Last summer, when Donald Trump began pressuring GOP-controlled states to redraw their congressional maps mid-decade, Republicans had a lofty goal: pick up a dozen or more seats in an effort to fend off a coming blue wave and retain the House in the midterms.

Trump scored early wins in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina. But the gerrymandering arms race he started hasn’t resulted in the lopsided victory the White House envisioned. The approval by voters in Virginia on Tuesday of a new congressional map that could net Democrats up to four new seats shows how Democrats have fought Trump to a surprising draw in the redistricting wars.

Right now, the parties are basically even in the states that have redrawn their maps since last summer. The new map in Virginia makes it even more likely that Republicans will lose the House in November, given Trump’s tanking approval numbers and the fact that Cook Political Report forecasts that Republicans have to win three-quarters of toss-up races to remain in control, calling Democrats “substantial favorites.”

This is not how Trump and his allies envisioned things going. After easily securing the new maps in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina, Trump suffered a humiliating defeat when Indiana Republicans refused to redraw their districts. Other GOP-controlled legislatures, including Kansas and Nebraska, also balked. Ohio passed a compromise map that, while favoring Republicans, could have been much worse for Democrats. The courts in Utah struck down the state’s existing map, leading to a likely Democratic pickup. And Missouri voters could have a chance to block that state’s new gerrymander at the polls in November, all of which helps Democrats.

Democrats in California, meanwhile, pulled off an improbable ballot measure to offset the Texas gerrymander by redrawing the Golden State’s maps. Now, Virginia Democrats have followed suit, despite the fact that the process in Virginia was actually much trickier. Democrats had to retake control of the legislature and governorship last November in order to kickstart the redistricting process. Then they had to convince voters in a state that is much less blue than California to pass a constitutional amendment authorizing the very type of partisan gerrymandering that Virginia voters had sought to limit just six years earlier, when they passed a separate constitutional amendment giving a bipartisan commission the power to draw congressional maps. The takeaway is that voters dislike gerrymandering, but they now seem to hate Trump even more.

That said, the redistricting wars are far from over. Florida is planning to convene a special session next week to redraw its congressional map, which could net Republicans between two and five more seats. The Supreme Court could issue a decision any day now striking down the key remaining section of the Voting Rights Act, which could shift a handful of seats toward the GOP—though whether those maps would take effect before November’s elections depends partly on the timing of the decision. (It’s probably too late for most Southern states to draw new maps before the midterms.) And the Virginia Supreme Court could still strike down the new voter-approved map; the court allowed the referendum to proceed after Republicans challenged it but has yet to issue a final decision on the constitutionality of the redistricting effort.

Trump has threatened to “take over” the election system, and the mid-decade gerrymandering spree he started is part of a multi-faceted plan to interfere in the midterms. But while that has deeply destabilized American democracy, the president hasn’t succeeded in stopping Democrats from racking up a series of electoral victories over the past year. The passage of the redistricting referendum in Virginia is the latest sign of Democrats successfully fighting back.

In a scathing ruling describing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an “unserious” and “unsafe” leader, a federal judge in Oregon issued an order that will protect doctors and hospitals, and the transgender kids they treat, from the federal crackdown on gender-affirming care.

On Saturday, US District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai ruled that Kennedy was acting illegally when he attempted last December to unilaterially cut off federal funding for healthcare providers treating kids with gender dysphoria. “Unserious leaders are unsafe,” Kasubhai wrote in his ruling, adding that Kennedy’s actions “caused chaos and terror for all those people and institutions of our great nation.”

The case began last December, when Kennedy issued a declaration falsely claiming that gender-affirming medical treatments for trans youth “fail to meet professional recognized standards of health care.” In reality, such treatments—including puberty blockers for kids entering adolescence and cross-sex hormones for older teens—are considered necessary for some patients under mainstream medical guidelines, and they’re supported by virtually the entire medical establishment. (And it’s worth noting that the treatments are actually quite rare, despite the amount of political attention paid to them.) Kennedy dubbed the treatments “sex-rejecting procedures” and claimed the right to pull all federal funding from any hospital, clinic, or doctor, found to be providing them. Soon, his department had referred over a dozen children’s hospitals for potential defunding, and hospitals hoping to avoid the federal crackdown began preemptively cutting off treatments for kids with gender dysphoria.

