Weekend Fox News host Pete Hegseth has already been an exceedingly controversial choice as Donald Trump’s pick for his Secretary of Defense. Hegseth and the Trump camp have spent recent days pushing back against two simultaneous controversies: allegations that Hegseth has “extremist” tattoos, as some critics have charged, and news broken by Vanity Fair on Thursday that Hegseth was previously investigated by police in California over a sexual misconduct claim. Hegseth has denied the allegations and no charges were ever filed against him. 

Hegseth is a veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lately, media scrutiny has focused on his tattoos, one of which depicts a Jerusalem cross, a Christian symbol first popularized during the Crusades, and one that reads “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” in Latin), which refers to divine providence. A slogan for Catholics during the First Crusade, this phrase has more recently been chanted by white supremacists and co-opted by the far right. 

Hegseth confirmed in a November interview with a podcaster that he was one of 12 National Guard members removed from working at Joe Biden’s inauguration after vetting by the FBI and U.S. military, adding: “I was deemed an extremist because of a tattoo by my National Guard unit in Washington, D.C., and my orders were revoked to guard the Biden inauguration.” A fellow National Guardsmen, DeRicko Gaither, confirmed to CBS that he’d reported Hegseth as being a possible “insider threat” due to the Deus Vult tattoo.  

The other controversy is fresh: journalist Gabriel Sherman reported on Thursday that Hegseth was investigated by Monterey Park police in 2017 over an allegation of sexual misconduct. He was not arrested or charged with a crime. 

On Thursday afternoon, a federal bankruptcy judge in Texas ordered an evidentiary hearing to review the auction process that resulted in Infowars being sold to satire site the Onion, saying he wanted to ensure the “process and transparency” of the sale. Infowars’ founder, the conspiracy mega-entrepreneur Alex Jones, has unsurprisingly declared that the auction process was “rigged” and vowed that the review process will return the site to him, while the Onion’s CEO told Mother Jones and other news outlets that the sale is proceeding. For reasons that no one has yet explained, attorneys for X, formerly known as Twitter, the social media giant now owned by Elon Musk, entered an appearance during the hearing and asked to be included on any future communications about the case.

“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said during a live broadcast on X. After Infowars was seized and the site shut down, Jones promptly began operating under the name and branding of a new venture, dubbed the Alex Jones Network, which streams on X. Jones noted that lawyers for X were present at the hearing, adding, somewhat mysteriously, “The cavalry is here. Trump is pissed.” (He later elaborated that “Trump knows I’m one of his biggest defenders.”)

“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said.

An attorney who entered an appearance for X didn’t respond to a request for comment; nor did X’s press office. Onion CEO Ben Collins, previously a journalist at NBC News covering disinformation, told Mother Jones on Friday morning, “We won the bid. The idea that he was just going to walk away from this gracefully without doing this sort of thing is funny in itself.” In a statement reprinted by Variety and other outlets, Collins said that the sale is “currently underway, pending standard processes.” Collins had said previously that the plan was to relaunch Infowars as a satirized version of itself in January.

As Donald Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second term, the reasons people voted him into office are becoming more clear. 

For Micki Witthoeft, it’s cause for celebration. Her daughter, Ashli Babitt, was shot and killed by a police officer after storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Today, Witthoeft is confident Trump will stand by his word and pardon everyone involved. 

“He said his administration’s going to be one on ‘promises made and promises kept,’ ” she said. “I felt like he was talking right to me.”

But it’s not the same sentiment for all voters. This week, the Reveal team looks at the many contradictions behind Trump’s victory, with stories from hosts Hanna Rosin and Lauren Ober of the new podcast from The Atlantic, We Live Here Now; Mother Jones reporter Tim Murphy; and Reveal producer Najib Aminy. The show delves into January 6ers seeking pardons, “messy middle” voters who split their ballots, and members of the Uncommitted movement who wouldn’t vote for Kamala Harris despite being opposed to Trump.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Some of the votes Americans cast on Tuesday that may have mattered most for the climate were quite a bit down-ballot from the presidential ticket: A handful of states held elections for the commissions that regulate utilities, and thereby exercise direct control over what sort of energy mix will fuel the coming years’ expected growth in electricity demand. In three closely watched races around the country—the utility commissions in Arizona, Montana, and Louisiana—Republican candidates either won or are in the lead. While they generally pitched themselves to voters as market-friendly, favoring an all-of-the-above approach to energy, clean energy advocates interviewed by Grist cast these candidates as deferential to the power companies they aspired to regulate.

