US senators voted 52-47, largely along party lines, against a war powers resolution on Wednesday afternoon that would have stopped the Trump administration from continuing its illegal military campaign against Iran without congressional approval.

Every Republican except Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul opposed the resolution; all Democrats apart from Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania supported it. Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) did not vote. 

The resolution “directs the President to remove the United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against Iran, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or a specific authorization for use of military force.” Article 1 of the Constitution grants Congress—not the president—the power to declare war, and the War Powers Act grants Congress the power to halt unauthorized military action by requiring troop withdrawal within 60 to 90 days.

“I’m here to call bullshit on the President of the United States.” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who sponsored the measure, said on the Senate floor just before the vote. “Every moment that Donald Trump leaves our heroes mired in the muck of this illegal war of choice in Iran, he is showing that he cares more about saving his own face than leading our troops.”

Duckworth is a veteran who lost both legs serving in the US Army during the Iraq War. In her remarks on the Senate floor, she said the Trump administration has not offered sufficient justification for launching—and now escalating—the war. 

“War is always tragic, but when it’s preventable, when it’s unjustified, it’s not just tragic—it’s a travesty,” Duckworth said. 

The Democratic-led measure was widely anticipated to fail. As I wrote shortly before the Senate’s previous war powers vote in March, which ended in a 47-53 vote against—with Sens. Paul and Fetterman being the same lawmakers to cross party lines—even if the resolution passed, it would ultimately require a two-thirds congressional majority to overturn Trump’s inevitable presidential veto. 

Many lawmakers thus approached the resolution as a way to drive home their stance on the war. In that light, what we saw Wednesday was not reassuring: four such resolutions have now failed since the start of the current war in February, while more than 2,000 people have been killed in Iran, according to the country’s health ministry—possibly many more, with figures not updated since April 3—and the US military has confirmed 13 combat-related deaths across the region.

The FBI and federal prosecutors in New York announced Wednesday morning that they have arrested Stefan Pildes, 50, one of the organizers of New York City’s Santacon, an infamous annual public pukefest which claims to be a charitable event. Pildes is accused of diverting money raised by Santacon NYC to a “slush fund,” then using that money for lakefront property renovations, luxury vacations, and concert tickets. All the while, the indictment says, “only a small fraction” of the money raised was actually given to charities.

Santacon, which began its life as a merry little art prank partially inspired by Mother Jones, has since become a powerfully unpopular cultural juggernaut, in which the drunkest denizens of various major American cities dress up in red and urinate upon their local landmarks. In 2023, a Gothamist investigation found that while Santacon NYC, the largest such event in the country, claims to have donated millions to charity, over an eight year period, “less than a fifth” of the money raised by the New York event went to charitable causes. More than a third of the money raised in that time, Gothamist reported, went to “groups or individuals who appear connected to Burning Man.”

On their website, Santacon NYC claims to have “made a tremendous difference for dozens of arts & charitable causes!” According to prosecutors in New York’s Southern District, when one attendee asked what she’d receive for buying a ticket to Santacon, “the SantaCon Email responded, in part, ‘your donation goes to charity and it is only a few bucks and that good feeling will warm your heart faster than whiskey and gingerbread.'”

But prosecutors allege proceeds from the Santacon ticket really went to Pildes himself, who the indictment says has been a major Santacon NYC organizer since November 2019. “Instead of donating the millions of dollars he raised,” the indictment reads, Pildes is alleged to have “misappropriated and stole the majority of SantaCon proceeds by diverting them to an entity that Pildes controlled, Creative Opportunities Group, Inc. (‘COG’), that had no public connection to SantaCon.”

Besides the aptly named “Creative Opportunites Group,” prosecutors also allege Pildes “abused his control” over a bank account set up for the nonprofit behind Santacon NYC, which is called Participatory Safety, Inc (PSI). Prosecutors allege that Pildes stole “hundreds of thousands of dollars in other SantaCon proceeds for his own personal use” from the PSI bank account.

“Among other things,” the indictment adds, “Pildes spent SantaCon proceeds on extensive renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey, luxury vacations in Hawaii, Las Vegas, and Vail, extravagant meals, and a luxury vehicle. Pildes did so despite claiming that he did not receive any compensation from SantaCon or PSI.” In March 2023, prosectuors say, Pildes emailed a potential Santacon venue, claiming that aside from fees for “ticket processing and production,” all ticket proceeds would go to PSI, “our not-for-profit partner that distributes to the charities we have listed on our charities page. No producer receives income from this event, this is a charity event.”

Chris Hackett, an early Santacon organizer in Brooklyn, says that he and Pildes recently encountered each other at the premiere of a recent documentary about the event, released by filmmaker Seth Porges last year. “I don’t know him but he knows me,” Hackett says. When Pildes suggested the two take a photo together, Hackett recalls telling him, “I don’t know you. I don’t like you. Fuck off now.”

Pildes is charged with one count of wire fraud; if convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Neither Santacon NYC nor Pildes has yet publicly commented on the arrest or the underlying allegations, and it is unclear if the accused has retained legal representation.

Santa himself could also not be reached for comment.

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Tucker Carlson sometimes speaks plainly. Sometimes he speaks in code. When he broke with Donald Trump over the Iran war last week, he did both.

The day after Easter, during a monologue on his internet show, Carlson assailed Trump for defiling “the holiest day in Christian life” with a rabid social media post that threatened to bomb power plants and bridges—civilian targets—if Tehran did not open “the Fuckin’ Strait” and that mocked Islam. An outraged Carlson expressed many of the obvious criticisms. He proclaimed that Trump had “shattered” a “uniquely joyful and peaceful moment for Christians” and that Trump’s “vile” vow to conduct “a war crime” was “unacceptable…under moral law.”

He accused Trump of receiving a thrill by threatening such violence. He called the post “evil” and declared, “No decent person mocks other people’s religion… No president should mock Islam… This is a mockery of Christianity.” He also slammed Christian leaders, most notably evangelist Paula White, the director of the White House Faith Office, for daring to compare Trump to Jesus. “Did Jesus command the disciples to go out and kill people?” he sharply asked.

