potentially unsafe,” one neighbor emailed to another. They didn’t even ask Newport’s zoning board, she’d heard. Her concern, she emphasized, was “the character,…

“YOU HAVE TO read this book,” my new psychologist informed me. As a teenager, I was raped by a hostel employee. For years after, I spent every waking moment trying to avoid the gruesome memories—which instead haunted me at night. I wanted nothing more than to share my story, certain that I’d feel immediate relief. But my therapist stopped me. “Talking about it will retraumatize you,” she said, suggesting that instead I tap on acupressure points while repeating a mantra. Both her admonition not to discuss the assault and her kooky alternative treatment came straight out of the book she said I had to read: The Body Keeps the Score. It is impossible to exaggerate the book’s popularity. Published in 2014, its author, Bessel van der Kolk, has become like…

DANI IZZIE, A WHEELCHAIR user with quadriplegia, tried to take public transit, as she usually does, when visiting Miami in 2022. Heading to catch a bus, Izzie came to the end of a street without curb cuts—meaning she couldn’t safely cross it to the bus stop. She tried to get an accessible taxi, but none were available. The door-to-door paratransit service wasn’t an option, since it needs advance scheduling. It ultimately took a call to police, who helped her down the curb. This wasn’t the first time, says Izzie, that “the absurdity of one little oversight” limited her autonomy and mobility. The real estate website Redfin’s Walk Score rates Miami the sixth-most walkable large city in the United States. But its methodology, Redfin confirmed to me, does not account for…