Arizona is, in a word, sunny. Its geography makes it “the famously obvious place to build solar,” said Caroline Spears, executive director of Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit that works to get clean energy advocates elected. But its utilities have built just a sliver of the potential solar energy that there is room for in the state—and the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates the state’s investor-owned utilities, is partly to blame for that. That commission’s most recent goal for renewable energy, set in 2007, was an unambitious 15 percent to be reached by 2025. “Their goals are worse than where Texas currently is and where Iowa currently is on clean energy,” Spears said. What’s more, the current slate of commissioners is in the process of considering whether to ditch that goal altogether.

Louisiana’s Public Service Commission is described as “one of the most reviled utilities in the country by its customers.”

Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.

Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.

In May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” 

This is more than just bluster. Reuters reported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.” 

Public health experts, physicians, and scientists responded with fury and disgust to the news that President-elect Donald Trump will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the secretary of health and human services. If Kennedy—who has also promoted dangerous and ludicrous ideas about fluoride, 5G technology, and the causes of HIV/AIDS, among innumerable other pseudoscientific claims—assumes the position, “the damage he could do is near infinite,” warns Dr. Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist.

“He will do great harm—generational harm.”

The scope of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is immense: It sits over 13 other agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Indian Health Service.

Kennedy, an environmental attorney by training with no background or credentials in medical or public health, is the founder of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense. He became one of the loudest voices in the anti-vaccine movement when he began falsely claiming nearly 20 years ago that the shots are tied to autism.

In the days before the election, when too many stories about deadlocked polls and undecided voters and the MAGAfication of young men began to wear on my soul, I turned to TikTok to see what women were thinking. Soon enough I was swimming in a sea of female excitement and angst. I watched videos of ordinary women of all ages and races—in deep blue districts and deep red ones—describing what this election meant to them. Women who had just voted, sitting in their cars and sobbing about what it would mean to elect the first female president, what it would mean to defeat a vitriolically sexist candidate who’s been found liable for sexually assaulting one woman and who stands accused by dozens more, whose campaign gleefully demeaned women as “trash” and “childless cat ladies.” What it would mean to elect someone who’d spent the last three months, and the two years before that, connecting reproductive freedom to economic concerns. What it would mean to elect someone taking the stress of caring for both kids and parents seriously, who recognizes the housing crisis is hurting all but the richest, who has more than a concept of a plan for how to address such problems.

I watched one young woman driving 10 hours to her home state because her absentee ballot never arrived, muttering “10 and 2, 10 and 2” as she stared out at the road ahead. I watched women flying across the country to vote. I watched women take part in the “They both reached for the gun” Chicago meme as they talked about canceling out the vote of their Trump-supporting father, brother, or husband. Or bragging on husbands or dads whose vote they didn’t have to cancel. One who said she wouldn’t have to cancel out her husband’s vote because he’d forget to do it if she didn’t remind him.

One woman told of breaking off her engagement when she found out her fiancé was for Trump. (“I can’t share my life with someone who is going to vote in that direction…Ladies, we need to stick together.”) I watched as young woman after young woman testified that they’d never, ever consider dating anyone who voted for Trump. I watched as women who were in middle or high school in 2016 reacted in horror at seeing, for the first time, Trump bragging on an Access Hollywood bus about grabbing women by the pussy and moving on them “like a bitch,” or stalking Hillary Clinton around a debate stage, or seeing the testimonies of the more than 25 women who have reported being sexually assaulted by him. “Dads voted for this?” read one incredulous caption.

There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women.