This was a harsh critique that people on the right and left, Democrats, Republicans, and independents, and folks of all faiths or none could share. Here was Carlson as a Christian peacenik anti-interventionist.

But there was something else going on in that 44-minute-long rant. Carlson opened with the fact that during his second inauguration, Trump did not place his hand on the Bible when he swore his oath to defend the Constitution. “That should have been maybe a clue that we need to pause and think about, what is this?” Carlson remarked. He suggested that Trump “didn’t put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what’s inside that book, and what’s inside that book are limits on human behavior.” Trump, he said, was not accepting a basic premise of the Old and New Testament: “You are not God, and you cannot assume his powers.”

Hmmm, who might recoil at the Bible, who might be repulsed by the supposed Word of God? Carlson did not answer that. But when railing against Trump’s social media post as the work of “evil,” he noted, “God creates, and Satan destroys.” It seemed he was associating Trump with Beelzebub. And he wondered aloud where Trump’s threats against Iran and the current stalemate will lead. He answered his own question: “Nuclear weapons… You wipe out a country of 92 million… You could have a global nuclear war… All things being equal, that’s where we’re heading.”

Carlson was casting Trump as a Satan-adjacent, Bible-hating, evil force slouching toward nuclear Armageddon.

And there’s more.

Asserting that nuclear war is the plan, he insisted, “There are a million signs, but the most obvious is the dumbest neocons in Trump’s orbit are saying it out loud.” He maintained that these unnamed neocons are “messengers” peddling “the policies of others.” He didn’t identify the others, but it could be Israel or Satan. Or maybe both. (Historically, prominent neoconservatives have been pro-Israel hawks and Jewish.)

Carlson did refer to one of these diabolical neocons by name: Fox News host Mark Levin, a fervent fan of the Iran war and a cheerleader for Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime. He noted that Trump has called on his followers to watch Levin, and he explained that it’s useful to do so because Levin’s show “has been a place where the future is revealed,” though the show is “probably” not written by Levin himself. That is, Levin is fronting for someone or something, and Trump is in league with this cabal.

On an Easter weekend episode of Levin’s show, Carlson pointed out, Levin reviewed the tremendous casualties of the biggest battles of World War II—the Battle of the Bulge, 80,000 to 90,000; Okinawa, more than 50,000—and told his viewers these numbers convinced President Harry Truman that it would be best to drop the newly invented atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rather than mount a massive invasion of Japan.

Carlson claimed that this observation from Levin was “an argument for [using] nuclear weapons” against Iran and that Levin was test-driving this idea for Trump. Doing so at Easter time, Carlson huffed, was giving “the finger to Christianity.” Levin did not directly call for using nuclear weapons in Iran. But Carlson proclaimed his comments delivered a clear message: This is the plan.

To recap: a nefarious band of neocons in league with the Bible-hating Trump are pushing for an “insane” nuclear war.

And there’s even more.

“Could there be a spiritual component to what we’re watching?” Carlson asked his viewers. He suggested the Iran war was more than a geostrategic blunder. He referred to it as “a very stealthy yet incredibly effective attack…on belief in Jesus,” part of a “sustained effort to exterminate…the Christian faith.” He even said that Trump himself might see “this in bigger terms…as the fulfillment of something or the elevation to some higher office beyond president of the United States. That’s entirely possible.” Pointing to evangelical supporters of Trump, he asked, “Who are these people encouraging the president of the US to see himself as a millennialist figure…as part of the End Times story.”

Carlson has always been a cagey fellow. He didn’t explicitly say that Trump was the anti-Christ and in cahoots with evildoers, such as neocons and Israel, to destroy Christianity. But that’s how I read the tea leaves he’s dishing. It’s not that difficult to connect his dots to see—aha!—Trump is a leading figure in the grandest conspiracy theory: the Devil scheming to use nuclear weapons to annihilate the true faith.

Carlson has a long history of embracing and peddling conspiracy theories. He has claimed the Democrats are trying to replace white Americans with immigrants; the January 6 riot was a false flag operation; the Biden administration developed secret plans to round up and imprison conservatives; the United States maintained secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine (a false assertion the Kremlin pushed); and the US government was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks.

His latest tale is the hugest conspiracy theory of all. Trump is not merely screwing up bigly in the Middle East. He is a key player—if not the key player—in the titanic clash between God and Satan. No doubt, for Carlson, Trump’s subsequent social media post, in which he said a “whole civilization will die tonight” was further proof of the mighty spiritual warfare underway.

Naturally, Trump could not not respond to Carlson. In a long post on Thursday, he called Carlson and Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones—former Trump stans who have dumped Mr. MAGA over the war—“losers” with “Low IQs” and “NUT JOBS” and “TROUBLEMAKERS” who lost their television shows and “will say anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity.” He excommunicated them: “They’re not ‘MAGA.’”

Reacting to Trump’s retort, Carlson’s email newsletter suggested that the president was being blackmailed by “anti-Christian” Israel or that “something far more morbid” was afoot. But now Carlson leaned away from the anti-Christ notion and observed that Trump was “under a level of pressure that most people cannot fathom, with rabid Israel Firsters viciously harassing him… Their shameless pursuit is steadfast enough to make even a man like Donald Trump go mad.” His newsletter noted, “Rather than engaging in petty name-calling, we want to give the president some grace.”

Yet in the same issue, the newsletter promoted a video from conspiracy-monger Alex Jones in which he insisted that Trump has “totally changed” and was “being led around by the nose by Netanyahu and by Mark Levin and others.” Jones prayed that God would “free him from the demonic influences that he’s under”—more satanic skullduggery. He called for Trump to be removed from office.

