President Donald Trump’s second term has often felt like an exercise in mass distraction. As soon as he’s directing people to pay attention to one issue like the Iran war or immigration, he’s already moved on to false claims about widespread voter fraud, taking over Greenland, or building a massive arch in the nation’s capital.

In the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, New York Times reporter and co-author Jonathan Swan has tried to make sense of Trump’s unprecedented tenure by bringing readers inside the room where major decisions happen. And Swan says the loyalists Trump has surrounded himself with in his second term have made Trump’s overwhelming and exhausting presidency possible.

“The word ‘loyalty’ almost isn’t strong enough to describe the bond that some of them have with him,” Swan says. “It’s a belief that this man is a figure of destiny, a figure of history, that God has put him here to save the country.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Swan talks about the immense challenges of covering the Trump administration, how the Jeffrey Epstein scandal sent the White House into crisis mode behind closed doors, and why he’s not eager to write another book about the president anytime soon.

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

President Trump’s rambling, combative speech Tuesday to the United Nations General Assembly saw him return to his most serious quagmire yet—the war in Iran—telling world leaders that he was considering completely destroying the country as a means to end the conflict he launched alongside Israel in February.

“Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” Trump pondered aloud, claiming that Iran’s leadership had rejected multiple peace deals with the US.

He said little about the terms of those offers—and nothing about the US and Israel’s explosive role in the Middle East, from Iran and the Gulf to Gaza and beyond.

The Center for International Policy’s Matt Duss, a former Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) foreign policy adviser, said in a statement that Trump’s threats were “dangerously unhinged” and “must be unequivocally rejected.”

“Such rhetoric is not merely reckless, it is a criminal threat of genocide against an entire nation,” Duss wrote. “U.S. lawmakers and U.S. partners around the world should condemn Trump’s remarks.”

The president again framed his demand as centering on Iran’s nuclear program, despite offering up a shifting litany of goals and terms on which he’d end the war across the last seven months, and implied that scorched earth was the only alternative. But American operations in Iran have brought an uncompromising government to power, limited the Iranian president’s power to enforce any deal, and made nuclear containment on the level of the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action virtually impossible for the indefinite future.

But it’s the tens of thousands of people who have been killed since the first US-Israeli strikes in February, and the communities whose essentials like food, water, and energy continue to be destroyed, who have faced the worst consequences—and who didn’t earn a mention in Trump’s speech beyond the threat of complete destruction.

The Trump administration says it plans to shut down Freedom 250, the quasi-private organization it used to take over the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations. But that doesn’t mean the president’s efforts to hijack the nation’s semiquincentennial have ended.

Trump is continuing to weaponize the anniversary as he combats what he claims are overly woke institutions. He’s still using the 250th to justify self-aggrandizing construction projects he is pushing in Washington. And, at least for the time being, the Freedom 250 fundraising apparatus remains in place, drawing scrutiny from congressional Democrats who are planning to ramp up their investigations into the Trump administration if they win control of Congress in November.

Freedom 250 is a limited liability company set up within the National Park Foundation, a nonprofit overseen by the Interior Department that raises private money for national parks. That complex arrangement makes the group’s operations, and its spending of federal money, opaque. According to USA Spending, a government website, Freedom 250 is funded via a grant to the National Park Foundation, to the tune of $86 million so far, that won’t expire until the end of 2028.

In addition, Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee noted in a July report that Event Strategies, Inc, or ESI—a private company with close ties to Trump’s campaign operations—still has a contract to organize festivities worth up to $100 million. According to the General Services Administration, that contract runs through 2030. This “could allow ESI to continue to host events and build projects in the name of the President’s self-aggrandizement until 2030,” Democrats wrote in their report. Event Strategies did not respond to inquiries.

Officials at Freedom 250 and the National Park Foundation say the Democrats needn’t worry. They expect Freedom 250 to dissolve in coming months. “Our intent to wind the Freedom 250 LLC down, and that wind down has begun,” said Josh deBerge, a spokesperson for the foundation.

Lawmakers have also questioned whether GOP operatives have used anniversary events to gather personal data from attendees to build email lists to benefit Republicans in the midterm elections. This month, House Democrats asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate how a Freedom 250 vendor called Campaign Nucleus—a firm owned by former Trump campaign official Brad Parscale—is using the phone numbers, email addresses, and ZIP codes it gathered from people who attended the events.

“President Trump and his allies are in a position to use information on American voters, harvested with taxpayer money and government resources, in an attempt to tip the scales in the upcoming midterm elections,” the Democrats wrote.

Campaign Nucleus did not respond to an request for comment.

Whatever happens with Freedom 250, Trump’s obsession with politicizing the country’s 250th birthday won’t dissipate anytime soon. Nor will Democrats’ interest in investigating what has transpired. Since last summer, Trump has staged a series of events nominally celebrating the anniversary that were funded, for the most part, with money Congress set aside for that purpose. But the festivities—a military parade; an IndyCar race around the National Mall; the “Patriot Games”; a massive fireworks display that actually occurred early on July 5 after extended remarks by the president; the ill-fated Great American State Fair; and the UFC fight at the White House on Trump’s 80th birthday—were light on commemoration of the country’s history and heavy on the kind of spectacle the president enjoys. There were, for instance, dozens of flyovers.