When the Fair Labor Standards Act was signed into law in 1938, first establishing a national minimum wage, it came with an exemption: employers could pay some disabled workers less than minimum wage. The federal exemption still stands, even as many states roll back their versions—and that wage can still be as little as 25 cents an hour.

25 states have since introduced or enacted legislation to phase out this outdated practice. Defenders of the 14(c) certificate program often argue that the disabled workers it covers, most of whom have intellectual and developmental disabilities, just wouldn’t get a job elsewhere.

A study published today in JAMA Health Forum by University of Pennsylvania researchers refutes that argument. Its authors found that in two states—New Hampshire and Maryland—that banned the practice, employment rates for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, such as people who are autistic, either increased or didn’t change when employers had to pay them an equal wage.

Neurologist Mihir Kakara, the study’s lead author, says the finding “points towards the fact that these people are able to work in equal-paying, fully integrated jobs as their peers who do not have a disability, given the right resources.”

On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced former Fox News host Pete Hegseth was his pick for secretary of defense. The choice is iconoclastic to say the least. Although Hegseth served as an Army National Guard officer, he has no experience in government leadership that could inform the management of the federal government’s largest agency.

What Hegseth does have are connections to the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.

Last year, the magazine Nashville Christian Family ran a profile of Hegseth, in which he mentioned being a member of a “Bible and book study” that focused on the book My Life for Yours by Doug Wilson, the 71-year-old unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros. Patriarch is the right word: When I interviewed Wilson a few months ago, he said that he, like many other TheoBros, believes women never should have been given the right to vote.

Wilson presides over a small fiefdom in Moscow, Idaho, where he is the head pastor of the flagship church of the denomination he helped found, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). In Moscow, Wilson has also helped to establish a college, a printing press, and a classical Christian school. In addition to his Moscow ventures, Wilson is also extremely online—he blogs, he posts on social media, and he makes slickly produced YouTube videos. Once a fringe figure, famous mostly among reformed Christians, last year Wilson’s star power brightened considerably in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and a speaking slot at the National Conservatism conference alongside then Ohio senator, now vice president-elect, JD Vance.  

At a rally Saturday in Gastonia, North Carolina, Donald Trump thanked God for an October jobs report that showed a slow-down in job growth due in part to the recent hurricane that decimated the western part of the state.

“How good was that?” Trump asked the crowd. “To get those numbers four days before the vote was…” Trump said, trailing off. Then he paused and looked upward, presumably to God, who he told: “Thank you very much sir. Thank you.”

“He’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the US economy added just 12,000 jobs in October. Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su attributed the slow growth to “significant impacts from hurricanes and strike activity.” That’s a reference to Hurricanes Helene and Milton and an ongoing strike by Boeing machinists. Noting the unemployment rate remains at 4.1 percent and inflation is falling, Su said the jobs report “reflects an atypical month rather than a shift in the broader economic outlook.”

Donald Trump is amplifying attacks on the media in the final days of the campaign, broadly threatening retaliation against the industry for coverage critical of him.

“To make America great you really have to get the news shaped up,” Trump told Fox News Saturday morning.

During a rally in North Carolina later that day, Trump called journalists covering the event “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.”

During the Fox News interview, Trump attacked several outlets. He called ABC News “corrupt,” renewing his gripe that the network’s David Muir during a September debate had correctly noted that that FBI data shows violent crime declining, contradicting Trump’s erroneous claims that it was “through the roof.”

Donald Trump has an enemies list. The Sierra Club has an allies list—some 259,000 Pennsylvanians who could decide the election.

They have demonstrated concern for the climate crisis, the clean energy transition, and the environment—but they are young, or newly registered, or do not regularly vote. “These voters can be critical,” says Sarah Burton, the Sierra Club’s national political director. “But they often need extra pushes to get out and actually vote.”

So the Sierra Club is enlisting a vast cadre of volunteers to turn them out. People are gathering in dining rooms across the state and in zoom calls nation-wide to write postcards and make phone calls. As of Thursday, they’d contacted about 100,000 people on the club’s list.

“The only thing that defeats Trump and MAGA Republicans is collective action, and in my mind, specifically collective action on climate. There is such a potential there. I think it’s really exciting,” Burton says.