I’m a bit confused. First, Carlson tells us Trump is an agent of satanic destruction that is aimed at the extermination of Christianity, suggesting he might be the anti-Christ. But then he characterizes Trump as being driven mad due to the pressure applied on him by “anti-Christian” Israelis. At the same time, he also promotes the claim that Trump is possessed by demons, which might make him the anti-Christ or might not. (Earlier this month, Carlson did an interview with a priest who conducts exorcisms, and they discussed the widespread demonic possessions of politicians. During that show, Carlson attributed his firing at Fox News to the work of demons.) In any case, we’re in woo-woo land. And after Trump posted a meme that depicted Trump as Jesus, a new issue of Carlson’s newsletter said Trump was “lost” and asked people to pray for him.

When Carlson addressed the 2024 Republican presidential convention as a Trump champion, he declared that Trump had survived the assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, due to “divine intervention.” So less than two years ago, Trump was saved by God. Now, according to Carlson, Trump is possibly trying to extinguish God and Christianity. That’s some turnabout.

Carlson has jumped from one extreme to another. Trump critics may welcome his assault on Trump. But as he so often does, he’s playing a dangerous game, demonizing (literally!) his foes, as he situates himself as a true defender of the Christian faith. Where will this take him and the slice of MAGA that feeds on the paranoia and conspiracism he pitches? God only knows.

President Donald Trump shared what appears to be an AI-generated image of Jesus hugging him on social media on Wednesday morning, just days after he was widely condemned for sharing a picture depicting himself as a Christ-like figure. 

He wrote in the post: “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!  President DJT.” The image comes from an account on X named “Irish for Trump” with the handle @Dkelly4congress, in reference to a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for the US House in 2024. The account also appears to be associated with the dive bar Croke Park in Boston, Massachusetts.

Since posting his earlier image on Monday, which was part of his bizarre remarks against Pope Leo XIV over the US-Israeli war in Iran, Trump told reporters that he believed the post actually portrayed him “as a doctor” and “had to do with [the humanitarian nonprofit] Red Cross.” The post was deleted later on Monday following backlash, with many of his own supporters voicing criticisms.  

But Trump appears to have doubled down on Wednesday, and JD Vance has backed the president.

“He took [the Monday post] down because he recognized that a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor,” Vance told Fox News’ Bret Baier on Monday. “I think the president of the United States likes to mix it up on social media.”​

Vance also criticized the pope, saying in the same interview that the Vatican should stick to “matters of morality” and “what’s going on in the Catholic Church” and “let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.” 

On Tuesday, Vance said the pope should “be careful” when talking about theology, asserting it was wrong for Leo to say Jesus “is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” 

Sure JD, the pope definitely doesn’t know about theology. 

As my colleague Kiera Butler wrote last week, the Trump administration’s war in Iran, as well as the absurd justifications of the military effort, is tearing apart his solid coalition of Catholic and evangelical Protestants. According to an Ipsos and Reuters survey released on Tuesday, only 55 percent of Republicans said they believed the war was worth the costs.

In March, a man who needed legal representation reached out to Maria Aguila’s law office in Jacksonville, Florida, asking to meet with an attorney. The only problem was that she had never heard of this attorney, and she is a solo practitioner who focuses on immigration and family law. Aguila was in court at the time, but the man left his alleged attorney’s website and phone number. When Aguila called, someone answered and hung up. And the website, she soon discovered, listed her law firm’s name and address. It even included her employer identification number. She warned her clients in a Facebook post in English and Spanish: “Someone is IMPERSONATING MY LAW FIRM,” Aguila wrote. “PLEASE DO NOT CALL THIS BUSINESS AND PAY ANY MONEY.” 

In her 26 years of practicing law, Aguila had never found herself in such a circumstance. “You put your blood, sweat, and tears into your business to help clients because it means something to you—I’m the daughter of immigrants,” Aguila, whose parents are from the Philippines, told me. “Here’s someone just taking your identity and your information and robbing people.” She filed a complaint with the Florida Bar. The scammer’s website is still online as of the publication of this story.

In the last year, the country’s most prominent legal organizations—such as the American Bar Association and the American Immigration Lawyers Association— have warned that scams targeting immigrants and attorneys have increased to an alarming level. Certainly, these kinds of grifts are not new in the legal world, which for years has dealt with bad actors practicing law without a license. But representatives from several legal groups and private attorneys told me that today’s scams are more sophisticated and harder to detect thanks to the proliferation of AI and social media. “Criminals have identified this as an opportunity,” said Charity Anastasio, Practice and Ethics Counsel at AILA. 

Scammers have also taken advantage of the desperate positions many immigrants find themselves in today as the Trump administration ramps up detention and deportation efforts. This population is much less likely to feel comfortable reporting a crime when ICE and law enforcement are working together more than ever. “This fear and desperation make it very ripe for individuals to be taken advantage of in this way,” said Adonia Simpson, the policy and pro bono deputy director at the American Bar Association Commission on Immigration, which has documented more than a dozen reports of fraud since last summer. But given most victims’ reluctance to contact law enforcement, the true scope of these scams is unknown. “The damage that this could be causing in the long run could be very significant,” Simpson added. “We really have no idea how pervasive this is. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg.”

Scammers’ tactics vary widely but appear to have a number of strategies in common. They advertise themselves on Facebook as law firms and communicate with victims through WhatsApp. Often, they adopt the name of a reputable law office, such as Aguila’s firm, or even individual attorneys. The American Bar Association, for example, recently discovered that several fraudsters had created documents using the organization’s old logo after they received calls from victims looking to speak with attorneys who claimed to work at the organization. Other scammers have posed as staff for the nonprofit Catholic Charities USA, which became so concerned about the pervasiveness of the problem that the organization issued an alert on its website to prospective clients.

The scams also usually involve the creation of a website with photos of supposed attorneys and smiling clients posing with documents like Social Security cards—but as several lawyers I spoke to pointed out, many of them appear to be created with AI. Victims are told to submit payment for legal services via Zelle and other cash transfer apps. Once the payment is received, the phony lawyers stop responding to their victims, several attorneys told me. “You see people spending thousands and thousands of dollars for services that are not rendered,” Simpson said.

