A protest camp in the small border town of Lochiel, Arizona, is seeking to stop federal contractors from building another portion of President Trump’s border barrier with Mexico. At the center of the protest camp is a 200-year-old cottonwood known as a “grandmother” tree, with activists sitting in the tree to physically stop its destruction.

“People are successfully forcing the government to stop, to slow down, or at least change course on border wall construction,” says journalist John Washington, a staff writer for the queer news outlet Lookout and author of multiple books about immigration. “They’ve been very clear that this is both an environmental and a political fight.”

The Trump administration has paused construction of border infrastructure in Big Bend National Park in Texas following public criticism of the controversial project. Crews were filmed bulldozing pristine desert wilderness earlier this month, sparking rare bipartisan pushback. The construction is part of a larger plan for the Big Bend region to build hundreds of miles of walls, vehicle barriers and other border infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security waived requirements that federal contractors comply with a broad slate of environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act, to proceed with construction in the national park.

“I think the administration made such a massive miscalculation when they sicced their bulldozers on this great American national park,” says Laiken Jordahl, a national public lands advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. Laiken says the movement to protect Big Bend cuts across partisan and ideological lines and is “a force to be reckoned with.”

We speak with Brendan Ballou, CEO of the Public Integrity Project, which is part of a lawsuit against President Donald Trump over his plan to monetize access to his social media platform Truth Social, where he routinely makes market-moving announcements. Truth API went live on August 1 and already has subscribers. Truth Social is charging up to $100,000 per month for early access to the president’s posts, giving investors an edge on major news events.

“It’s profoundly corrupt,” says Ballou. “The government can’t discriminate who it gives information to based on who they are, what they believe, what they’re willing to pay the president.”

We look at major media news with Jessica González, co-CEO of the advocacy organization Free Press. She discusses the landmark lawsuit against Meta for making its social media platforms addictive for young people, efforts to halt the Paramount-Warner Bros. megamerger, and Disney’s lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission over what it calls the Trump administration’s “retaliatory campaign” against the ABC television network.

González says President Donald Trump’s “authoritarian takeover attempt of our media system” must be opposed.

President Trump’s son-in-law and envoy Jared Kushner met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Monday after Israel rejected a 15-point plan for Gaza promoted by President Trump’s “Board of Peace.” The proposal would have seen Hamas gradually disarm and turn over governance of Gaza to an international force in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from the besieged territory.

Israel, supported by Kushner, is pushing for a deal whereby it “would not be obliged to conduct any of its obligations unless and until Hamas was fully disarmed,” says Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani. “This is essentially Israel throwing a poison pill into an agreement by including conditions that can never be met.”

Rabbani argues that Jared Kushner is not a suitable negotiator because there is a “very intimate ideological, political connection between the Kushners and Israel.”

We continue our conversation with Maggie Haberman, whose recent book with fellow New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, digs into the handling of the Epstein files and the president’s decision to wage war on Iran.

Haberman says Trump “basically ignored many of his own advisers and just went ahead” with the war on Iran after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed regime change would be easily accomplished during a briefing in the Situation Room.

“This is a government run by … about a half-dozen people, give or take,” says Haberman. The way Trump has been operating the government during his second term is “a form of regime change in our own country,” says Haberman. “This is a reimagining of the U.S. presidency, an expansion of executive power on a level we have not seen before in modern history, in some ways ever.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Maggie Haberman is the co-author of the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. In the book, Haberman and her fellow New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan provide an inside look at how the administration has handled many of the biggest crises of Trump’s second term.

Haberman, who has been reporting on Trump since the 1990s, details his frequent attacks on the press over critical reporting, particularly against female reporters. She also discusses the renewed controversy over his close aide Natalie Harp, whom Haberman describes as “something like a human binky” for Trump.

A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. Durán traces the ideological lineage of the current Trump administration back from Vance to Thiel and the far-right-wing monarchist Curtis Yarvin, whose “right-libertarian” political theory has long made the rounds among Silicon Valley elite. “These guys were never libertarians,” says Durán. “Now that they are the government, we see their true face: They’re fascists, and they’re authoritarians.”