Democrats are also looking into Freedom 250’s fundraising. “Freedom 250 appears to be yet another slush fund for wealthy corporations and insiders to buy influence with the White House,” four Senate Democrats recently wrote in a letter to the head of the National Park Foundation. In August, Rep. Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, and Maxine Dexter, the top Democrat on the panel’s investigative subcommittee, wrote to nearly two dozen Freedom 250 sponsors and partners—many of which are federal contractors or otherwise have interests that could be impacted by administration policy—to ask if their donations were linked to promises of improper influence.

Freedom 250 spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez has denied that the group has engaged in improper fundraising, calling the claims “a partisan smear from politicians” eager to “manufacture division.”

Even if Freedom 250 ultimately disappears, its leadership is not going away. Last year, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum appointed former Trump campaign co-manager Chris Lacivita and fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke, two of Freedom 250’s leaders, to National Park Foundation’s board. They can retain those posts even after Freedom 250 dissolves.

Freedom 250 claims to be nonpartisan, but it leaders remain key figures in GOP electoral efforts. O’Rourke is fundraiser for MAGA Inc, Trump’s political action committee that is spending hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Republican candidates this fall. LaCivita continues to advise Trump and GOP candidates. Alvarez is a senior adviser to the Republican National Committee. All three were in Dallas this month, helping run the “midterm convention” Trump held to boost Republicans in November.

Earlier this month, Trump used a Truth Social post to demand that the Smithsonian Institution install multiple statues of George Washington at its National Museum of American History, including a 30-foot “colossus.” Trump’s stated reason: “the Museum has failed to give George Washington and our other Founding Fathers the celebration they deserve” during “our Nation’s 250th Anniversary Year.”

The American History Museum already contains a George Washington statue, along with other artifacts and information related to the first president. It’s located in Washington, DC, less than half a mile from the Washington Monument. Two more Washington statues seem superfluous. Trump’s actual motivation, beyond his evident infatuation with statues, may be reigniting culture wars with a new attack on wokeness. “Instead of a Center for Restorative History,” he wrote, “America’s National History Museum should have a Center for American Heroes.”

Trump has similarly attributed his effort to renovate the Kennedy Center to the anniversary. The administration’s recent shutdown of the center, and the president’s threat to raze it if he remains barred from putting his name on it, follows a past claim by Trump that he would close the center “in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country.”

The logic of such statements is hard to follow, but the president’s eagerness to invoke the country’s birthday to justify his whims is clear enough.

Other initiatives that Trump has attributed to semiquincentennial are proceeding. Excavation work on the 250-foot arch the president wants to erect in front of Arlington National Cemetery is expected to start any day. Trump recently revised his vision for that project. In an apparent bid to create a national security rationale, he announced that it would become a “top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

The White House is also still pushing to build a “National Garden of American Heroes,” consisting of 250 statues of US luminaries, on a portion of the National Mall near the Jefferson Memorial. The administration recently installed a pair of gazebos, or aywans, donated by government of Uzbekastan there that the Uzbek ambassador has said will be part of the statue garden. The administration badly missed its goal of completing the project by July 4 of this year. But despite a lawsuit and questions about the plan’s legality, it is still pushing to complete the statue garden during Trump’s presidency.

O’Rourke is also a raising money for the National Garden of American Heroes Foundation, a recently formed group gathering private donations to help finance the statue garden, along with a luxury golf course nearby.

Congressional Democrats say that’s part of a pattern. Natural Resources Democrats argue that Freedom 250 acted as “blueprint” for other administration efforts to combine public and private funding in slush funds that advance Trump’s pet projects even as they claim freedom from congressional oversight. Lawmakers have also faulted the administration’s use of another nonprofit controlled by the Interior Department, the Trust for the National Mall, as vehicle for funding Trump’s ballroom project.

As Trump continues to use organizations similar to Freedom 250, Democrats say they will keep investigating. In that sense, long after the parties end, the fight over the country’s birthday will go on.

In recent weeks, a fresh crop of people connected to the artificial intelligence industry have emerged to warn that AI is possibly going to kill us all, spreading the word with various degrees of credibility or self-interest. Anthropic chief and co-founder Dario Amodei has also called to slow down the development of AI technology, a recommendation that Sam Altman of OpenAI and even notorious good judgment-haver Elon Musk quickly cosigned. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and the president himself have continued to insist that AI is essential for American technological advancement and military might. As a very strange public debate has ensued, it’s become clear that Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other people connected with the administration view AI as an essentially masculine tool: “dominant,” a word they keep using over and over, powerful, and able to be kept in check only by a strong ruler.