Other schemes are more elaborate. In one New York case, scammers used Facebook to contact victims, fabricated documents using symbols from the federal government, and even organized sham court hearings via videoconference with fraudsters impersonating judges. Screenshots of one such hearing show a man dressed in a suit sitting behind a laptop, an American flag to his right, and a seal that reads, “United States Court of Appeals” behind him. Another image shows another person wearing a US Customs and Border Protection jacket, with the emblem of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services behind him. At least 150 people needing legal help between March 2023 and November 2025 paid more than $100,000 to the phony lawyers. Victims’ funds were laundered into bank accounts overseas, though defendants kept some of the cash for personal expenses like DoorDash food orders, court records state.

In February, the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York indicted five people from Colombia accused of running the operation. A trial date has not been set; they each face up to 20 years in prison. “The criminal conduct charged in the indictment is no ordinary fraud,” attorneys wrote in court filings. “The defendants undermined the rule of law and the integrity of our immigration system.”

But the New York case is a rare example of an immigration scam that resulted in arrests. Most seemingly operate without consequences, in part because the Internet offers anonymity to criminals who could be based anywhere. In Aguila’s case, an IT specialist found that the website using her office’s address was registered in Turkey, she told me. 

Law enforcement agencies, from state to federal, are also siloed from one another, which makes it difficult to crack down on larger scam operations. A recent case in Kenner, Louisiana, illustrates how complicated investigating these cases can be. Police there arrested a 25-year-old man in February on charges that he impersonated a lawyer and scammed a Honduran woman seeking to secure legal status for her two children. Police say the man, David Ardila-Garcia, promoted a fake law firm on Facebook with the name “Immigration Attorney Services.” For 11 months, he met with the Louisiana mother on FaceTime and asked her to send him several payments totaling more than $6,000. When her case wasn’t moving forward, she contacted Kenner police and provided detectives with the phone number tied to the Zelle account where she sent payments. A query of a law enforcement database revealed the number belonged to Ardila-Garcia, who lived in Fort Myers, Florida. He was arrested on a warrant there and extradited to Louisiana.

Kenner Police Chief Keith Conley told me he believes there are more victims. Banking records obtained by detectives show that Ardila-Garcia deposited about $250,000 into a Colombian bank. But Conley said his agency struggled to persuade federal and Florida authorities to help them secure a search warrant for Ardila-Garcia’s laptop. “That would have been a treasure trove of information as far as other victims,” Conley said. 

The impacts on victims are endless. Beyond losing thousands of dollars that could have gone toward legitimate legal assistance, immigrants could also be missing court deadlines and hearings in their cases at a time when the system is increasingly hostile to them. “You could be simply deported in an environment like this,” Anastasio, from AILA, said. “You don’t have any money left over to pay anybody because you just gave it to a criminal.” In the New York federal case, one victim was ordered deported by a judge, though the ruling was later reversed after the scam came to light.

In the end, these scams also create enormous challenges for immigration attorneys. Many who spoke to Anastasio at AILA describe feeling shame that their identity was used to harm people, she told me. Anastasio advises them to file complaints with the police and their respective bar associations in case they’re ever accused of wrongdoing. “It hurts the rule of law. It hurts our standing as a system of justice,” she told me. “That’s under enough attack now already. We really don’t need this added criminal element.”

Last week, someone seeking legal help called Aguila’s office in Jacksonville. A TikTok video advertising immigration services in Spanish had surfaced, this one listing her phone number. Aguila couldn’t believe her identity had wound up as part of another scam. “I’m trying to get my work done for my clients, and then I’m constantly having to be worried about people calling me, thinking I’m offering this assistance when I’m not,” she told me over the phone on Tuesday. “I don’t even know what to do anymore. It seems out of control.”

Earlier this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that it was moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight, a symbolic hour signifying global catastrophe. The hands have been moved 27 times since the clock’s creation in 1947, and they’re now the closest they’ve pointed to worldwide destruction. The threats of nuclear war, climate change, artificial intelligence, and disinformation all played into the decision. It’s meant as a wake-up call to the world.

One of the experts who helped make that decision is University of Chicago physics professor Daniel Holz, chair of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board. And even though the clock evokes a potentially terrifying future, Holz takes a more optimistic approach to the entire endeavor. 

“Really, the Doomsday Clock is a symbol of hope,” Holz says. “The whole point of this clock is to, yes, to alarm people, to inform people, but also to demonstrate we can turn back the hands of the clock. And we’ve done it in the past, and we can hope to do it in the future. And we must.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Holz sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the Doomsday Clock’s history, why we’re closer to global destruction than ever before, and what we can do to reverse course.

This is an update of an episode that first aired in July 2025.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

In 2023, after Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress, the Justice Department noted the stiff sentence reflected the court’s conclusion that Rhodes’ “conduct was terrorism.”

“The Oath Keepers plotted for months to violently disrupt the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next,” then–Attorney General Merrick Garland said. “The Justice Department will continue to do everything in our power to hold accountable those criminally responsible for the January 6th attack on our democracy.”

Not anymore. In court filings Tuesday, DOJ lawyers asked DC Circuit Court judges to vacate the seditious conspiracy and other convictions of 12 members of the Proud Boys groups and Oath Keepers, including Rhodes.

The defendants affected were all convicted over their effort to prevent the peaceful of transfer of power following Donald Trump’s election defeat in 2020. After his win in 2024, while pardoning around 1,600 people convicted of taking part in the January 6 riot, Trump treated the convicted seditionists differently, merely commuting their prison sentences—which meant that while free, they remained convicted felons. Those defendants continued to appeal their original convictions.

The new DOJ move would end their designation as seditionists and undo the symbolically important legal determination that the attack on Congress was part of an effort to overthrow the lawful government of the United States.

The DOJ filings, signed by District of Columbia US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, did not explain the department’s reasoning beyond a line stating: “The government has decided in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of a criminal case is in the interests of justice.”

The filing comes a few weeks after Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, reportedly in part out of frustration that the Justice Department had failed to secure criminal convictions of political foes whom the president had demanded face prosecution on dubious charges.

Trump has fared better pushing DOJ to advance his claims about January 6, which he has called a “day of love,” while continuing to insist that the false claims that fueled the attack—his claim that he won the 2020 election—were accurate.

Now, the lies that led to the first-ever attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power in the United States are effectively government policy. The Justice Department, under acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, is moving further from its long-standing independence—and attempting to give the president the legal system he wants.

Justice for Chappell Roan! On Monday, Jorginho, the soccer star who alleged that the bestselling artist was responsible for a security guard making his stepdaughter cry—supposedly because the child stared at Roan—made an apology on his Instagram story: “I made my initial statement in the heat of the moment after hearing that my child and wife had been approached by an adult male security guard in an intimidating way.” 

The incident took place last month during the Lollapalooza music festival in São Paulo, Brazil, where Jorginho claimed in a social media post that a security guard “aggressively” confronted his wife Catherine and stepdaughter Ada and upset the child after she walked past Roan’s breakfast table. He tagged Roan at the end of that post: “@chappellroan WITHOUT YOUR FANS, YOU WOULD BE NOTHING. AND TO THE FANS, SHE DOES NOT DESERVE YOUR AFFECTION.”

The post went viral, leading to an ongoing online harassment campaign against Roan, and even led Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Cavaliere to post on X that he intended to ban her from performing in the city’s highest-profile international music festival. 

Despite Roan saying at the time that she “didn’t even see a woman and a child” and that “no one bothered her,” the online backlash continued. There appeared to be no clear direction to the criticism: it isn’t about Roan’s behavior but about people’s collective eagerness to participate in a misogynistic pile-on: Was she at fault in the incident, unrepentant, and possibly the worst person to have ever existed? Is she only famous because her family offered her the financial stability for her music career to flourish? (According to the Springfield News-Leader, her hometown paper, Roan put on a fundraising performance as a teenager to raise funds to attend Grammy Camp in New York City.)

In his Monday statement, after Roan’s own public statement and their respective teams’ discussion of the incident, Jorginho acknowledged that the artist had “no knowledge of what took place at breakfast and had not asked anyone to approach them.” The soccer player also noted that the security guard in question has since publicly stated that, at the time, he was representing another artist at the hotel. 

“I regret the impact the situation has had on Chappell Roan, Catherine, Ada, and our family,” Jorginho continued. “I do not support or encourage hate speech or online attacks from any side…As far as I am concerned, this matter is closed.” 

But is the matter actually closed? The harassment that resulted—something completely unjustified even if Roan was, in fact, mean to a child—is illustrative of how famous women have to be perfect, even when mistreated. As culture writer Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote in 2022, women in the public eye exist in “a system that builds [them] into untouchable fantasies just so we can watch in glee as the facade inevitably crumbles.” Compare public coverage of the Roan incident with the muted response to the long list of famous men who have inflicted real harm on others, and who continue to insist that holding them accountable is “cancel culture.”

Roan demonstrated more moral courage than many powerful people in her February decision to leave Casey Wasserman’s talent agency after reports revealed the entertainment executive’s ties to convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. Yet she received far more social backlash over a non-event than praise after taking a material risk for the sake of her principles.

As Kat Tenbarge, a reporter on internet culture and its intersections with misogyny and violence, wrote last month about the Chappell Roan backlash:

This is what happens to women and marginalized people all the time: people make stuff up about you and it becomes your reputation, even though you never did what they accused you of doing. This is supposedly the great threat of the #MeToo movement to permanently tarnish innocent men’s reputations, but in reality, it happens all the time to women over significantly less serious allegations.

That pattern applies to how society treats all women, including those lacking the means to shine a light on their harassment. In workplaces alone, according to a 2026 report by online compliance training firm Traliant, at least a third of workers said they would only report harassment if they were able to do so anonymously, about a quarter said they had personally witnessed retaliation for pointing out misconduct, and one in five said they were personally subjected to it. The result: according to a 2022 global survey by the International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency, only about half of victims worldwide told someone else about their experiences.

The normalization and justification of Roan’s harassment is part of a pattern—one that ultimately normalizes, and justifies, parallel treatment of much less powerful women.

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

Governments desperate for cash to protect their citizens from the growing impacts of the climate crisis are being put in a “beyond absurd” situation this week at global finance talks: they are being urged not to mention the climate, even as they address the current oil crisis.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WBG) spring meetings take place this week amid a fragile ceasefire in Iran and upended geopolitics. One of the priorities was to forge a new “climate change action plan” (CCAP) for the world’s biggest provider of funds to developing countries to replace the current strategy, which expires in June.

Now, it looks like the new plan may be shelved, along with substantive discussion of the climate crisis.

With the oil crunch still biting, the delegates from up to 189 countries at the conference in Washington, DC, might have been expected to discuss investments in renewable energy, which many see as crucial to energy security and an antidote to volatility. Climate finance is also a pressing issue for poor countries already paying billions each year to repair the damage from droughts, floods and storms.

If these discussions are instead largely confined to whispers in corridors, the reason is clear: the US president, Donald Trump. Insiders have told the Guardian the White House is forcing countries to choose between opening up a potentially unbridgeable rift or playing down the climate crisis and trying to squeeze in green priorities by the back door.

Last autumn, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent demanded the removal of some climate finance targets from the World Bank’s aims and insisted it must “finance all affordable and reliable sources of energy…[with] an all-of-the-above approach to energy that includes financing for gas, oil, and coal.” The US is the biggest shareholder in the World Bank, with about 17 percent of its capital.

Other countries, including large developed economies, have reacted with alarm. Senior staff of several international finance and development institutions have said the US has piled pressure on the World Bank, the IMF, and other publicly funded institutions over the climate.

They said that, although the climate was still on the agenda, people at a senior level were “self-censoring” and removing the term from reports and projects. The Guardian understands some leading countries prefer not to push for a new CCAP.