A prominent human rights lawyer in the United Kingdom has been charged with criminal contempt for his closing speech in the trial of his client, Charlotte “Lottie” Head, one of four Palestine Action activists who were sentenced as terrorists over their involvement in a 2024 protest and raid on an Israeli weapons factory. Their sentencing marked the first time a British judge issued terrorism sentencing enhancements on people who were not actually convicted of terrorism. An additional 21 currently jailed Palestine Action protesters could face similar sentences, which carry multiyear prison terms.

The charges against Rajiv Menon are similarly unprecedented in British legal history. He is accused of encouraging a jury to acquit Head according to their conscience. Menon denies this accusation and says he was simply informing the jury of a prior legal case. He adds that, along with the U.K. government’s ban on Palestine Action under anti-terrorism laws, the case against him is intended to have a “chilling effect” against pro-Palestine protest, and carries “serious constitutional implications.”

Newly released federal documents have revealed the existence of an expansive surveillance program launched by the federal government against activists, labor unions, community groups, and even a bicycle repair collective, in Minnesota last winter. “Operation Puppet Master” was launched in response to statewide protests against the ICE killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. The program has come to light in the course of a federal case against 15 Minnesotans who have been accused of “conspiracy” to impede ICE’s immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota. Isaac Sant, one of the defendants in the case, says the charges levied against him are “politically motivated” and “intended to quell dissent.”

As part of its spying operation, DHS sent undercover agents to meetings in churches, parks, libraries, schools and union halls and secretly obtained the financial records of left-leaning national organizations such as the Communications Workers of America and Sunrise Movement. “We were sick to hear that we were also in this list of people that were organizing using their First Amendment rights and the right to petition to their government, but also not surprised,” says Emilia González Avalos, the executive director of Unidos MN, a local organization that was one of the groups surveilled by DHS. “This is one of the tactics they have used across the world to repress and scare and disrupt movements that are organizing with other people against racism, that are organizing for justice, and that are organizing for a multiracial, high-functioning democracy.”

The new documentary American Doctor tells the story of how the besieged hospitals of Gaza have continued to treat the sick and wounded throughout Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian territory, with local medical staff risking their own lives in the process. According to Palestinian officials, Israeli attacks have killed about 1,700 healthcare workers in Gaza since October 2023. The documentary follows three U.S. doctors as they volunteer in Gaza hospitals.

Director Poh Si Teng says the film rose out of her “deep despair” over what was happening in Gaza, including deadly Israeli attacks on her former Al Jazeera colleagues. American Doctor is her attempt “to bring Palestine back to the United States,” Teng says.

We also speak with two of the subjects of the film: trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and emergency physician Dr. Thaer Ahmad, who is Palestinian American.

One of the biggest upsets from Democratic primary elections this month was Donavan McKinney’s defeat of two-term Congressmember Shri Thanedar in the House primary to represent parts of Detroit and Wayne County in Michigan’s 13th District. McKinney, a democratic socialist state lawmaker, won on a platform to get corporate money out of politics, support Medicare for All and end military aid to Israel, among other issues. Like many other insurgent Democrats running for office, he has also proposed strict limits on artificial intelligence data centers. He took no corporate PAC money, and his campaign was supported by the Justice Democrats, Working Families Party, Democratic Socialists of America and major labor unions.

“We built the biggest and baddest coalition in the country,” says McKinney of his win. “People have come together and realized that our district deserves better.”

We speak with Tennessee lawmaker Justin J. Pearson, who just won the Democratic primary to represent part of Memphis in the state’s 9th Congressional District. Pearson’s campaign focused in part on opposing large artificial intelligence data centers, particularly Elon Musk’s Colossus 1 and Colossus 2, which are in the Memphis area.

“People don’t want toxic data centers polluting the air that they breathe,” says Pearson. “It’s not a fight of right versus left; it’s a fight of those who are at the top and the rest of us.”

Pearson is a longtime environmental justice organizer and advocate who first gained national prominence three years ago, when he was expelled from Tennessee’s House of Representatives for protesting Republicans’ inaction on gun violence. He is now running in a congressional district that was recently gerrymandered to dilute Black voting power in the state following a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act. His opponent in November is Republican state Senator Brent Taylor, who is endorsed by President Donald Trump.