With the election on everyone’s mind, it’s a good moment to revisit a consequential election from the past. No, we’re not talking about 2016. Let’s go way further back—to what’s considered the only successful coup d’etat in US history. 

In the late 1800s, Wilmington, North Carolina, was a city where African Americans thrived economically and held elected office. This did not sit well with white supremacists, who during the election of 1898 used violence to intimidate voters and overthrow the elected government.

The leader of the coup, a former Confederate colonel named Alfred Moore Waddell, gave a speech in which he told white people: “If you see the Negro out voting tomorrow, tell him to stop. If he doesn’t, shoot him down. Shoot him down in his tracks.”

The idea that women might vote differently from their husbands made Fox News star Jesse Watters’ brain melt live on air this week.

Referring to his current wife, Watters, with his trademark smirk, told his colleagues on The Five, “If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair.” This, from a man who admitted to his employer in 2017 that he was in a relationship with a colleague 14 years his junior—something that reportedly led to his divorce from his first wife. “What else is she keeping from me?” Jesse mused, prompting guffaws from his fellow panelists.

Beyond hypocrisy, Mother Jones creator Kat Abughazaleh argues that Watters’ reaction reveals the fierce undercurrent of sexist resentment coursing through this year’s campaign, typified by Donald Trump, who just this week ominously vowed to protect women, “whether the women like it or not.”

It’s an issue that Democrats and their anti-Trump allies have been eager to highlight, including former congresswoman and top Harris campaigner Liz Cheney, who told CBS’ Face the Nation on Wednesday, “I think you’re going to have, frankly, a lot of men and women who will go into the voting booth and will vote their conscience, will vote for Vice President Harris.”

After all shouting and debating, all the billions in ads, and all the fury, the 2024 election will determine whether this nation remains committed to its imperfect democracy or slides toward fascism, whether the politics of hate, grievance, paranoia, fear, and racism triumphs or those of community and inclusion, whether women’s freedoms are curtailed or protected, whether climate change is ignored or addressed, whether the privilege of plutocrats is enhanced or challenged, whether millions of Americans are deported or granted a path forward. But the election will also determine whether Americans live in a world of facts or one of false narratives. It will tell us if America is reality-based.

Donald Trump, as a politician, is a creature of reality television. And reality TV is not real. It is designed to convey the impression of verisimilitude. But the story lines are concocted. The editing is manipulative. The goal is to orchestrate human interactions that can then be turned into compelling, don’t-touch-that-dial stories. They need not be true; they often aren’t. The trick is to fool the viewer into believing they are—or at least to persuade the audience go along with the ruse.

That’s what happened with Trump and The Apprentice, the NBC show he starred in for 14 years. Prior to its appearance, Trump was in a slump as a businessman, having gone bust in Atlantic City as a casino owner and moving from the development of large real estate projects to licensing his name as a brand. The show created a new reality for Trump, depicting him as a hyper-successful billionaire with razor-sharp intuition.

John Miller, a former marketing executive for NBC, recently noted that the network forged a “false narrative for Donald Trump as a big businessman.” Explaining this, he said, “Clearly we had to make something bigger than it was.” That something was Trump. He added, “If people think that he’s the person [to best handle the economy] because he was a great businessman, that is a false narrative. We did it for the show. But it became very dangerous now for the country.”

In early April, Trex Proffitt opened his mail-in primary ballot and saw that no Democrats were running for state senate in Pennsylvania’s 13th district.

It made sense: The district, which covers the city of Lancaster and its surrounding suburbs, has been represented by Republicans for over a century. The incumbent, Scott Martin, is vocally anti-abortion and the sponsor of a bill banning instruction around gender identity and sexual orientation in elementary schools. Martin won a decisive eleven-point victory against a well-funded challenger in 2020. The odds for Democrats have likely gotten slimmer after the district was redrawn in 2022 to include more rural areas.  

But Proffitt, a 56-year-old history teacher at a small Quaker school, still felt something could be done. He decided to run against Martin, winning a write-in campaign to become the Democratic nominee for state senate. After a personal tragedy, Proffitt wanted to center LGBTQ rights in his campaign—even in a reliably Republican district.