That would be disastrous for the developing world, experts said. “It is beyond absurd that, in the middle of an escalating oil crisis, a World Bank meeting could sideline talk of climate change,” said Mohamed Adow, the director of the Power Shift Africa think tank. “Fossil fuels and the climate emergency are inextricably linked. This moment is a huge opportunity to accelerate the shift away from fossil-fuel dependence, with potentially historic benefits for the world. It will be a tragedy if politicians fail to do so.”

Catherine Abreu, the director of the International Climate Politics Hub, said: “The spring meetings will be a big test of these institutions. Will we see the World Bank and IMF unable to respond to the majority of their members, because they are swayed by these powerful minorities?”

Under its current CCAP, the World Bank Group aims to devote 35 percent of all its funding to climate-related activities, half of which should be for adaptation, and the group has also moved to end most finance to fossil fuels, though loopholes remain. The World Bank is the biggest single source of climate funding, and many donor countries channel their climate finance largely through the multilateral development banks.

At the Cop29 UN climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, countries agreed that at least $1.3 tillion a year should flow to the developing world by 2035, to help countries cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of extreme weather. Developed countries committed $300 billion a year of that total, and reaching the target cannot happen without the World Bank.

In the World Bank Group’s last financial year, from 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025, 48 percent of financing qualified as having climate co-benefits under its methodology.

A spokesperson for the World Bank Group said: “The World Bank Group supports public and private clients in achieving their smart development goals. This includes building low-carbon, resilient infrastructure, and energy systems that manage emissions responsibly so countries can create jobs and sustain growth.

“We will finance what works best for countries, using a least-cost, reliable mix to meet their needs, while managing emissions responsibly. It is not an either/or and we are continuing to see strong demand for support for adaptation and mitigation from our clients. Over the last decade, 215 million people have gained new or improved access to electricity through our current energy programs, and we expect this number to grow to 575 million.”

Much could still be achieved without formally labeling projects as climate-related, Lord Stern, a former World Bank chief economist and now a professor at the London School of Economics, told the Guardian. “You don’t have to plant big climate flags on these things; it’s just a good investment,” he said.

“US pressure is coming on the World Bank, but they can continue to do agriculture, forests, water, energy, public transport. These things are highly relevant to tackling the climate crisis—without highlighting climate change,” he added.

He also pointed to mass transit systems, such as urban railways, in cities in the developing world. “Metro systems in cities are a big part of the climate story. Why would the US oppose metro systems in overcrowded cities? Building a metro is not a covert climate action; it’s just doing things better.”

There is still much work to be done on clarifying what should make up the $300bn and $1.3 trillion targets. Stern said: “The way climate finance is counted is something I hope will develop. Without jiggery-pokery, there are lots of things that we should be supporting that should be counted towards the global climate finance goal.”

There’s a virus in our tax system.

A stealth virus, it was embedded in America’s economic DNA for a century, biding its time, waiting for the appropriate conditions to reveal itself. And then we created those conditions, unleashing it to infect our institutions of culture and democracy, replicate, and burst forth to infect anew.

An oligarchy virus.

In his departing address, President Joe Biden warned of rising oligarchy in the United States—a notable event, being the first time any US president had thus directed a term previously associated with corrupt Russian billionaires. In truth, oligarchy has been thriving for decades in the United States, though never so much as it is today. University of California, Berkeley, economist Gabriel Zucman recently calculated that, as of November 2025, the richest 0.00001 percent of the population, just 19 politically influential billionaires, held in excess of $3 trillion. That’s more than 12 percent of the nation’s total income. The richest among them, Elon Musk, may soon be the planet’s first trillionaire.

The United States now has 1,000 billionaires, give or take. This so-called megadonor (really megataker) class has always pulled strings in the background. But with a few exceptions, only recently have they become such conspicuous political players. After Biden’s disastrous June 2024 debate performance, mainstream media headlines conveyed, without a lick of irony, who was really calling the shots: “Biden campaign tries to soothe panicked donors in tense phone calls” (Reuters); “Democratic Donors’ Big Question: What’s Plan B?” (New York Times).

A Washington Post analysis last fall found that federal campaign spending by the 100 richest Americans, untethered by a series of permissive Supreme Court rulings, had soared 50-fold over the previous decade. In March, a New York Times analysis revealed that 300 billionaires and their close family members had spent more than $3 billion on federal elections in 2024—19 percent of overall expenditures, whereas billionaire spending on the 2008 election had been a scant 0.3 percent of the total. Many of these same billionaires, the Times noted, are now flexing their wealth power in state and local elections as well.

Nowhere is the oligarchy problem more acute than among those 0.00001 percenters. Fifteen of the 19 are hectobillionaires, with assets north of $100 billion each. Each of the top six controls a major media outlet or social media platform—three (Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg) sat onstage at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebration. 

No person anywhere, in any era, has spent as much to sway election outcomes as Musk, the richest person in history who, according to Open Secrets, shelled out almost $292 million in 2024 helping get Trump and other Republican candidates elected. And that doesn’t count the value of harnessing his X platform to support a twice-impeached, felonious former president who openly promised to make the rich richer—and delivered.

Musk expended 0.1 percent of his wealth in the process and got far more in return. The Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies, awarded him billions of dollars in new contracts, and sent his firms’ share prices soaring by placing him in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, an unsanctioned body that succeeded wildly—not in eliminating government fraud and waste as promised, but in gutting and disabling federal agencies, including the ones creating headaches for Musk’s companies. 

Whatever you may think of billionaires and their existence, the ways in which extreme wealth concentration distorts our culture and government have become so screamingly obvious that they no longer need be debated. The real, existential question is: Can this oligarchy virus be stopped? Or have we, as with our climate, allowed things to go too far?

To answer these questions, it pays to examine how we got here in the first place.

You’ve probably heard the term “progressive taxation.” That’s when the government claims a larger chunk of each successive tier of a person’s income as they move up the ladder. In theory, our federal government does so now, but with caveats you could drive a vintage Ferrari through.