The Trump administration has become a place where very odd politics around both gender and “wokeness” are constantly on display. Trump issued a garbled executive order immediately upon retaking office that attempted to redefine “male” and “female.” Hegseth is obsessed with testosterone, announcing in July that military members will be screened for low T regardless of their gender. The intense focus on gender and wokeness has also been true of their approach to AI: Last year, the administration promised that it would require AI companies with federal contracts to make sure their large language models match the administration’s views on things like climate change; transgender identity; and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. (The administration characterized the mandate as a way to only purchase AI tools that “prioritize truthfulness and ideological neutrality.”) 

It’s now increasingly obvious that Trump and his administration view AI technology as something akin to a large, dangerous dog that only a masculine owner can control. Trump has repeatedly called warnings that AI could harm human beings “a hoax,” writing on TruthSocial that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” 

“The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change,’” the president also posted, with his trademark random capitalization. “That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!”  

More recently, Trump promised, also on TruthSocial, that he’d appoint an “AI czar,” writing, “Only High I.Q. individuals need apply! AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful.” And on X, he tried very hard to rebrand AI entirely, putting to his followers a poll about which more flattering term should be used instead. “A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI),” the president wrote, “or Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI).”

The debate took a strange turn last week when the New York Post ran a story warning that some people calling for a slowdown of AI development, including Amodei, are connected with the “effective altruism” movement. Effective altruism is, simply put, a philosophy first put forward by the bioethicist Peter Singer, which purports to use calculation and hard evidence to maximize the impact of charitable donations, and figure out what charitable initiatives will do the most good mathematically. The idea is controversial for all kinds of reasons, and one of its most visible proponents has been imprisoned financial fraudster Sam-Bankman-Fried, which isn’t, itself, a great advertisement. Some people have even likened EA to a cult, and one actual and extremely violent high-control group, the Zizians, had some effective altruist DNA. There’s also an offshoot best described as “effective altruism accelerationism,” promoted by several high-profile Silicon Valley figures, which holds that accelerating technological progress, including by developing AI faster, will promote human survival and consciousness on a galactic level, an idea that has several obvious, universe-sized holes. (Among them: AI data centers already clearly have disastrous environmental and health impacts, which is the opposite of promoting human survival.)

Boiling all of that down to only what might interest or scare their readers, the Post positioned effective altruism as a frightening example of a wealthy “group of woke elitists” trying to engineer the world to their liking. “It’s a group of globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronoun and promote ‘Effective Altruism’ that believe all the world’s problems can be solved with technology,” the paper elaborated, adding that EA’s “obsessed adherents believe in funneling their wealth toward the goals they view as most important to humanity, including climate change and strict AI regulation.” 

Right-wing commentators were quick to make the connection: that “woke,” feminine, or nonbinary people can’t be trusted in their warnings on AI. “There is no committee or regulatory body with a ‘they/them’ that will make any good decisions,” far-right activist Chris Rufo declared. “Social scientists call this the Iron Law of Genderfluidity, and it’s been replicated in a hundred peer-reviewed journals, so you know it’s true.” (He was attempting to make a joke; there is no such “law.”) 

The Post soon ran a second story about how another prominent AI critic, author and computer scientist Nate Soares, is romantic partners with Aella, a well-known pseudonymous sex writer who has an OnlyFans and goes to sex parties. Soares is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. But the Post‘s story barely discussed his work; rather than cast doubt on any of Soares’ specific ideas about AI, it instead painted AI critics as sexually deviant—even if only by association—and thus untrustworthy. Other outlets like Fox News and the Bari Weiss-run The Free Press have followed suit with their own stories about the dangers of the effective altruism movement’s views on AI. 

The Defense Department has also gotten involved. The X account for the so-called Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, previously seen posting QAnon memes, has issued a series of posts attacking effective altruism. Emil Michael, who was confirmed to that position in May 2025, is a former businessman who worked at Uber and, before that, Klout, a social media analytics company that assigned users a score assessing their online popularity and influence.

“Americanism, not effective altruism,” one recent tweet from the account declared. “The United States will continue to be AI DOMINANT!” 

“No dooming,” another declared. “America will be AI DOMINANT! Whoever wins AI, WINS!” 

Michael has also appeared on Fox News to declare effective altruism’s advocacy against AI to be a plot against American interests. “The amount of dollars being spent in DC now, directly and indirectly, by this effective altruist movement,” he said recently in a Fox appearance shared on another Pentagon account, “in the next few years, you’re going to see more dollars poured into this industry from a lobbying standpoint. The promoters of some of these extinction, death-cult-like philosophies are a part of that effort… There’s no doubt this is a coordinated campaign to scare people to make irrational decisions that benefit some of these incumbents.”

Dr. Fred Turner is a Stanford University professor of communication who studies media, technology, and American cultural history. In the early years of the internet, he wrote recently in The Baffler, developers were interested in networking—using tech to create connections between people and imagine a more collaborative and utopian world. Now, he wrote, they’re interested in extraction.

“The social world is no longer something to be interlinked,” Turner told me. Now, he says, “The value comes from monitoring, measuring, mapping, and reselling every bit of our social interaction, including the production of knowledge, stories, and language.” 

AI promises to help companies do just that. Given how often Trump has used the presidency as a vehicle to make money, Turner says it would be natural to assume that Trump’s alliance with the industry has something to do with his seeing the potential for personal profit from its data centers. But it’s also about asserting dominance and control.

“The Trump presidency is a process of protecting Trump’s personal incentives—his own personal reputation—and constantly shifting debates that could be about policy into interpersonal name calling realms where he can assert a kind of machismo,” Turner says. 

The administration, Turner adds, has made asserting a stereotypically menacing masculinity a core part of how the world is meant to see it: “That kind of projection of masculine dominance in a cruel way, as Trump does routinely, has the effect of scaring enemies, recruiting allies, and drawing the craven to your side. They are embracing a masculine style that gives them real material gains.” 

With respect to the Trump administration’s sudden championing of AI broadly and data centers specifically, Turner asks “what would they imagine they gain from reframing a policy about land use, about water use, about electricity use, in terms of sexuality?

‘If it were mine to do, I would teach the world a class on separating out policy debate and questions of sexual style and ethics,” Turner says. “If you tangle them up, you can muddy the water and cause folks to become upset against their own interests. I’d be asking about the profitability for Trump and his crew both in a financial sense, and then other senses: of turning a debate about technology into a debate about who’s got the phallus.” 

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.

The recent news from ProPublica that a Russian oligarch attended Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding celebration on a private island in the Bahamas and covered hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for the lavish affair was not a surprise to anyone familiar with the main thrust of my new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. The book chronicles the decade-long covert operation Putin has waged against the United States to sow discord, influence elections (to benefit Trump), and court Trump and his crew. An important fact in the wedding story is that Umar Kremlev, this oh-so generous oligarch, is not just another Russian billionaire who has to make nice with Putin to keep his fortune; he has been a key member of Putin’s security apparatus—truly the inner circle—and became an oligarch (and head of a corrupt international boxing organization) because of that. In essence, a Putin operative infiltrated deep into the Trump clan.

This is not the first time Russia has attempted to squirm its way into Trump Jr.’s world. During the 2016 campaign, Junior received a message from an associate who worked with the son of another Russian oligarch. That contact informed Don Jr. that Moscow was plotting to secretly help Trump and wanted to send an emissary who had dirt on Hillary Clinton to meet with the Trump campaign. Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I love it.” The meeting soon happened, with Trump Jr., campaign chair Paul Manafort, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner present. When the meeting was revealed—eight months after the election—Trump Jr. first lied about it, saying it was not related to the campaign, and then later claimed the emissary (who was tied to Russian intelligence) provided no useful derogatory information on Clinton.

What was most important about the meeting was that it signaled to Moscow that the Trump camp was a-okay with Putin meddling in the election and that it made the Trump gang aware that the Kremlin intended to covertly mess in American politics to assist Trump. Still, Trump, Trump Jr., Manafort, and other Trumpers would loudly assert throughout the campaign and in the years afterward that Putin had not interfered. That is, they knowingly lied.

Which brings us to collusion.

Collusion has been the buzzword at the center of the Trump-Russia scandal for 10 years. Trump and his minions have contended that there was no collusion and, thus, no scandal, meaning the whole Russia investigation was a “hoax” and a Deep State “witch hunt” orchestrated to destroy Trump.

Their definition of collusion basically rested on whether Trump or his lieutenants were in the same room with Russian hackers as they pilfered the documents from Democrats that would later be made public by WikiLeaks. No evidence of such collaboration emerged. So, they have vociferously argued ever since, there was no collusion. And, therefore, no scandal.

The issue of collusion, naturally, has come up, as I’ve been doing media interviews about the new book. It has long seemed to me that the meeting Trump Jr. set up and the subsequent denials from him and other Trump players—which echoed and affirmed Putin’s denials of interfering in the election—were a form of collusion. Team Trump was colluding with Putin’s attempted cover-up. Maybe Trump and his lieutenants weren’t involved in the hack-and-leak operation. But they deliberately lied and provided cover for Putin. Smells like collusion.

As I’ve been discussing all this in media interviews, I’ve made the point that perhaps the better term is complicity. For 10 years, not just in 2016, Putin has been attacking US elections—the book details all this—and throughout that time, Trump has incessantly maintained that Moscow was doing nothing and that all claims otherwise were part of the Deep State’s bogus “Russia, Russia, Russia” conspiracy against him. Consequently, Trump has been complicit in Putin’s ongoing information war against the United States. That’s an act of profound betrayal.

In the stretch following the 2016 election, Democrats and Trump critics were too fixated on collusion. But it was the complicity, stupid.

Now let’s go back to collusion.

My book does have a chapter titled “Collusion,” and it digs into a 966-page bipartisan report on the Russian attack on the 2016 election that was produced by the Senate Intelligence Committee and released in August 2020. This investigation offers the most comprehensive account of what transpired in 2016. One of the most intriguing portions of the report zeroes in on Manafort. (Another very interesting section looks at whether the Kremlin obtained any compromising material on Trump. Read the book for that.)