In 2019, Proffitt’s son George, who was transgender, died at the age of 20 from a drug overdose. George loved folk punk music and was active in the local LGBTQ community. He had struggled for years with depression and suicidality, but he seemed to be doing better before his death.

Elon Musk’s obsessive quest to get Donald Trump into the White House has taken a desperate turn. On Thursday, the tech CEO tweeted to more than 20o million followers that he’s offering $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign his pro-Trump petition.

This $100 deal is an expansion of a previous bargain he levied with swing state voters earlier this year, where he offered $47 to any voters located in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina who’d be willing to refer a friend to the petition.

However, this $100 special offer is exclusively for Pennsylvanians.

Every four years, the presidential election brings with it a perennial question about an essential voting bloc: Who will Black voters turn out for? 

Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes has spent months on the campaign trail talking to Black voters about how they see the goals and limits of their own political power. He paid special attention to Black Republicans, including a new crop of Black supporters of former President Donald Trump. 

This week on Reveal, we hear from voters at the Republican National Convention, a graduate from a historically Black university whose star is rising on the right after appearing in a viral video hugging Trump at a Chick-fil-A, and a Republican organizing other Black voters to turn out for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Right for America, a super PAC financed by a handful of billionaires that supports Donald Trump, recently released an ad that promotes Trump’s various tax proposals and celebrates American workers, particularly those who put in overtime. It’s full of photos and videos supposedly showing overtime workers—the “hardest working citizens in our country”—including a welder, a truck driver, and a hospital worker. Yet many of these shots are stock footage or photos of workers in foreign countries, and the ad is misleading overall, leaving out Trump’s past opposition to compensating employees who work overtime.

The 30-second spot, which is being aired in swing states, hails Trump’s vow to end taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime pay. Not surprisingly, it avoids fundamental facts about these proposals. Budget experts have pointed out that eliminating taxes on Social Security would lead to Social Security and Medicare becoming insolvent earlier than what’s now forecast and increase the national deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. Suspending the tax on overtime would cost $1.7 trillion over a decade. Ending taxes on tips is not likely to help most workers who depend on tips—many are low-income earners who don’t pay much in taxes—and could cause an assortment of problems.

There are two ridiculous aspects to the ad: The depiction of Trump as a champion of overtime workers and its incorporation of images of non-American workers. When Trump was president, his administration cut back a rule proposed by the Obama administration to compel businesses to provide overtime compensation to about 4.1 million workers. The Trump Labor Department rule covered only 1.3 million, screwing nearly 3 million American workers. The business community had fought fiercely against the Obama proposal, and Trump came to its rescue. As ABC News put it in a headline, “New overtime rules a ‘win for corporate executives,’ economists say.”

And as a businessman, Trump has been no champion of overtime workers. At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, last month, Trump discussed his experience as a businessman with overtime. “I know a lot about overtime,” he said. “I hated to give overtime.” He recalled that he would employ new workers to replace those who were supposed to work overtime. “I shouldn’t say this,” he added, “but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay. I hated it.”

This week, soon after his 100th birthday, former President Jimmy Carter was able to vote in his home state of Georgia—in part thanks to protections under the Voting Rights Act. As his grandson Jason Carter explained in a CNN interview with Jake Tapper, voting assistance protections in Georgia allow family members to help cast absentee ballots (the vote can still be discarded if a signature or mark on the ballot does not match what is on file, per Georgia law).

“He sat down and told everybody what he wanted to do, and was excited about it,” Jason Carter told Tapper. “My aunt dropped his ballot [at] an absentee drop box, just like thousands and thousands of other Georgians.”

Jimmy Carter just voted. His grandson explains how. pic.twitter.com/Ax1Ulvt9RR

Even if Carter doesn’t consider himself disabled, many aging people benefit from disability rights laws and protections. Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act guarantees that “any voter who requires assistance to vote by reason of blindness, disability, or inability to read or write may be given assistance by a person of the voter’s choice.”