Only families with excess income can accumulate wealth, of course. And those with extraordinary incomes accumulate an extraordinary share of the wealth. Which brings us to our first caveat: The government’s definition of income is wrong. When I say “income,” I’m not talking about the number on the W-2 form that reports your wages to the IRS, but rather your true economic income, which is known as Haig-Simons income.

Tax analysts Robert Haig and Henry Simons developed the concept early in the 20th century. It’s simple: Haig-Simons income is the increase (or decrease) in your pre-tax wealth from the start of the year to the end of the year assuming you haven’t spent a penny. This definition accounts not just for work earnings, but also for changes in the value of a family’s assets and investments (real estate, a business, artwork, stocks and bonds, jewelry, etc.) even if those assets haven’t been sold. Gains on unsold investments, often referred to as “paper profits” or “unrealized gains,” are as real as any other form of income when it comes to measuring wealth.

Barring government intervention, the wealth derived from Haig-Simons income—which I’ll just call “income” going forward—always concentrates in the hands of the rich. To understand this, picture 2,000 working-class families with annual earnings of $50,000 each—$100 million all told. Suppose those households live very frugally and spend only 90 percent of their earnings. That leaves them with pre-tax savings at year’s end of $5,000 per family, or $10 million total.

Now consider a single ultra-rich family with the same total income—$100 million, mainly from investments. Even if this absurdly fortunate family burns through $10 million living in luxury, they end the year up $90 million. So, our working-class group and our ultra-rich family have the same overall income, but the rich family pockets 90 percent of the resulting wealth.

These figures are pretax, so let’s tax them.

What if we imposed an across-the-board flat tax, as Republicans often have advocated? Make it 10 percent. Our working-class households, after taxes and living expenses, break even. The ultra-rich household ends up with less money—$80 million—but its share of the overall wealth gain rises to 100 percent.

Winner takes all.

In theory, an income tax, if sufficiently progressive and combined with an enforceable inheritance tax, can prevent an oligarchy from arising in the first place. And for a while the federal tax system actually accomplished this. During the post-World War II period—when family wealth derived largely from earnings that were subject to annual taxation at progressive rates, and when the country’s income distribution wasn’t so heavily skewed in favor of those at the top—it did a decent job of preventing undue wealth concentration. But the system’s fatal flaw, the oligarchy virus, always lurked just beneath the surface in the way the IRS defines income.

The income tax was first enacted by Congress early last century in response to the Gilded Age, which began soon after the Civil War ended and lasted until World War I. Then came the Great Depression and the robust tax-the-rich initiatives of the World War II years, which brought about an unprecedented de-concentration of wealth in America. From 1945 through the 1970s, the top marginal tax rate on wages—that is, the rate that applied to the topmost portion of a high-earner’s income—fluctuated between 70 and 94 percent, which helped maintain a relatively egalitarian wealth distribution as the GI Bill and other government programs contributed to a thriving (if overwhelmingly white) middle class.

The system only worked because economic conditions were not yet conducive to the emergence of the virus. The 1956 federal minimum wage was worth more than $12 an hour in today’s dollars, for example, versus $7.25 now. Antitrust laws were strictly enforced to block mergers in a wide variety of industries, including banking, brewing, consumer products, groceries, shoes, and steel. Strong unions kept wages on track with the nation’s rising GDP while the S&P 500 lagged. These and other factors prevented the most affluent families from realizing the full regressive potential of the tax system and, for nearly four decades, stopped wealth from re-concentrating to Gilded Age levels.  

We’ve now overshot those levels. The Great Re-Gilding commenced in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan oversaw the first of two major tax-cut packages and Congress left the minimum wage to the hungry teeth of inflation, such that its buying power today is less than half of what it was in the year the Rolling Stones released “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Relentless attacks on organized labor by conservative politicians eroded private sector union membership from a mid-1950s peak of 35 percent to about 6 percent in 2025. Decades of trade policies that made it cheaper for US firms to manufacture products overseas curbed demand for domestic labor, constraining wage growth. These wage-reducing strategies didn’t merely reduce the quality of life for millions of Americans, they also shifted a significant portion of workers’ wages into corporate profits—boosting the bosses’ stock portfolios and creating ripe conditions for the oligarchy virus. 

The impact of stagnant wages on the fortunes of the rich wasn’t a one-off. Economic policymakers increasingly based their decisions almost solely on protecting and boosting the value of investment assets owned by relatively few affluent Americans. The government all but gave up on antitrust enforcement, granting near monopolistic power to major players in industry after industry—airlines, energy, groceries, media.

A 1982 regulatory change allowed public corporations to buy back their shares en masse from the market. When a company does this, its value is divided among fewer shares, thereby boosting the share price and giving a tax-free bonus to the remaining investors—who would have been taxed had that money instead been distributed as dividends. In 2018, Republican lawmakers slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. That generous rate cut, and the unprecedented buyback binge it fueled, drove stock prices up while doing nothing to enhance the productive value of the companies.

And who owns stock in America? The richest one-tenth of 1 percent of the population owns nearly one-quarter of it. The remaining nine-tenths of the top 1 percent owns another quarter. In fact, the average household in that topmost tier holds almost 500 times as much stock as the average household in the bottom 99 percent.

How did a supposedly progressive income tax system fail so miserably? That’s the oligarchy virus at work. The virus ensures that when investment gains become too prominent in the nation’s overall income mix, the system flips regressive. That’s because the federal government taxes investment gains at a fraction of the rates it applies to other income (like your salary)—and that’s when those gains are taxed at all.

Haig-Simons income, to remind you, includes the gains on unsold investments, which are by far the biggest source of income for America’s wealthiest families. But the IRS won’t touch that income. And even when the gains are “realized” via the sale of the underlying investment, the government touches that income lightly.

Look at Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, who holds more than $100 billion in unrealized profits from his company holdings. He need never sell those shares, because, like other wealthy investors, he can simply borrow against them at low interest rates, avoiding income tax almost entirely. And if Huang does sell those shares, his windfall is subject to the maximum capital gains tax (23.8 percent), already far lower than the rate he would pay on a CEO’s conventional salary (roughly 41 percent, with payroll taxes).