In the Manafort passages, the committee—led at the time by a Republican senator named Marco Rubio—revealed that while he was chairing the Trump campaign, Manafort was interacting with and passing sensitive internal campaign data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a close business associate who was also a Russian intelligence officer. And, the report noted, Kilimnik had connections to the Russian military intelligence unit that ran the hack-and-leak operation that targeted the Clinton campaign. Moreover, the report noted that committee investigators had uncovered “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility of Manafort’s potential connection to the hack-and-leak operations.”

The report’s description of this information was redacted, as was much text about Kilimnik. In my reporting for the book, I learned that the redacted portions disclosed that Kilimnik was an agent for the GRU, the Russian intelligence outfit that ran the hack-and-leak attack—a fact buttressing the possibility that Kilimnik was involved in or aware of that operation when he was in communication with Manafort.

Because of all the redactions—the intelligence community did not want to reveal too much of what it knew about the Manafort-Kilimnik connection to protect sources and methods—the public has never learned the full story. It appears there’s a chance that there was indeed collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian operation via Manafort.

In any event, the fact that Trump’s campaign chair was in direct contact with a Russian agent—they communicated through means that left no traces—ought to have triggered a major scandal. Yet this Republican-backed report—which affirmed that Moscow intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump and that Trump actively exploited the Russian attack and “publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia”—had little impact on the public view of the Trump-Russia affair.

It was released during the Covid pandemic in the summertime, when the two political parties were holding their presidential conventions. By then, most of the political-and-media world had moved on from all that Russia business, particularly after the final report of special counsel Robert Mueller noted he had found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia. (He did point out he had amassed plenty of evidence that Trump committed multiple acts of obstruction of justice.)

So Trump and those within MAGA-land could continue to peddle the narrative that collusion was a bogus charge that had been concocted by the Deep State, the media, and nefarious Democrats.

Trump Jr.’s wedding should prompt a reappraisal of the collusion question, as it illuminates what I try to convey in the book: Putin has been running an extensive covert action against the United States for a decade, and Trump and his crew have both colluded and been complicit.

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

For 38 years, Josh Armes worked as a coal miner in West Virginia and Virginia.

After retirement, Armes, 74, of Grundy, Virginia, was diagnosed with black lung disease, medically known as coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP), caused by breathing in coal dust over long periods, which irreversibly damages the lungs.

Armes has required an oxygen tank to breathe for the past four years or so, along with regular doctor visits and an albuterol inhaler to help when he has trouble breathing. Even with the supplemental oxygen, he’s severely limited in what he can physically do.

In 2014, Armes received notice that the federal black lung benefits he had been receiving for more than three years were being appealed against by a coal operator. For the last 12 years, he and his family have been in an appeals process limbo, trying to regain their benefits while Armes’s condition progresses.

The federal black lung program was created in 1969 to provide coal miners disabled by black lung with monetary compensation and medical benefits. But the Armes family is just one of many who have struggled with appeals and long delays in obtaining federal black lung benefits.

Those delays come as the Trump administration moves to boost the coal industry and as cases of black lung are surging—reaching a nearly 50-year high, according to data published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine last month.

According to a May report by the government accountability office (GAO), 7,709 miner beneficiaries were receiving black lung benefits in 2024. The report was requested in 2023 by Democratic senators Mark Warner, John Hickenlooper, Tim Kaine, and John Fetterman, who have also introduced legislation to improve the black-lung benefits system.

In the fiscal year 2025, about 22,500 beneficiaries, including dependents, survivors, and miners, were receiving black lung benefits.

Between 2013 to 2024, 40 percent of approved claims by the Department of Labor were disputed, generally by coal operators.

The May report said miners have expressed problems with obtaining black-lung benefits. It said miners have been forced to wait several years for their claims to be approved, and raised issues with coal operators filing appeals. “I can’t figure out one thing. They sent me a paper that said I got first- and second-stage black lung. That ought to be enough, or do you have to be dead?” Armes said.

His daughter, Crystal Armes, said obtaining the black lung benefits is an arduous process, involving paying out of pocket for medical tests and finding a lawyer to take on the case. She also argued that the law should change so that coal companies shouldn’t be able to appeal after benefits are awarded.

“The burden of proof lies on the coal miner to prove that he has black lung,” she said. “We have appealed it and appealed it and appealed it. Still appealing it. He [Josh] does have black lung. Hopefully, soon we will be awarded the black lung benefits again. But I’m not holding my breath on that one.”

The GAO report said: “Miners in all six groups expressed their belief that mine operators were either ‘waiting for them to die’ or ‘waiting for them to give up’ so they could avoid paying benefit.” It noted between January 2013 to mid-August 2024, 390 beneficiaries whose claims were initially approved had their claims denied after appeal, leaving them responsible for paying back the benefits.

According to the report, the median length of an appealed claim was three years or more.

Among 53,000 closed claims between January 2013 and August 2024, 11 claims took longer than 10 years to close. The report did not state how many open cases have surpassed 10 years.

The Armes family are still waiting for their black lungs benefits appeals process to complete, while not receiving benefits.

“When you’re awarded it, they can appeal it, get a different judge, and it’s stripped away from you, which I find absolutely insane,” added Crystal Armes. “They fight you at every single step of the way. They’ll send you from one doctor to another doctor to go do another test and another test. You got to go to this doctor. You got to travel over here, and it’s very costly. And some people don’t have the means to be able to do that. I don’t feel like the process should be this difficult.”

According to data published in August in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, researchers at the National Institute for Safety and Occupational Health found 32.5 percent of veteran underground coal miners in central Appalachia are suffering from black lung disease, a rate unseen since 1978.

Between 2020 and 2023, more than 1,700 coal miners in the US died from black lung disease. The rise in cases has been attributed to silica dust that is more common in the coal seams being mined today.

In April, E&E Greenwire reported that the Trump administration’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) would “indefinitely delay” a federal silica dust rule, “pending judicial review”—but any judicial review is on pause due to the agency requesting an abeyance on court action.

Rebecca Shelton, director of policy for Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, in a statement on the agency’s freeze on enforcing the rule, said: “If the Trump administration actually cared about protecting coal miners from black lung, we’d have a strong silica rule in place right now. Instead, they are hiding behind a ridiculous legal process to delay action while miners get sick and die.”

The United Mine Workers of America has pushed to unfreeze the federal silica dust rule, which would mandate engineering and ventilation controls to protect miners on the job. It was passed in April 2024, but funding for the rule was blocked by Republicans in Congress in June 2024, and the MSHA under the Trump administration indicated to the union it has no plans to enforce the rule.

“Every day [that] federal regulators drag their feet and sit on this rule, another working father, mother, husband, wife, sister or brother contracts an incurable, fatal disease,” Brian Sanson, president of UMWA International, in a statement. “Someone’s life is forever changed. A company’s profit margin cannot take precedence over a miner’s right to draw a breath.”

Meanwhile, miners already dealing with black lung disease are still facing difficulties in trying to obtain federal benefits.

“These people, like my dad, he gave his life to mining to support his family, and now you know we’ve been fighting this fight for over 10 plus years now. Everyone should be outraged by this,” added Crystal Armes. “We’re hardworking, everyday Americans who go to work every day, pay our taxes, try to do the right thing, and then, we can’t get what was promised us.”

The White House deferred comment to the Department of Labor. NIOSH did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the MSHA at the Department of Labor said in an email: “Until pending litigation and limited rulemaking on respirable crystalline silica are resolved, MSHA continues to vigorously enforce the permissible exposure limit of 100 micrograms per cubic meter.”

President Donald Trump, who loves a media hit, may no longer get his moments of glory on television after major news networks ABC, CBS, Fox News, and NBC announced on Monday that they would pause TV coverage of presidential events.

The four networks’ decision comes after Donald Trump banned CNN and other outlets “from the White House” on Friday for “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” 

“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting,” ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC said in a joint statement of solidarity. Those five networks belong to the White House television press pool and rotate daily to provide reporting, video, and audio of the president’s daily events to share with other outlets around the world. 

Along with CNN, Trump banned reporters from Politico and MS NOW. Reporters from all three publications were denied access to the White House on Saturday. The three outlets filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in federal court earlier on Monday morning, alleging violations of First Amendment free press rights and Fifth Amendment due process. 

According to CNN and others, Fox News Washington Bureau Chief and acting TV pool chair Bryan Boughton wrote in a Monday email to TV pool subscribers that “there will be no replacement pool put in place” and “all other pool coverage will continue as normal, including Congress, VIPs, and selected events in Washington and around the country.”

CNN was scheduled to be the TV pool on Monday and would have gone with Trump to New York City for the annual United Nations General Assembly this week. According to CNN, the White House’s Sunday night press schedule listed Hearst, which owns local newspapers and TV stations across the country, as the “secondary” TV crew in DC and Real America’s Voice, a right-wing streaming channel, as the “secondary” crew for the New York trip. These “secondary” teams can typically ask questions to the president at pool events but don’t provide all the pool reporting to other media organizations.

Later on Monday, Trump held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new White House helipad—only most of the audio sounded like static and led at least one Newsmax reporter to blame the inability to hear the president on a lack of pool access.

The Associated Press sent an update on Monday, acknowledging the ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, and saying “no network travel pool is expected” to accompany Trump. “The Associated Press will cover the president at the United Nations, with journalists on the ground providing coverage, including live video, images and reporting.”

With uncertain coverage of future events like the United Nations General Assembly and Chinese President Xi visiting the US later this week—the latter of which Trump seems to care about after reportedly spending up to $875,000 to accelerate construction of the same helipad unveiled Monday on the White House lawn ahead of the visit—his decision looks to have backfired.

President Donald Trump said that he plans to make his proposed 250-foot arch in Washington, DC, a “top grade military complex” that holds large stores of weaponry, citing national security reasons and a “strong request” from the US military. 