A coalition of 21 mostly Democratic-led states and Washington, DC, immedialy sued, arguing Kennedy had skipped the legally required procedures for such a drastic policy change. Last month, Kasubhai agreed that Kennedy had overstepped his authority and issued an order temporarily blocking the declaration. “The notion that ‘I will go forward and issue a declaration and see if we can get away with it’ is not a principle of governance that adheres to the overarching commitment to a democratic republic that requires the rule of law to be regarded and respected and honored as sacred,” the judge said at the time.

But Kasubhai’s first order wasn’t stopping the Trump administration. While the court case played out, HHS began going through the formal rule-making process, proposing a sweeping regulation that would strip federal Medicaid and Medicare funding from any hospital that provides trans youth health care, which I wrote about in depth last week. Such a regulation, if implemented, would force hospitals nationwide to cut off trans kids’ care or else face financial devastation. A former Trump policy aide has referred to the proposed rule as a “nuclear weapon.” A second proposed policy would ban federal insurance programs for kids in low-income families from covering the treatments.

Now, Kasubhai has thrown a new wrench in the administration’s plans. His ruling on Saturday makes permanent his prior order blocking Kennedy’s declaration. But the judge also went further, prohibiting HHS from enacting any similar policy “which supercedes or purports to supercede the professionally recognized standards of care” in the states that sued. “Despite repeatedly emphasizing their commitment and obligation to protect children, Defendants have sweepingly wielded the Kennedy Declaration to threaten children’s hospitals that provide life-saving care to children,” Kasubhai wrote.

Such a broad order was necessary, Kasubhai wrote, because the Trump administration has a track record of “evading or flouting” prior court orders.

The judge also took particular exception to an argument made by HHS that Kennedy’s declaration couldn’t be blocked because it was simply an example of the secretary exercising his right to free speech. The department’s arguments are based on “the bald-faced lie that the Kennedy Declaration amounts to nothing more than one man’s musings on gender-affirming care,” Kasubhai thundered. “Defendants cannot bully or gaslight this Court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy—the freedom of speech—when that principle comes nowhere close to being implicated.”

Kasubhai’s order is sweeping enough that it likely blocks not just Kennedy’s declaration but also the soon-to-be-finalized Medicaid and Medicare regulations, according to Jennifer Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law. “This administration has tried to come back multiple times and do the same thing and then try to characterize it as something new,” she explains. “The court wanted to prevent that from happening.”

The Trump administration could appeal Kasubhai’s ruling. But now, if it tries to finalize its regulations in their current form, the states defending trans youth health care can go back to Kasubhai and argue that HHS is violating the injunction, Levi says. As a result, it seems likely that the regulations will be promptly blocked—if the Trump administration does decide to finalize them.

And that matters because hospitals across the country are watching this legislation closely to figure out if it’s financially and legally safe enough for them to offer trans youth health care. Could those hospitals who ended treatments restart them on the strength of Kasubhai’s new ruling? “I think they certainly could, and I think they should,” Levi tells me.

At the start of last week, there were four members of Congress at risk of expulsion due to allegations of severe misconduct. Two of those members, Reps. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), quickly resigned. On Tuesday afternoon, Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) became the third member of Congress to resign in eight days. Now only one of the scandal-plagued members is still standing: Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.).

The allegations against Swalwell and Gonzales involved accusations of misconduct against women—including rape in Swalwell’s case. (The former California congressman has said that “allegations of sexual assault are flat false.”) Cherfilus-McCormick was indicted by a federal grand jury in November based on allegations that she and her brother stole government funding then used some of it to make illegal contributions to her campaign. A subcommittee of the House Ethics committee more recently found a pattern of “progressive and compounding corruption.” (The Florida Democrat resigned moments before the Ethics committee met to determine what, if any, punishment she should face.) 