But Huang would get a far better deal than a mere halving of his tax rate, because it turns out that allowing unrealized gains to compound tax-free for decades drastically lowers the effective annual rate at which they are taxed when the investment is sold.

Confused? Check this out: Suppose you invest $1 million in a company that grows at 10 percent per year. If you sell that stock after 20 years and pay the 23.8 percent tax, you end up with the same amount of money as you would if your paper gains had been taxed at 12.4 percent annually, and you sold just enough stock every year to pay the tax. That’s only about a third of the top rate a high earner pays on wage income, and even less than a typical worker—say a plumbing contractor making $80,000 a year—is charged on their earnings.

But wait! The math gets even more advantageous for a guy like Huang, thanks to an often-overlooked aspect of federal tax regressivity. Namely, the faster an investment grows, the lower the effective tax rate when it is eventually sold. If, in 2006, you had put your $1 million into Nvidia stock—which had a staggering average return of 37.7 percent per year through 2025—and then sold it at the end of those 20 years and paid the tax, your effective annual tax rate would be less than 5 percent. Nice, huh?

By rewarding the most fortunate long-term investors with the lowest tax rates, federal policymakers have virtually guaranteed oligarchic levels of wealth and power. If you hit a home run, as in our initial example, you pay only half the already favorable capital gains tax rate. But if you’re Huang, or Jeff Bezos, whose company’s value has risen roughly a millionfold over 32 years—a real grand slam—your effective tax rate when you finally sell those shares dwindles to a paltry 4 percent. 

From 1945 to 1982, the virus remained dormant. The inflation-adjusted S&P 500 index roughly doubled in value over that 37-year period. From 1982 to today, it has ballooned fifteenfold. As the gap between the true incomes of the wealthiest households and other Americans widened, and the share of upper-crust incomes comprised primarily of investment gains swelled, our ineptly designed tax system produced the opposite of a desirable outcome—a pernicious oligarchy class, which is now fighting tooth and nail to extend its economic and political advantage.

What if we had put up guardrails? Something like the Buffett Rule—an unsuccessful proposal to tax annual incomes of $1 million or more at a minimum of 30 percent, inspired by Warren Buffett’s observation that it was unfair he paid lower tax rates than his secretary. Had that rule been applied to Buffett’s Haig-Simons income—if his Berkshire Hathaway gains were taxed at 30 percent annually, and he sold just enough each year to cover the bill—he would have been worth $9.5 billion as of January 2026—not $149.5 billion. And had he been charged the same rate each year that the IRS charges on the top wage tier for a married couple, his Berkshire wealth, excluding state taxes, would today add up to about $1.4 billion, less than 1 percent of its present value—which resulted from his true income going largely untaxed for six decades.

The same applies to other members of the 12-figure club. Taxed properly, they could never have accumulated such colossal, democracy-distorting piles of treasure. In 1982, per Zucman’s analysis, the average top 0.00001 percent household (just 11 families) had 14,000 times the wealth of the average household. Now they have 200,000 times more.

The virus in action.

Is there hope for a vaccine? Some cure for this societal affliction? 

Theoretically, yes. To address the Haig-Simons income gap, you could raise the minimum wage, enhance legal protections that allow workers to organize, update overtime laws, and properly fund the agencies that enforce the antitrust statutes. You could pass laws to reverse pro-monopoly court decisions and repeal the 1982 SEC ruling that enabled unlimited stock buybacks.

Simultaneously, you could overhaul the tax code to create a truly progressive income tax. This would require abandoning the fiction that investment gains aren’t real until the investments are sold, and that income from sales of stocks and bonds and gold bars and stud horses and rare sports cars deserve to be taxed at lower rates less than the compensation we earn by hauling garbage or painting houses—or writing magazine articles. 

All of that would all be a step in the right direction. Yet given the damage the virus has already wrought to our body politic—and this might well require a constitutional amendment—we need a wealth tax as a circuit breaker. For this very purpose, I helped write the Oligarch Act of 2025, introduced in the House last April by Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.).     

The Oligarch Act taxes excessive wealth progressively, at a maximum rate of 8 percent on fortunes in excess of 1 million times the median US household wealth. (This rate would apply to more families today, five, than at any time since the Gilded Age.) By taxing relative—not absolute—wealth, the legislation serves as a firewall against extreme wealth inequality. When inequality is moderate, fewer households would be subject to it. But in an oligarchic era such as today, it would put brakes on the undeserved growth of the most obscene fortunes and help shift political power back to whom it was once promised: the people. 

So yes, we know what’s needed, but the odds of accomplishing it? Mighty slim. Oligarchy feeds on itself. Wealth begets power—which begets more wealth, which begets additional power. Disrupting that vicious cycle by peaceful means becomes increasingly difficult and, at some point, maybe impossible.

If political efforts prove futile, could a popular uprising—like the French Revolution—dethrone our oligarchs? Fun idea, but consider how, in the hands of King Louis, mass surveillance and armies of AI-controlled drones and robots might have changed the outcome.

When you’re battling a virus, the longer the infection festers, the worse your chances of survival. Have we waited too long to treat this one? No doubt. But confronting American oligarchy now—before it’s entirely unstoppable—is the only rational choice.

Bob Lord, a former tax attorney, is senior vice president of tax policy for the group Patriotic Millionaires.

Methodology: Estimates of billionaires’ stock holdings in their primary company on January 1, 2026, were based on publicly available sources. For simplicity, the graphic only considers the effect of taxing each billionaire’s unrealized (paper) gains annually from the year the stock was first publicly traded. The calculations assume the billionaire sold just enough of the stock each year to cover the tax owed. Had we also taxed their gains in valuation during the pre-IPO years, the effect would be more profound. For example, had Jeff Bezos’ January 1 Amazon holdings been taxed at the prevailing ordinary wage rate (income plus payroll taxes) each year during the pre-IPO period and subsequently each year thereafter, they would have been worth roughly $7 billion in January—not more than $200 billion.