Trump added in his Sunday post on Truth Social that the planned “Triumphal Arch” near the National Mall would “have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas.” 

The president first proposed building the arch last October to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. The much-criticized project, as currently planned, would tower over most other DC landmarks—the tallest being the Washington Monument, at approximately 555 feet—and block the view of Arlington National Cemetery from the Lincoln Memorial. 

Three Vietnam War veterans sued the administration to prevent construction of the arch based on the view issue, and also because Trump has not secured the required approval from Congress. Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered the administration to provide 48 hours’ notice before doing any work on the project, but has yet to rule on the merits of the case. 

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) called Trump’s new arch plan, “obviously idiotic” as he “clearly expects to lose a lawsuit and therefore wants to set up a pretext to argue that the arch is tied to national security.”

Trump’s latest post represents a significant departure from his former plan for the arch, which included a winged, gilded statue of Lady Liberty and an inscription reading, “One Nation Under God.” The drones and snipers could indeed be a matter of Trump trying to justify the arch as a national security requirement—he applied a similar argument to his unpermitted and unpopular White House ballroom, announcing in March that “the military is building a big complex under the ballroom.” 

As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz has pointed out, Trump has a long history of using the idea of “national security” to do whatever he wants: threatening to annex Greenland, targeting ICE protesters as terrorists, expanding construction of hyperscale data centers, and removing trans people from public life. “If national security is everything, then national security is nothing at all,” Hurwitz noted. Well, except, in this case, an excuse for Trump to abuse his power when no one is willing to stop him.

Ed Sheeran opened his Philadelphia show Saturday night by admitting to “making mistakes”—maybe not quite the apology some people were hoping for. It was the star musician’s first performance since billionaire Robert Kraft pressured Sheeran and his team to remove Macklemore from his stadium tour over the rapper’s pro-Palestinian comments onstage.

Sheeran, who seemed to be reading from a teleprompter, told the audience he has tried to avoid being an “activist musician” or “a political commentator of any kind” throughout his career because he wants his music to be “about unity, not division, about humanity, not politics.” He said he recognized that the October 7 Hamas attack and “what is happening in Gaza,” which he called “catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate,” was a “humanitarian issue.”

“This concert is still a place where everyone is welcome and everyone here can stand beside people that have opposing views,” Sheeran continued.

“I am deeply worried about the idea that venues pre-approve content performers,” he said. “It should never happen in the free world.” He did not mention Kraft by name or comment on the billionaire’s reasoning for demanding Macklemore’s removal.

In a statement last week, Kraft wrote in part: “Based on Macklemore’s recent actions, material shared from the stage during Ed Sheeran’s shows in New Jersey, and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community, we determined that his participation in the September 25th and 26th concerts at Gillette Stadium would cross that line.”

Kraft has a long history of donating to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, an organization that raises funds for IDF soldiers, veterans, and families, and the United Democracy Project, a super PAC backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to elect pro-Israel candidates.  

During shows at MetLife Stadium earlier this month, Macklemore advocated for Palestinian freedom and called Israel’s actions “genocide”—a designation most scholars of the subject would agree with. Shortly after Macklemore was taken off Sheeran’s tour, all four of the remaining opening acts withdrew out of solidarity. 

Just before starting his Saturday show, Sheeran said that the recent developments put him “in the middle of an important and passionate argument about freedom of speech and the most complex political issue on the planet.”

His comments, which echoed a social media statement he made last Tuesday, are unlikely to appease critics who accuse him of complicity with Kraft. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, for one, took issue with his “attempts to ‘both-sides’ Israel’s ongoing genocide.” Sheeran claims to support peace, the group said, “yet fails to even mention its crucial condition—justice.”

All five opening acts took significant financial hits by dropping out of the tour—as of April, Sheeran was the sixth-most streamed artist on Spotify of all time. And Sheeran failed to back them up on a subject where one cannot credibly walk a line down the middle.

At the end of Saturday’s performance, Sheeran told the crowd that he wanted to “apologize for the first bit of the show,” noting that families with children did not buy their tickets to hear him talking about something other than “unity” and “love” and “family.”

“The last week of my life has been one of the worst weeks of my life,” he said, thanking the crowd for their support. “I really didn’t know whether I’d be even getting onstage again, whether I even wanted to be an artist at all.”

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

As a child in the 1950s and ’60s, Regina Martin became so used to the oil pumpjacks near her home that she assumed every child lived beside them. Everyone was made “sick to [their] tummy” by the sulfurous, rotten-egg smell that never seemed to leave, she thought.

Only until she was grown did she begin to see a possible connection between growing up on top of the nation’s largest urban oil drilling field and her own sickness and the asthma that affected her sister. 

For over a century in Los Angeles and across the nation, Black people have been disproportionately likely to live near oil wells, the machinery that draws oil from deep underground. The pollution from these drilling sites are connected to birth complications, child development issues, respiratory illnesses, and cancer. 

Now, a new California state law moves to turn that lived experience into a broader public-policy question: What does a state owe communities exposed to pollution for generations? And what happens when you can’t offer support to every family that has struggled through the harm?