The accusations against Mills, who remains under investigation by the Ethics Committee, are shockingly wide-ranging. As I reported in a February profile, the Florida congressman has been accused of:

• Severely exaggerating his military record by falsely claiming to have been an Army Ranger, an Army sniper, and a Special Forces qualified medic—none of which are supported by records released by the Army 
• Earning a Bronze Star through stolen valor and false claims about saving the lives of multiple former Army comrades in Iraq 
• Punching someone during a trip to Ireland while serving in Congress in 2023
• Threatening to share sexually explicit content of an ex-girlfriend and, according to court testimony, saying he would kill her future partners 

In October, a Florida judge placed a restraining order on Mills after concluding that he subjected his ex-girlfriend to “dating violence” via cyberstalking. Mills has defended himself by noting that he has never been criminally charged for that, or other, alleged misbehavior. That is true but highly misleading. Mills spent more than three hours in court as part of the restraining order case. He took the stand to defend himself but failed to convince a Florida judge to rule in his favor. (As part of his decision, the judge determined that Mills was not “truthful” about explicit material recorded during the relationship.)

Earlier last year, Mills was also implicated in an alleged assault involving a different girlfriend, although she later retracted the claim. According to bodycam footage and documents recently obtained by the Washington Post, police were on the verge of arresting Mills in relation to those allegations. The Post explained:  

Before changing her account, the woman had shown [officer] Mazloom bruises on her arms and marks on her face, the body-camera footage shows. Tearful, she told the officer that Mills had harmed her during an argument and forcibly removed her from his Southwest Washington penthouse apartment, according to the footage.

Subsequent bodycam footage reviewed by the Post showed the alleged victim talking on the phone. She then told Mazloom, the DC police officer, that “he wants me to say” that the marks “were from our vacation and that I bruise easily.” According to the Post, Mazloom told fellow officers that he understood the alleged victim had been speaking to Mills.

Mills, an Army veteran who became an international arms dealer before running for Congress, has made enemies on both sides of the aisle in Washington. On Monday, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who has been in a long-running feud with her Republican colleague, introduced a resolution to expel Mills from Congress. Mills is reportedly weighing introducing his own resolution to expel Mace. (His congressional office has not responded to multiple interview requests and requests for comment that I have sent between January and April.)

For now, Mills may remain safe from expulsion as the Ethics Committee investigation proceeds on an open-ended timeline. This fall, though, Mills is facing what is likely to be his first truly competitive reelection battle since he entered Congress in 2023. His likely Democratic opponent, Bale Dalton, is a former Navy helicopter pilot who served as the chief of staff for NASA.

In 2024, Mills won by 13 points in his Republican-leaning district. In a normal year with a normal Republican running for reelection, that would be an insurmountable challenge for Democrats. In 2026, as Democrats overperform in races across the country and Mills’ scandals become more widely known, none of the usual rules apply.

Voters are anxious about losing their jobs to artificial intelligence, and key players across the political spectrum have started to notice. 

Now, the Working Families Party has rolled out a slate of policy proposals for the midterms, backed by more than two dozen Democratic candidates and representatives, that aims to address that anxiety. Their plan to counter AI-related job losses? Not a direct cash dividend, but a program seeking to place Americans in union jobs. 

A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that over half of Americans believe AI does more harm than good in their day-to-day lives, and 70 percent think that broad AI adoption will decrease the overall number of available jobs. 

With the midterms coming up, corporations and politicians are looking to address these fears. This month, OpenAI proposed creating a “public wealth fund” that would “provide every citizen with a stake in AI-driven economic growth.” Yesterday, New York Assemblyman Alex Bores proposed a taxation framework designed to redistribute wealth from major AI corporations to people whose jobs might be displaced by their products, calling it an “AI dividend.” 

The Working Families Party, meanwhile, is proposing what looks like another Green New Deal-style jobs program to solve the same problem. 

Julie Gonzales, who is running for U.S. Senate in Colorado, said the WFP’s union jobs would be in green infrastructure and healthcare, though the platform itself doesn’t specify how this jobs program would work. “Corporations and the do-nothing Dems they support have shipped jobs overseas, cut wages, and busted unions to boost their own profits,” Gonzales said. 

A jobs guarantee hasn’t seen much success since the Works Progress Administration of the 1940s—despite broad popular support for such a policy. The new WFP platform, called the “Working Families Guarantee,” also includes guaranteed low-cost health and childcare. They plan to fund this program by (you guessed it) increasing taxes on the rich. “The working families guarantee is what working people deserve, and we are coming to collect,” said Maurice Mitchell, the group’s national political director. The politicians endorsing the Working Families Guarantee include Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-IL). Several prominent candidates—among them Brad Lander in New York, Charles Booker in Kentucky, and Graham Platner in Maine—have also signed on. 

The Working Families Guarantee platform is part of an ongoing struggle over the future of AI policy within the Democratic Party. The Searchlight Institute, a moderate think tank which pitches itself as the leader of a “realignment” within the party, has vocally opposed efforts to limit datacenter buildout. (Searchlight, however, is backed by Nvidia-linked donors.) Third Way, another centrist Democratic think tank, has taken similar positions. 

The WFP, a relatively small left-wing party with big influence, wants to push moderate candidates further to the left. They’ve found a foothold among younger voters, who increasingly distrust both major parties. Ravi Mangla, National Press Secretary for the Working Families Party, told Mother Jones “people want leaders with backbone, yet groups like Third Way and the Searchlight Institute are telling Democrats to avoid taking positions on things like guaranteed health care and AI regulations.”

“That,” Mangla said, “is a losing position.” 

Donald Trump’s nominee for Federal Reserve chair promised to bring a new inflation framework and regime change to the central bank on Tuesday morning—all while maintaining that the president’s economy was doing just great. 

One bizarre exchange between nominee Kevin Warsh and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) during the former’s confirmation hearing was telling:

“If Professor Warsh were to assign a letter grade to the American economy today for the average working family, what grade would you assign?” Warnock asked. 

“In modern academic institutions they give everyone A’s,” Warsh joked to a handful of laughs in the crowd. “If I give a student anything but an A, I would have been summoned to the dean’s office.” 

While Warnock’s question had a peculiar frame—Warsh became a lecturer at Stanford University after resigning from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2011 over disagreements on how to improve the US economy—the Fed chair nominee avoided a factual response, lest it displease the president. 

Warsh made a similar move when Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) asked him about Trump’s remarks that “the roaring economy is roaring like never before” in his State of the Union address in February.  

“The broad contours of the economy are improving,” Warsh responded. “I think it can improve more, and in the years ahead, I think the economy’s potential is strengthening.”

Warsh’s comment comes amid a massive affordability crisis with prices skyrocketing even further during the US-Israeli ongoing war in Iran and Trump’s tariffs—even if Wall Street appears to be happy. 

It wasn’t just larger economic issues that Warsh avoided answering. Democratic senators, and even Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), questioned whether the nominee was as independent from political pressure as he asserts. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) criticized Warsh for flip-flopping on his position on interest rates, which notably aligned with Trump when he won the 2024 election. During the 2008 financial crisis, Warsh, who was a Federal Reserve board member at the time, argued against lowering interest rates to help American families and businesses borrow money. Instead, banks got bailouts during his term.

Warren said Trump passed on nominating Warsh for Fed chair over his stance on interest rates, “but as soon as Donald Trump became president a second time,” Warsh “began shouting from the rooftops about how the Fed should cut interest rates.” 

Just a few hours before the Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Trump appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box and said he would be disappointed if Warsh did not cut interest rates immediately upon getting confirmed. Last week, when asked on Fox Business whether interest rates would still drop this year, Trump answered, “When Kevin gets in, I do.” And last December, Trump said that “anybody that disagrees with me will never be the Fed chairman.”

Warsh’s confirmation hearing comes as Trump strains to restore the economy and the public’s confidence before the midterm elections this November. The nomination is one desperate move in a desperate campaign by a desperate party. 

Vice President JD Vance, a relatively recent Catholic convert, has had a lot to say in recent weeks about his newfound religion—and it’s rubbing some cradle Catholics the wrong way. 

Last week at a Turning Point USA event, Vance addressed remarks Pope Leo XIV had made about the war in Iran. 

“I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” he said. 

This was after his boss, President Donald Trump, posted an AI-generated image of himself depicted as Jesus and called the pope “weak on crime.” 

The pope has been vocal about his opposition to Trump’s handling of the war in Iran. After the president posted on social media that Iran could lose its entire civilization if it didn’t bend to his will, Leo told reporters: “Today, as we all know, there was this threat against the entire people of Iran, and this is truly unacceptable.”

The feud between the pope and the president has led to admonishments from nearly every bishop in the church, according to National Catholic Reporter columnist Michael Sean Winters. But some recent converts, like Vance, are speaking quite loudly and confidently while still learning the tenets of their faith. “I love converts, but you move into somebody’s house, you don’t start rearranging the furniture,” Winters said. 