We speak with Timnit Gebru, a leader in the field of AI ethics, about how artificial intelligence is entrenching societal biases and inequality. Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, a group of academics, activists and engineers who produce research rooted in the belief that technology should benefit everyone. She also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the inclusion and visibility of Black people in the field of AI. Gebru previously served as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google but was fired in 2020 for writing a paper that warned about the financial and environmental costs of large language models, as well as their propensity to promote racism. The internet, which is what AI uses to train itself, “represents hegemonic views,” says Gebru. “We even know articles like Wikipedia are heavily biased. It’s overwhelmingly Western and male.”

Militaries across the world are in an “AI arms race,” says Heidy Khlaaf, a chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, which just released a joint report with Airwars titled “Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain.”

“What it is is a series of different types of AI algorithms that are chained together, each with their own pitfalls, each with their own flaws,” she says. “And these systems build off of each other and feed into one another to, unfortunately, end up resulting in civilian casualties.”

This can lead to faulty targeting because “humans are prone to just accepting recommendations of AI algorithms without corroborating that evidence,” adds Khlaaf.

The Washington Post reported Monday that due to an alleged Iranian threat to assassinate President Trump, he secretly swapped planes before departing the July NATO summit in Turkey — leaving senior administration officials, staff and members of the press corps on board.

“The Israelis passed a tip, a concern, that the plane and potentially the president was under threat,” says Dan Lamothe, one of the Washington Postreporters who broke the story. But it turns out the ”CIA had low confidence” in the Israeli tip, according to a more recent Post story Lamothe co-authored on Thursday. “I think that kind of leaves the Secret Service in a tough spot of assessing: What do you do in this zero-fail mission to keep the president safe?”

From London, we revisit the Gaza Tribunal, an independent, nongovernmental inquiry into the United Kingdom’s complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The tribunal, held nearly one year ago, was chaired by our three guests: former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Israeli professor of human rights law Neve Gordon and Palestinian legal scholar Shahd Hammouri. Their new book is titled The Gaza Tribunal: Britain’s Complicity in Genocide. We discuss the recent apology from Prime Minister Andy Burnham over the Labour Party’s early support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, the United Kingdom’s crackdown on the Palestine Action protest group under counterterrorism laws, and whether British policymakers will face any accountability for participating in “one of the biggest crimes in humanity.”

We spend the hour with civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. In 2018, the organization opened the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, to tell the history of millions of enslaved Africans who were abducted and trafficked across the Atlantic to the Americas by European powers, and to chronicle the legacy of slavery, racism, lynchings and segregation in the United States. The Legacy Museum has just opened its first international exhibition as part of the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland.

“In putting together the content we have at the Legacy Museum, you begin to appreciate just how global the institution of slavery was,” Stevenson tells Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman in Edinburgh. “We were eager to have an opportunity to present this content on this continent, which … hasn’t done very much to acknowledge this history.”

Stevenson details the Equal Justice Initiative’s goal of educating the public about racial iniquities, as well as his own family’s connection to slavery. “My foreparents did not come to this country seeking greater opportunity. They did not come seeking shelter from some distant threat. They came in chains. They were victims of a brutal abduction,” he says.

We continue our coverage from the Edinburgh International Festival, where acclaimed Brazilian actor and filmmaker Wagner Moura stars in the play A Trial — after An Enemy of the People. A sequel to the 1882 Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People, A Trial — after An Enemy of the People interrogates themes of authoritarianism, misinformation and public judgement. It is directed by Brazil’s Christiane Jatahy.

“We in Brazil, we know what a dictatorship is. We know how harmful that is, how horrible that is, how bad that is,” says Moura, referencing the military dictatorship in Brazil that took place from 1964 to 1985. He draws parallels between that period and the leadership of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is in prison for an attempted coup d’état.

Democracy Now! is broadcasting from Scotland at the Edinburgh International Festival, which features music, opera, theater and dance and is one of Europe’s biggest arts festivals. We are joined by the acclaimed Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, one of the most celebrated classical violinists in the world. She became the first woman and first Scottish artist to become director of the Edinburgh International Festival in 2022.