California lawmakers have passed AB 1661, which would steer $5 million collected from penalized oil wells in Inglewood into direct cash aid for 1,000 nearby households with qualifying respiratory or reproductive health impacts. Some of LA’s Blackest suburbs and city neighborhoods, including Inglewood, Ladera Heights, and Baldwin Hills, surround the oil field. 

The legislation, introduced by Assemblymember Isaac G. Bryan, is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom by October. It sets aside enough money for payments of up to $5,000 for 1,000 impacted households under its initial structure. The money would come from the state’s community repair and reinvestment fund for people living nearest the oil field.

For Black communities living nearest to refineries, highways, landfills, and oil wells, this fund may signal something larger than one oil field or payment. It asks whether money can begin to repair harms accumulated across generations: lives cut short by illness, household wealth drained by medical bills and depressed property values, and the anxiety of raising children amid pollution. 

Bryan and other supporters are calling it environmental reparations and say it is a model that could be replicated to make industrial companies help repair the damage borne by people living closest to polluting sites. 

To Tianna Shaw-Wakeman, the environmental justice program director with Black Women for Wellness in LA, the law could provide a national organizing model. “My hope has always come at the community level, at the grassroots level,” she said. “I see how grassroots organizing has created long-term change in our local communities, and I see that that can be and is being replicated all over the country.”

For Bryan, who represents the communities surrounding the Inglewood Oil Field, the cash-assistance program is part of a longer fight over the field’s legacy. Bryan, the first Black legislator to chair the California Assembly’s Natural Resources Committee, said his constituents have faced lower life expectancies and higher rates of asthma and heart conditions for decades.

“The company has essentially just been extracting from the community with no investments in the community, no care in the community and what feels like no regard at times for the broader community,” Bryan told Capital B. “The community [is] due this repair, and it’s been long overdue.”

The measure builds on Bryan’s earlier legislation, AB 2716, which Newsom signed in 2024. That law requires the Inglewood Oil Field to close by 2030 and establish a penalty structure for low-producing wells. Low-producing wells can leak methane and other harmful gases into the air and water. To push operators to curb that pollution and clean up their sites, regulators imposed a penalty on companies that keep such wells operating. Bryan said operators are charged $10,000 per well each month, with the revenue directed into a community repair fund restricted to investments within 2.5 miles of the field.

The fund could eventually support affordable housing, urban greening, park infrastructure, and other community priorities, Bryan said. He described the cash program as a pilot that could help determine whether direct payments are the form of repair residents most want. “We know people are struggling,” he said. “We know one of the biggest tools against an increasingly unaffordable society is to just put more money in people’s pockets.”

As communities nationwide press for stronger environmental protections, California’s experiment could test whether government and industry are willing to move beyond preventing future harm and toward compensating people who have already lived with its costs.

“Community members who have been deeply impacted, whose health have been deeply impacted, have never gotten restitution for that in any sort of way. We deserve more than we have been getting,” Shaw-Wakeman said. “And as we transition our city, as we transition our county, part of that story has to be addressing past harms.”

At the same time, California has passed a law that would shield reparation payments from taxation. “California is actively preparing for the implementation of reparations programs,” said state Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, who introduced the legislation. “We must ensure that recipients receive the full benefit of these efforts.”

Three dozen community groups came together in support of the environmental reparations legislation. There were no groups in public opposition. 

The legislation would not close the oil field or resolve the long-running fight over drilling in Los Angeles County. 

Under the proposal, eligible households within 2.5 miles of the field could seek aid if a resident has experienced respiratory or reproductive health impacts. But the program’s practical reach will depend on how Los Angeles County designs the application process, what documentation it requires, and how it handles demand if more than 1,000 households apply. There are tens of thousands more households in proximity to the oil field.

Bryan said Los Angeles County was still working through how the assistance would be delivered. It could come as a lump-sum payment, monthly payments, or another structure, he said, and county officials were evaluating which approach would best serve families.

Shaw-Wakeman said Black Women for Wellness and its allies pushed for a process that does not force residents to clear burdensome or invasive hurdles to prove harm. The organization has urged officials to consider self-attestation rather than requiring applicants to produce medical records that may be difficult or costly to obtain.

That question of access may determine whether the fund actually proves relief or is another government program that excludes the people it was intended to help. Many families, particularly low-income ones, may be living with these illnesses without formal diagnoses. 

The program also lands amid a larger debate over what should happen to urban oil sites once production ends. Environmental justice advocates have argued that closing wells is only the first step. They want operators held responsible for plugging wells, cleaning contaminated land, and ensuring that redevelopment does not displace the same neighbors who lived with the pollution. 

As oil wells have closed in Los Angeles in recent years, rental prices and home values have risen, threatening to displace longtime Black residents. 

“We can’t replace toxic oil extraction with gentrification,” Shaw-Wakeman said. “There is still a lot more to address beyond those 1,000 households. We’re trying to address the ways in which community members are still being harmed every day.”