Two lawmakers—Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales—resigned from office last week amid unrelated House Ethics Committee investigations over alleged sexual misconduct. And yesterday, the Committee stated that since 2017, they have initiated no less than 20 misconduct investigations against members of Congress, most of whom have not ended up resigning. 

Sexual misconduct is pervasive in America’s statehouses, too, according to a new report by the National Women’s Defense League, a group focused on preventing sexual harassment in the workplace. The group started reporting on accusations against state lawmakers in 2023, tracking accusations going back to 2013. 

NWDL has found credible sexual harassment allegations against 162 sitting state officials, in 424 incidents between 2013 and 2026. Six of those lawmakers were accused in 2025 — Ryan Armagost (R-Colo.); Ron Weinberg (R-Colo.); Jeremy Dean (D-Mo.); Dan McKeon (R-Neb.); Jeremy Olson (R-N.D.); and Solicitor General Judd Stone (R-Texas). Of those 162 lawmakers, 17 are still in office. 

“The public record is only the tip of the iceberg,” said Sarah Higginbotham, NWDL co-director. Higginbotham noted that the report only includes public-facing accounts from people able to withstand the fear of retaliation from their bosses. “These numbers understate the harm.” 

The problem is bipartisan: at the statehouse level, accusations against Republicans and Democrats happen at near-equal rates. The vast majority of victims are women, and 93 percent of accused officials over the past decade are men. 

For Aftyn Behn (D-Tenn.), this isn’t surprising news. “Old-school sexism is absolutely back,” Behn said at a virtual press conference Tuesday morning, before offering a recent example. “Yesterday, a Republican female colleague of mine walked to the lectern on the Tennessee General Assembly House floor to present her bill. A member whistled at her. We all heard it, but nobody said a word, and we just moved on like nothing had happened.”

The problem may also be growing worse. In the years following the #MeToo movement, NWDL co-director Emma Davidson Tribbs said, the number of people reporting workplace sexual misconduct has decreased. “The recent dip in public reporting is a warning sign. It signals distrust in accountability systems,” she said. After Swalwell and Gonzales’ resignations, advocates hope they can push this issue back into the spotlight. 

“This moment can, hopefully, give us momentum,” Republican Pennsylvania state representative Abby Major said at Tuesday’s press conference. This past year, five states enacted laws addressing sexual harassment in state legislatures—but most states still have relatively few protections in place. In practice, those protections might look like a confidential sexual misconduct reporting system, transparency around misconduct investigations, and other reforms. “We have to ensure that no one has to choose between their safety and their livelihood,” Major said. 

Tucker Carlson would very much like you to forgive him for backing Donald Trump all these years.

“It’s not enough to say ‘I changed my mind’ or ‘this is bad, I’m out,'” Carlson said on his news podcast The Tucker Carlson Show on Monday. “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”

Carlson said he will “be tormented for a long time” for promoting Trump in his campaign for presidency. The podcast episode featured his brother Buckley, who, according to the show’s notes, wrote speeches for Trump in 2015 and “can fully understand how painful the current betrayal is.”

Carlson, it must be noted, claimed his support for Trump “was not intentional.”

But it certainly looks intentional. Carlson consistently misled over 3.5 million viewers on his Fox News show. During the lead-up to the 2020 election, Carlson boasted a nightly audience of over 5 million.

Carlson repeatedly spread Trump’s propaganda, including unsubstantiated claims of “meaningful voter fraud” in Georgia following the 2020 election. He also made racist and anti-immigrant remarks, including voicing support for the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which promotes the fictional idea that nonwhite people are brought to the US to replace white voters and decimate the GOP fundraising base. 

Carlson’s breaking point came when Trump invaded Iran and went on a genocidal online crash out by posting a series of religious posts on religious Truth Social posts earlier this month.  Carlson said the whole ordeal made “a mockery of Christianity.”

Carlson has been sowing the seeds of redemption for weeks now. After Trump went on several verbal tirades against Pope Leo XIV, who himself criticized the US’ role in the Iran War, Carlson condemned Trump publicly saying on his April 15 show: “Could this be the antichrist? Well, who knows? At least that’s my conclusion.”

So here is my conclusion: Carlson is one of many conservative commentators who now want you to believe they were sold a fake bill of goods. From Marjorie Taylor Greene to Candace Owens, Alex Jones, and Megyn Kelly, right-wing commentators see Trump’s MAGA base defecting. Are these right-wing ideologues suddenly principled defenders of conservative values? Not a chance. They’re all just hucksters who sense a good business opportunity.

These fake outrage artists are even using Trump’s playbook to do it. Call it the latest iteration of the art of the deal.

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

Democrats should get louder in championing clean energy’s affordability and resilience from global shocks, according to some of the party’s leading voices on the climate.

As the Iran war roils economies by raising the cost of oil and gas, countries are aiming to accelerate their shift to cleaner energy. But in the US, Donald Trump has sought to kill off any alternative to fossil fuels while opposing Democrats have been reluctant to tie the conflict to any action on the climate crisis.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally travels, in the wake of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran caused energy costs to spike around the world. In the US, gasoline has soared above $4.10 a gallon nationally, with Trump admitting the costs could even be “a little bit higher” by November.

Democrats have pointed to this as further evidence of the US president’s broken promises to lower the cost of living for Americans. But there have been few calls for a pivotal switch away from the volatility of fossil fuels in favor of clean energy in response to the conflict, to the frustration of those who support action on the climate crisis.

“There’s a timely clash on climate and costs that Democrats can win, as long as we have the nerve to actually show up to the fight,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator, who added “true energy independence will be achieved by powering our economy with renewable energy, the fuel sources for which are unlimited, free and independent of geopolitical events.”

“Democrats will continue to lose the righteous and winnable fight over the future of clean energy if we cede the battlefield to fossil fuel liars and our own party’s misguided climate-hushers,” Whitehouse said.

Climate “hushing,” in which politicians and businesses downplay or ignore the need to cut planet-heating emissions, has been prevalent in the US during Trump’s second term. A bruising 2024 election loss and ongoing inflation concerns—polls show gasoline costs are Americans’ top concern about the Iran war—have left Democrats wrestling with a critique of affordability rather than the imperiled livability of the planet, despite the clear link between the two.

The Iran war provides a “unique moment of opportunity” for Democrats to extol the advantages of lower-pollution options like electric cars but the focus should be on “reducing consumer costs, which should’ve been the message over climate protection all along,” according to Paul Bledsoe, a former climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House.

“I don’t think they’ve grasped the political opportunity yet,” Bledsoe said. “They have to stay really focused on how these next-generation technologies will provide a consumer benefit. When you pitch clean energy as cutting consumer costs first and improving the overall economy second, people are happy to cut emissions third.”

Translating this into a winning political message has been a struggle for Democrats who in Joe Biden’s administration passed sweeping climate legislation to spur new jobs in the clean energy sector, only for the bill to be gutted by Republicans now in control of Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has proposed a partial resurrection of incentives for clean energy should his party regain power.

But Democrats must do better to pitch solar, wind, and battery technologies as a way to reduce US exposure to international fossil fuel costs dictated by global events, according to Ro Khanna, a leading Democratic member of Congress. “I really believe we missed a moment to do that with the Ukraine war,” he said. “We should have been linking the clean energy agenda to Americans’ economic security and our national security, and we should do that again.”

Longer term, Khanna added, the US needs to “wean ourselves off the petrostates. We need a moonshot for clean technology.”

Such a shift from fossil fuels, which scientists say is imperative if the world is to avert catastrophic climate impacts, has been stymied by Trump, who has implemented a “drill, baby drill” approach to oil and gas extraction and has taken extraordinary measures, even amid the Iran crisis, to halt domestic clean energy generation that he has called a “scam” and a “con job.”

The soaring price of oil may even be beneficial, Trump has suggested, because “when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.” This money is mostly flowing to large fossil fuel corporations, with the world’s largest 100 oil and gas companies making more than $30 billion every hour in unearned profit during the first month of the war.

Trump’s approach differs starkly from that of other countries that have sought to rapidly reduce their exposure to a faraway conflict. Electric car sales have boomed in South Korea and Malaysia, while in Pakistan electric rickshaws have been selling out. “This is a wake-up call,” Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto said recently. “We will convert all motorcycles into electric motorcycles. All cars, all trucks, all tractors must [also] be electric.”

The European Union, too, plans to accelerate clean energy deployment to help alleviate electricity bills. “Every delayed investment in the energy transition risks greater cost for society at a later stage,” a draft European Commission proposal states. The plan comes ahead of a conference in Colombia this month where representatives from 85 countries will gather to craft a roadmap on how to move beyond the fossil fuel era.

The Iran war is a case study for the need to make this transition, according to the United Nations. “Clean energy is the antidote to fossil fuel cost chaos, because it is cheaper, safer, and faster to market,” said Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief. “Wars don’t disrupt the supply of sunlight for solar power, and wind power does not depend on vulnerable shipping straits.”

The mounting toll of the climate crisis, though, is the primary reason to ditch coal, oil and gas, advocates argue. Such impacts are increasingly apparent in the US, as well as the rest of the world, with the country enduring its hottest and driest start to a year in recorded history, with record-breaking March heat and punishing bouts of drought, heat and wildfire strafing much of the US west.

Despite the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate science, two-thirds of Americans are worried about global heating, polling has shown, with most people in the US underestimating how concerned others are about the topic as it has receded from coverage in many media outlets.

There has been “a surprising silence” from Democrats and climate activists on how clean energy is cheaper, inexhaustible and more locally controlled compared with fossil fuels, according to Anthony Leiserowitz, an academic at Yale University who studies public perceptions of the climate crisis. “And, oh by the way, it reduces the carbon pollution causing global warming,” he added.

Last week, the publishing conglomerate Condé Nast shuttered Self, a women’s health publication that in recent years had turned to publishing service journalism on chronic health conditions that was both practical and normalized living with chronic illness. Amid a trend of unrealistic articles on longevity and ambiguously defined, MAHA-coded writing on “wellness,” Self was a breath of fresh air.

“SELF has played an important role in shaping conversations around health and wellness,” Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said in a memo published last week. “However, as audience behaviors shift, we have not seen a path for SELF to continue in its current form as a digital publication.” Lynch’s memo said that health and wellness content would “be integrated into our other brands, including Allure and Glamour.” Self had already gone digital-only and ceased print publication in 2017.

I spoke to chronically ill women who had been dedicated readers of Self about what the magazine, and its closure, meant to them. Self may not have been a revenue driver for Condé, but its work was transformative for readers, quietly shifting away from the typical fare of women’s magazines in the 2000s and 2010s—like problematic weight-loss content—to a more progressive vision of women’s health and wellness.

Self‘s conversational style of writing about health topics made the publication more accessible, said Jaime Seltzer, scientific director of the myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome nonprofit MEAction, who was interviewed by then–editor-in-chief Rachel Miller for a 2022 article that Seltzer said sparked more awareness around ME/CFS and Long Covid and had a major impact on people who were trying to figure out what is happening to their health.

“The more people who know they have a disease, the more they can get the clinical care that they need,” Seltzer said. “A really good article like this is a great way to show a friend or a relative what you’re going through.”

Beth Morton, a migraine care advocate said she appreciated Self‘s non-stigmatizing articles on the condition by people who lived with migraines themselves. Self “still had an impact,” Morton said, lamenting the decision to shutter the magazine.

Myisha Malone-King, a chronic illness advocate living with Crohn’s disease, said Self made her feel seen and supported when she struggled with getting medical care for an ovarian cyst. “I felt extremely lonely when I was diagnosed,” Malone-King said, calling the publication’s folding “a huge blow.”

Condé Nast hasn’t announced what will happen to Self‘s digital presence and archives, and representatives for the company did not respond to a query about whether the site would stay online—or whether it would follow other folded media outlets, like the feminist publication Bitch Media, which also engaged frequently with chronic illness and disability, into digital oblivion (though some articles from Bitch are being republished in The Flytrap).

Vivian Delchamps Wolf, a disabled and chronically ill professor of English at Dominican University of California, told me how much she valued Self’s ability to capture the social dimensions of chronic illness, as with a piece by its former staff writer Katie Camero on how to navigate friendships with people who don’t seem to get what life with a chronic illness is like.

Reporting in that vein, Delchamps Wolf said, “clearly comes from an authentic space and refuses to present chronic illness as pitiful.”

“It’s so important that journalists address issues like medical racism and other systemic barriers that worsen people’s experiences of chronic illness,” Delchamps Wolf said. “In addition to talking about medical concerns, we have to acknowledge chronic illness as a politically, culturally, and socially marginalized category to bring about substantive change.”

Now, there’s one fewer publication where that can happen.