“I think what is quite unusual about the Edinburgh International Festival is the humanitarian mission that is woven into all of its origin rhetoric,” says Benedetti. She explains that this year’s festival focuses on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. “We’re not celebrating only dark or dazzling. We’re trying to present these things alongside each other.”

We speak with Keith LaMar, an artist, teacher and writer on death row in Ohio. LaMar, who has spent three decades in solitary confinement, was sentenced to death for the murder of five fellow prisoners during a 1993 prison uprising. He has always maintained his innocence. His trial was held in a remote Ohio community before an all-white jury. LaMar is one of three men on death row for whom Ohio Governor Mike DeWine issued reprieves, pushing back their execution dates to 2030.

“The reprieve, while good in a legal sense in giving us more time, it also increases the pressure, the harassment that I’m undergoing,” says Keith LaMar. “I’ve been undergoing consistent torture since the last reprieve,” explains LaMar, who received a previous reprieve three years ago.

LaMar’s lawyer Keegan Stephan says there is “incredible new evidence” of his client’s innocence, and Amy Gordiejew, campaign manager of Justice for Keith LaMar, says he “was framed.”

We speak with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed after his victory in Michigan’s primary race for U.S. Senate sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party. El-Sayed, a former public health official, ran a progressive campaign focused on affordability, Medicare for All, getting money out of politics, and opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He defeated Congressmember Haley Stevens, who was backed by tens of millions in outside spending including by AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby group.

“In an era where many of us can’t afford basic things like groceries or rent or healthcare, the idea that your government is sending your tax dollars to buy bombs and tanks for foreign governments seems anathema,” El-Sayed says. “That money could be spent to fix your potholes, rebuild your kid’s school.”

El-Sayed says his focus now is on beating Republican nominee Mike Rogers, whom he calls a “bootlicker for Trumpism,” and to present a positive vision for his party that can lead into the next Democratic presidential administration.

Composer and playwright César Alvarez joins Democracy Now! to discuss their new musical, The Potluck. It tells the story of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, when Klansmen and American Nazis opened fire on an antiracist demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina, killing five members of the Communist Workers’ Party. In 2020, the Greensboro City Council passed a resolution apologizing for the attack and the police department’s complicity in the killings.

Alvarez tells Democracy Now! the musical is an attempt to grapple with “what it has meant to grow up in the aftermath of this state-sanctioned murder,” as well their personal connection to the massacre. Alvarez’s parents were part of the Communist Workers’ Party, and Alvarez is named in honor of two of their slain comrades.

Kansas state Senator Cindy Holscher won Tuesday’s primary race to become the Democratic nominee in the state’s gubernatorial race, facing Republican Ty Masterson in November. Holscher clinched the nomination over fellow state lawmaker Ethan Corson, who was backed by the outgoing Democratic Kansas Governor Laura Kelly. Holscher’s victory is seen as another resounding defeat for establishment Democrats in Kansas and nationwide. The fight over data centers became a defining issue in the Kansas race.

“We see [data centers] suck up the resources in terms of water. We see energy usage causing utility bills to skyrocket. So, certainly not things that you want to have happen during an affordability crisis,” Holscher tells Democracy Now!

Holscher also celebrates the defeat of a ballot measure to change how state Supreme Court justices are elected, which she calls a “backdoor attempt” to attack abortion rights, voting access and public education.

Reproductive rights activists are alarmed over a pledge by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to institute nationwide abortion restrictions. Blanche, whose confirmation for attorney general is currently before the Senate, made the remarks in a private call with anti-abortion activists that was later posted online. According to the audio recording, Blanche said the Trump administration is pursuing policies “so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,” referring to the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended the constitutional right to abortion and left the matter to individual states.

Amy Littlefield, The Nation's abortion access correspondent, says the administration is likely to focus on limiting abortion pills delivered by mail, perhaps by invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, which banned the mailing of “lewd” and “indecent” materials through the mail. Littlefield calls it a “zombie law from the Victorian era” that reflects the frustration of the anti-abortion movement's inability to reduce abortions despite victories at the Supreme Court.

“Abortion bans do not stop abortion. What they do is they kill and harm the people who need them,” she says.

Littlefield is the author of Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights.