Truth Social announced last week that it was selling immediate access—or at least as close as possible—to President Donald Trump’s thoughts. For $100,000 a month, anyone will be able to receive almost instantaneous access to Trump’s Truth Social posts through the platform’s API, a very small but significant advantage over following them via the web. The offer is not, however, like many of his other commercial offerings attempting to capitalize on the presidency—this is no chintzy watch or repackaged phone painted gold. This is real business, and it’s uniquely structured to ensure that those willing to pay will have real, immediate access to the president’s statements.

There is already a booming business in selling near-immediate access to information—licensed data feeds are offered by other social media companies and media companies like Dow Jones and Bloomberg offer pricey wire services that allow extremely fast access to headlines and key data points. The market for all this is Wall Street firms who do high-speed trading—where access to key market-moving information even milliseconds faster than a competitor can allow profitable trades.

In fact, if anything, it was odd that Truth Social, which has struggled to make much of a profit or expand its active user base much beyond Trump and his immediate family, hadn’t already offered a live data feed.

But the way Truth Social introduced its new product was not subtle. According to its press release:

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” said Kevin McGurn, Interim Chief Executive Officer of TMTG. “Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream. As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company, creating lasting value for shareholders.”

Realistically, only one user’s posts on Truth Social genuinely move markets, and now, according to the company, Trump Media is going to use that fact to make money for shareholders. Notably, Trump is believed to own roughly 42 percent of the company.

The press release claimed that the company had already signed up customers and were expecting more to join before Aug. 1 when the program launches. The Financial Times reported this week that the cost will be $100,000 monthly.

That’s a striking cost—according to at least one source, it’s more than double what Twitter charges for API-access to its much, much larger galaxy of market-moving accounts, and Meta and LinkedIn negotiate their large-scale deals individually.

Ironically, what makes the Truth Social feed so lucrative is the thing that once seemed like one of the company’s weaknesses—Trump has an exclusivity deal with Trump Media + Technology Group.

Back in 2022, I wrote how Trump Media had signed a deal with Trump guaranteeing that he can post content elsewhere, provided he posts it on Truth Social six hours before he posts it anywhere else. The giant caveat on the deal was that Trump can post content related to political messaging, political fundraising, or get-out-the-vote efforts anywhere, at any point.

In 2022, when Trump was not in office and was mainly an out-of-work politician, testing political messages and trying to raise money, that was a hole in the business plan. Of course, Trump still is constantly testing political messages and trying to raise money for political groups, but the market-moving content—for instance, his April 9 Truth Social post that he would be suspending most tariffs which sent stocks soaring—has stayed on Truth Social.

But the move also has some on Wall Street unsettled. According to the Financial Times, at least one top executive at a hedge-fund pointed out that even if a firm doesn’t find the API feed that useful—and several apparently told FT they don’t, because it only really benefits firms that do high-speed trading—they still might have a fiduciary obligation. That’s the requirement that executives of a company do everything they can to make a profit, or be exposed to lawsuits from shareholders.

A second macro hedge fund executive called it “scandalous” but suggested that some hedge funds may have to subscribe to the service out of a fiduciary duty to clients, to avoid falling behind competitors.

“It’s a huge misuse of power,” said one crypto trader. “It’s a terrible look . . . not exactly presidential and impartial.”

In some ways, this is just an extension of the whole premise of Truth Social—a platform that gets all its relevance through Trump. The company’s risk disclosures on SEC filings have long plainly stated that they understand he is essentially the main reason the service has users. As a typical disclosure explains:

President Trump has a significant influence on TMTG’s business plan. TMTG believes President Trump’s reputation and relationships are a critical element to the success of TMTG’s business. TMTG’s future success will depend, to a significant extent, upon the continued presence and popularity of President Trump. If President Trump were to discontinue his relationship with TMTG due to death, disability, or any other reason, or limit his involvement with TMTG due to becoming a candidate for political office, TMTG would be significantly disadvantaged.

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

Amid a summer of dangerous heat, drought, and floods, a majority of Americans are connecting increasingly severe weather to the climate crisis, new polling shows, despite efforts by President Donald Trump to dismiss global heating as a “con job” and a “hoax.”

It’s a sign that attempts to suppress and polarize climate concerns may not be seeing full success, said Grace Adcox, senior climate strategist at Data for Progress.

“We started with the question of ‘are extreme weather events increasing,’ because we thought [that] if we can find consensus on that, that can be an entry point to being able to have a more bipartisan conversation about climate and climate intervention,” she said.

About 61 percent of likely American voters believe extreme weather events have become more frequent over the past five years, the survey from the progressive polling firm Data for Progress, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found. That includes 72 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Independents, and nearly half—46 percent—of all Republicans.

Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island senator who has long criticized Democrats for quieting their talk of global warming—or “climate-hushing”—said the new data “adds to the mountain of evidence that the public is way ahead of the politicians on the dire consequences of climate change.”

“Climate hushers who ignore this righteous fight should take note,” he told the Guardian.

The researchers also asked participants about whether or not specific forms of extreme weather are being “worsened by climate change.” Majorities linked climate change to worsening wildfires (64 percent), droughts (63 percent), flooding and flash flooding (62 percent), hurricanes (59 percent), and severe thunderstorms and hailstorms (59 percent). But heatwaves topped the list, with 67 percent saying climate change is making them worse—including 48 percent of Republicans, the highest share for any of the extreme weather events surveyed.

That could be because nearly everyone in the US has experienced unusually hot days or weeks in recent years, Adcox said. High temperatures kill more people annually in the US than hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods combined.

“There are regional differences across experiences with extreme weather,” Adcox said. “Extreme heat happens to have the biggest footprint in the American context compared to some of these other types of extreme weather.”

The finding indicates that scorching conditions could provide an “interesting opening salvo” to speak about the climate crisis, she added.

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said the new poll’s findings are “very consistent” with the conclusions researchers have drawn based on Yale’s surveys, which have shown Americans are increasingly linking extreme weather to the climate crisis and want to protect workers from heat.

But Jennifer Marlon, a senior research scientist at Yale who also focuses on climate communications, said despite this, it’s not clear if most Americans understand why exactly the climate is changing.

“This is probably the biggest misconception out there—many Americans still think the warming is due to some kind of natural cycle. But it isn’t,” she said, adding that a spring survey from Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found 27 percent of people think that the changes are mostly natural.

The survey findings could help inform how to frame future conversations about the climate crisis with skeptical Americans, Adcox said. For instance, the data indicates heat may be the form of extreme weather that invites most conversation about climate.

“You can say, hey, this extreme heat event is crazy, so let’s talk about it, let’s talk about why it’s happening,” she said.

Another survey finding also indicates that even Americans who may not be convinced that the climate crisis is human-caused—or even that it is happening—would support some climate justice-focused measures.

Amid global and national rising temperatures, workers who labor outdoors—such as construction workers, farm workers, and roofers—are among the populations most vulnerable to heat-related illness.

In fact, extreme heat is a leading contributor to workplace injuries and deaths. Some indoor workers, including those in warehouses, commercial kitchens, and manufacturing facilities, can also face severe heat risk due to a lack of air conditioning, poor ventilation, humidity, and other factors. It’s a risk that the polling indicates most Americans think lawmakers should address.

About 88 percent of participants in the Data for Progress survey said they favor policies in their own state requiring employers to provide heat protections like access to drinking water, shade, breaks, and air conditioning. Only 7 percent of likely voters said they oppose the policy, indicating broad support for the protections that previous Data for Progress polls have also shown.

“These findings send a powerful message: protecting workers from dangerous heat isn’t a partisan issue,” said Jessica E Martinez, executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a network of two dozen local grassroots worker organizations. “When 88 percent of likely voters … support requiring employers to provide basic, lifesaving heat protections, it’s clear the public expects every worker to be protected.”

She said the polling indicates the public would support the creation of a federal heat standard—something workers have demanded for years, but on which progress has stalled under Trump.

The current administration this April also allowed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s nationwide enforcement initiative focused on protecting workers from heat illness, then later issued a revised but vastly weakened program.

“Our hope in continuing to profile the broad and particularly strong support that we see across partisanship for extreme heat protections for workers is a way for us to illustrate what it could look like to take an approach to climate that puts working people first,” Adcox said.

Earlier this month, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—possibly the most prominent figure on Israel’s extreme right—canceled a visit to New York amid legal pressure, in a rare moment of accountability for a regime that generally operates with near impunity where the United States is concerned. 

Ben-Gvir, who is best known for attempting to build a crocodile moat around one of his prisons, advocating to bring back hanging, starving prisoners, and pushing for Israel to settle Gaza, was scheduled to attend an international police summit at the UN. But after the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group, and the Hind Rajab Foundation, a Belgium-based group that files war crimes claims against individual Israeli soldiers, asked New York Attorney General Letitia James to investigate Ben-Gvir for war crimes, he bowed out.

“I think it’s a big win,” said Jake Romm, the organization’s US spokesperson. “Anything that signals that impunity is going away is a victory, even if it’s not an arrest. He’s being made afraid of accountability. It’s a sign the impunity is starting to crumble.” 

The lawyers asked James to investigate Ben-Gvir. His policies, they contend, have harmed residents of New York, where multiple participants in the Global Sumud Flotillas to Gaza—attempts to deliver aid through Israel’s blockade that have repeatedly been attacked by the Israeli military—reside and are prepared to testify that they were harmed by Ben-Gvir. Najeh Abduljalil, a New York resident who served as an EMT on a boat full of military veterans sailing to Gaza with aid last year, witnessed Ben-Gvir’s threats toward his group—then watched as the Israeli military allegedly firebombed a boat 70 meters away from him. “The whole idea was to psychologically terrify us,” Abduljalil said. 

Michael Fix, another flotilla participant, alleged “physical and mental abuse” in Israeli prisons under Ben-Gvir’s administration. And a Palestinian-American New York resident who spent time in Israeli jails said in an interview that Ben-Gvir was to blame for “severe changes in conditions” when he took over Israel’s prison ministry: an increase in physical beatings, alongside the elimination of family visitation for some Palestinian prisoners, and reduction of the prisoners’ food allowance. 

The Center for Constitutional Rights and Hind Rajab Foundation both argue  that Attorney General James would have jurisdiction to investigate Ben-Gvir, though James hasn’t spoken publicly on the matter. Her office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But in September, an even more significant architect of genocide in Gaza is scheduled to come to New York: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has presided over the killing of at least 73,000 Palestinians.

During Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, he promised to arrest Netanyahu. But in a video posted Tuesday, Mamdani acknowledged that he lacks the independent legal authority to put Netanyahu in handcuffs, calling on the federal government to do so.

Donald Trump, in apparent response, posted on social media that Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while ​in the United States of America.” 

That doesn’t mean Netanyahu is immune to the tactics fielded against Ben-Gvir—or that he and his collaborators can’t be made unwelcome in New York. The mayor could follow the example of Rudy Giuliani, who in 1995 had Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, ejected from a Lincoln Center UN concert. He could direct the New York Police Department not to assist with Netanyahu’s motorcade. Or he could join the calls for James to open an independent investigation into how Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu, or other Israeli officials may have harmed New Yorkers.

According to President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, you may be a member of a criminal conspiracy if you have done any of the following: worn black to a demonstration, given face masks to protesters, joined a book club, distributed a zine. Recently, federal prosecutors have cited these actions as evidence that activists protesting Trump’s deportation machine are part of an organized criminal enterprise. Call it antifa, domestic terrorism, the radical left—in Trump’s eyes, dissent is never organic. It’s all just part of one big “conspiracy.”

Over the past year, prosecutors have increasingly levied conspiracy charges against activists in federal indictments from Chicago to Spokane, Washington. Some of these cases crumbled quickly; others, like the government’s attempt to paint leftist activists in Texas as an “antifa cell,” resulted in shocking convictions. According to Steffen Seitz, a litigation fellow at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law who has studied conspiracy law, this isn’t a haphazard strategy. “I think they are trying to explicitly go after social movements, and conspiracy is something that allows them to do that particularly effectively,” Seitz told me. 

“Conspiracy” comes from the Latin conspirare, or “to breathe together.” Under US law, a conspiracy is just an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act. Criminalizing conspiracy is supposed to allow law enforcement to disrupt criminal plots before they occur and prosecute groups acting in concert—the idea being that organized crime poses a greater threat than individuals acting alone. G. Robert Blakey, the principal author of the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, said he designed RICO to make “the fight a fair fight between the Davids of this world and the twin Goliaths of organized crime and white-collar crime.”

And yes, many criminal conspiracies do exist: the Mob, drug cartels, Enron. But far too often, the government uses conspiracy law to punish organizers. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, prosecutors brought conspiracy charges to crush the labor movement by framing strikes as illegal agreements. The US government brought them against communists in the 1940s and ’50s and Vietnam War dissidents in the ’60s and ’70s. In 2023, Georgia’s attorney general provided a 21st-century blueprint for the Trump administration when he used the state RICO statute against 61 “Stop Cop City” activists, alleging the community organizers and concerned citizens who’d protested against a $90 million police training center in Atlanta had actually been engaging in a sweeping criminal enterprise. (A judge dismissed the charges in December 2025.) 

Conspiracy law poses a special threat to social movements because it “drastically increases the universe of evidence that might be relevant” to prove that people coordinated with each other, Seitz said. Tacking on a conspiracy charge to a protest case does a bit of bibbidi-bobbidi-boo: Suddenly, two people who attend the same demonstration become co-conspirators. ICE watch group chats become fertile ground for FBI investigation. And a sweatshirt that archly says “I’m Antifa!” becomes evidence of violent intent, as the DOJ claimed in its June indictment of 15 Minnesota anti-ICE activists. Benign statements are interrogated, paranoid connections are drawn from mere proximity, and disparate facts are pulled into a single narrative, offered up to judges and juries as proof of synchronized criminal activity.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that protest conspiracy charges have surged as conspiracy theorists have become entrenched in our federal government. Trump and his allies frequently accuse their political foes of conspiratorial plots: “rigging” an election, being part of “the deep state,” sending “paid professional agitators” to protests. 

In the US, conspiracy theories have long targeted marginalized groups, from Catholic immigrants to Jews. But as federal bureaucracy expanded after World War I, conspiracy theories about the US government became increasingly popular, according to Kathryn S. Olmsted, author of Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. These fears were rooted in legitimate concern: The state was building out a secret surveillance apparatus—as the Edward Snowden leaks eventually made clear—and enacting real abuses. 

But Trump has stoked this deep state paranoia to further his own agenda. His winks at Pizzagate and QAnon have grown into an outright embrace of the people promoting the conspiracy theories. And he’s scapegoated minorities by linking them to alleged plots perpetrated by powerful Democratic institutions: Thanks to the liberal elite, immigrants are eating your pets, and trans people in prison are taking your tax dollars. 

When Trump lost the election in 2020, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell appeared on Fox News and claimed that the manipulation of voting machines was “one huge, huge criminal conspiracy that should be investigated by military intelligence.” In 2023, before he was the head of the FBI, Kash Patel promised to “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media” who had helped Joe Biden “rig” the presidential election.

Now that he’s back in the Oval Office, Trump continues to claim victimhood while bringing the full force of the security state to bear against his opponents. Trump designated “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization and released a new playbook for investigating and disrupting groups engaged in “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.” People who warn their undocumented neighbors about the presence of ICE, or college students who call on their universities to divest from weapons manufacturers, could now be considered “participants in…criminal and terroristic conspiracies.”

On July 16, the US State Department convened an international summit on “left-wing terrorism,” during which White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller declared—without evidence—that ICE agents have been subject to “repeat, systemic, organized, funded insurrection.” And later that evening, Trump revived claims of another criminal conspiracy targeting his administration: During a primetime speech, the president announced he’d reviewed “significant evidence” of widespread voter fraud. ABC News, NBC News, “and others in the media are part of a plot,” Trump said, “to continue this fraud” and “protect the radical left.”

This administration’s embrace of conspiracy theories mirrors the growing weaponization of conspiracy charges: Both obfuscate where true power lies. Trump—one of the most powerful men on Earth—is not being persecuted by a deep state conspiracy. Nor are the ICE officers who have brutalized protesters and terrorized immigrant communities. But by calling acts of civil disobedience against state repression a “conspiracy,” Trump and his allies seek to make themselves look like they are just one of us—and the true threat is a much more powerful force, composed of anyone and everyone who dares disagree. 

President Donald Trump’s open disdain for Americans who have died in war, “losers” and “suckers,” in his estimation, is well documented. But that hasn’t stopped him from exploiting fallen soldiers to prop up support for himself. This time, it’s the four service members who were killed over the last week as the US returns to full-scale war with Iran.

“All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,'” Trump told reporters as he departed to attend a dignified transfer, the process by which the remains of fallen military members are moved from aircraft to vehicle, in Dover, Delaware, on Wednesday.

There is no evidence that the service members killed, as Trump so confidently claimed, ever said or believed this. It conveniently happens to be one of the exceedingly few talking points Trump has had for continuing an increasingly unpopular war on all his own. And what better device for repeating his excuse than dead Americans who can’t speak for themselves?

The assertion was made, without evidence or apparent shame, shortly after the president appeared to boast on social media about the total number of service members killed since the US first launched strikes against Iran in February. In doing so, Trump referred to the casualties of previous wars, seemingly arguing that 18 wasn’t so bad.

“Afghanistan War: 20 years, 2,000 DEAD.
Iraq War: 9 years, 4,600 DEAD.
Vietnam War: 19 years and 5 months, 58,220 DEAD.
Korean War: 3 years and 1 month, 36,574 DEAD.
Venezuela War: 1 day, 0 DEAD.
Iran Military Conflict: 4 months, 18 DEAD.”

The comments are the latest evidence of Trump’s long-held, blatant disregard for those killed in war. Meanwhile, his administration’s celebration of war, both in absurd pageantry and ethos, continues apace.

I don’t know many specifics about former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer—but I do know his goodbye video is baffling.

On Monday, Starmer posted a TikTok video of himself in the final scene of Furious 7, complete with the ending song, “See You Again” by Wiz Khalifa and featuring Charlie Puth. The former prime minister’s face was edited onto Vin Diesel’s Fast and Furious character, Dominic Toretto, and a photo of the front door of 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s official residence and office, to Paul Walker’s character, Brian O’Conner, as the pair part ways. The actual movie scene served as a tribute to Walker, who died in a single-vehicle car collision while Furious 7 was still filming.

“Hey, thought you could leave without saying goodbye?” O’Conner—or in this case, the 10 Downing Street front door asks. 

And Toretto, a.k.a. Keir Starmer, smiles at O’Conner and thinks to himself: “I used to say I live my life a quarter-mile at a time, and I think that’s why we were brothers, because you did, too.”

The movie continues to a montage of O’Conner in the previous Fast and Furious movies, so of course the typically buttoned-up Starmer replaces it with a montage of what—I guess—he thinks he looks like doing his job well: delivering speeches; walking with his wife Victoria Starmer while a bunch of people applaud him; speaking with members of the military; and doing the “6-7” meme hand gesture with another student in a classroom (something some schools have banned because its ubiquity has become annoying and—I just learned this one—something Starmer jokingly apologized to a teacher over for doing on another occasion).

It’s ridiculous, but it is much better than what the US has at the moment. 

This week, we’re bringing you a special episode from Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. Gladwell’s show recently investigated what was once the biggest secession movement in the US since the Civil War: the movement by disillusioned residents in Staten Island to secede from New York City.

“The Staten Island Problem,” Revisionist History’s newest five-part series, reconstructs the battle for New York during the turbulent early 1990s—the rise of Rudy Giuliani, the peak of the homicide rate, the Wu-Tang Clan, young Donald Trump, and the first Black mayor of New York—all through the prism of the city’s oft-forgotten borough. Why tell this story now? Because the island’s secession movement is an early example of the politics of resentment that dominates America today.

The first episode of “The Staten Island Problem” tells the story of David Dinkins, the first Black mayor of New York, facing off with the borough president of Staten Island all while trying to hold his city together.

Revisionist History and “The Staten Island Problem” are produced by Pushkin Industries. Check out the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

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

About a week after its allies won a Supreme Court ruling allowing states to ban transgender girls from girls’ school athletics, a leading conservative group that has campaigned for seven years to “protect women’s sports” is singing a very different tune. On July 8, the Heritage Foundation—the right-wing think tank widely known for sponsoring Project 2025—published a report calling for the rollback of the very landmark federal protections for women’s sports that have driven their explosion in popularity over the last five decades.

The paper, by Heritage senior research fellow and Boise State University professor Scott Yenor, argued for “restoring a flexible approach to athletics” by exempting sports from Title IX, the 1972 federal law that bans sex discrimination in education, or else loosening the law’s requirements. The paper is laced with stereotypes about women’s “natural preferences”—describing women as having “gentle, graceful, cooperative tendencies” and being “oriented toward motherhood and traditional feminine graces.”

Blatant sexism is to be expected from Yenor, who in 2021 ignited a firestorm at Boise State when he described career-oriented women as “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” But even though much of the conservative movement, including the Heritage Foundation, has spent the last several years crowing about the importance of protecting women’s sports using Title IX—in the context of banning trans women athletes—they’re not laughing Yenor out of the room this time. Over the last week and a half, his argument has been published or covered by right-wing outlets the Daily Signal, the College Fix, and Compact magazine, among others.

The conflict over transgender athletes—which leans heavily on rhetoric about the sexes having different inherent athletic capabilities—is “breathing new life” into old conservative arguments against women’s competitive sports, says Deborah Brake, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and former senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. “The push to exclude trans girls from girls’ sports has never really been about transgender athletes,” Brake says. “There’s a much bigger gender war that they are fighting about inherent, fixed biological difference.”

In his paper for the Heritage Foundation, Yenor argues that schools should be allowed to “accommodate sex differences” by replacing competitive women’s sports opportunities with “cheerleading, dance, yoga, hiking clubs, recreational intramurals, and other athletic opportunities more aligned with average female interests and tendencies.” High-intensity exercise, he notes, “increases infertility.” (Women who exercise “too much” may indeed have a harder time getting pregnant, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists—but some research suggests those effects are mitigated as long as they eat enough. Anyway, it’s not altogether clear that getting pregnant is a priority for the school-age athletes Yenor is writing about.)

Meanwhile, Yenor advocates expanding men’s athletics: “Restoring a healthier balance involves protecting and even expanding men’s sports while allowing natural variation in program offering.”

Of course, cutting women’s competitive sports in favor of dance and yoga classes would reverse an over 50-year trend in women’s sports. Since Title IX was enacted, the number of high school girls playing varsity sports has risen from 300,000 to 3.4 million, according to a 2022 report from the Women’s Sports Foundation. In 1972, 15 percent of college athletes were women; by 2018, that number hit 44 percent. “Title IX transformed American sports and American life,” Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh opened his trans athlete opinion in June, before ruling that Title IX allowed states to ban transgender girls from girls’ school sports teams, no matter their hormone levels or medical circumstances.   

Yenor specifically takes aim at a piece of federal agency guidance issued in 1979, describing three alternate ways for schools to prove they are providing equal athletic opportunity to women. Under this “three-part test,” schools can either 1) maintain numbers of women student athletes proportionate to women’s enrollment; 2) have a continuing history of expanding women’s competitive sports; or 3) demonstrate they have “fully and effectively” accommodated interest among female students. Today, when girls fight back against a school’s decision to cut their volleyball team, for example, they can win if they show that their school has done none of the above. “Without the three-part test, ‘equal athletic opportunity to participate in sports’ has no teeth,” Brake says.

Courts have historically rejected attempts to toss or weaken this framework, according to Brake. The “[Heritage] report is mostly a rehashing of the same losing arguments from the early days of Title IX litigation, using the recent transgender panic as a catalyst to revive them,” she says. “The law has been stable for a long time.”

But according to Duke Law School professor Doriane Coleman, that status quo suddenly became more vulnerable two years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that judges don’t have to defer to federal agency interpretations of the law.  

Could Loper Bright invalidate the guidance that’s been used to expand and protect women’s sports for decades? At least two high-ranking federal judges think so. In January, the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against female students who sued the University of Kentucky (coincidentally, anti-trans activist Riley Gaines’ alma mater) to create Division I equestrian, field hockey, and lacrosse teams. The students lost after the courts agreed that there wasn’t enough interest among the student body to field competitive teams in those sports. But two of the three appeals court judges went much further, adding that the whole three-part test could be tossed. “We are skeptical of this guidance’s validity,” they wrote in a concurring opinion. “The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare adopted the guidance in a different world, one where the modern Department of Education did not yet exist and one where courts routinely deferred to agency interpretations of statutes and regulations.”

Coleman says she believes the three-part test isn’t “fit for purpose” today, in part because of the modern popularity of women’s sports and the increasing share of college students who are women. An opponent of trans girls participating in competitive girls’ athletics—though she’s more lenient when it comes to no-cut teams and recreational leagues—Coleman agrees with Yenor, the Heritage author, on some points: “I don’t think he’s wrong that the numbers of women who are interested in—and I mean interested [in], not capable [of]—participating in elite sports are different from the numbers of men,” she says. When girls reach their mid-teens, she says, “Your body just changes, and hips pop out and your breasts pop out, you just can’t do some of the things you used to be able to do really well.”

Yenor’s proposal to count yoga and dance classes toward Title IX’s equal athletic opportunity requirements is “interesting,” Coleman says. But as a former champion runner herself, she’s concerned such a move could create cover for schools to cut or defund elite women’s sports programs. “The thing that it hides, and the thing that makes me worried,” she adds, “is [that] it could be a strategy for decreasing commitment for those female student athletes who are real D1 competitive badasses.”

On the whole, Coleman thinks it’s unlikely that gains in women’s school sports could be reversed: “We’ve gone way past the point where we don’t understand that female athletes are as physical and competitive, in their own way, as men are.” And Brake, for her part, still considers the “three-part test” settled law.

Then again, Brake adds, “I’ve been surprised about a lot of what’s been happening in the last year and a half on discrimination law and gender. Things that we thought were long settled, this administration has been trying to completely turn back the clock—not years, but decades.”

Ashley Brouillette had not heard from her ex-husband, David Brouillette, since November. She says one of their last interactions was a three-minute voicemail in which David told her that someone should slit her and her daughters’ throats.

Then, last week, Ashley got a call from a journalist, who asked if she recognized her ex-husband among the ICE agents photographed after the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. She did. The news caught her off guard, so she reached out to David: He told her he’d shot Durán and that he’d acted in self-defense because, he claimed, Durán tried to hit him with a car. Ashley doesn’t believe him. After watching the limited surveillance footage of the incident, she believes her ex-husband “murdered” Durán, a 25-year-old Colombian man whose daughter recently celebrated her third birthday.

Durán was not the target of ICE’s operation in Biddeford. After coming to the United States in 2023, he got jobs cleaning a veterinary office and delivering food. In a press conference, Durán’s partner, Martha Karolina Rojas Álvarez, described him as someone whose joy was contagious. “He always said I was his life, and that he dreamed of a whole lifetime with me,” Rojas said through a translator. “He always told me, Until we’re little old people.” 

After the killing, Ashley says, David told her that she needed to talk about his character in a positive way. “I’m not going to lie for you,” she replied. She says he also asked her not to talk about abuse that had happened in their marriage, which ended in 2009. When reached by Mother Jones, Ashley accused David of years of violence and abuse, allegations that were corroborated by her mother and echoed comments Ashley had made to a child welfare official years ago, according to court records. The Augusta, Maine, police department did not find documentation of the alleged abuse, but she and her mother recalled harrowing details. One time, Ashley alleges, David threw hot water at her while she held their daughter. Another time, he allegedly pointed a gun at her and said he should shoot her in their bathtub. Now, with David on the phone, Ashley repeated that she wouldn’t lie for him.

Another ex-wife, Lucinda Brouillette, said in a statement to reporters that she “unequivocally” believes David is capable of extreme acts of violence. In hundreds of pages of court records, she has accused him of physical and verbal abuse, including allegedly dumping a plate of spaghetti on his 13-year-old daughter’s head and then tackling her while she cried. “I have feared for a long time that his anger, aggression, and escalating behavior would eventually result in severe, life-threatening violence, and I often believed I would be the one on the receiving end of it,” Lucinda wrote.

While surveillance footage captures the moments before and after the shooting, no videos have emerged to show the moment when David allegedly killed Durán. What has become clear in the days afterward, however, is that there are many reasons why ICE should have avoided hiring him in the first place. “The seriousness of the allegations—domestic violence—you’d think would likely be disqualifying for someone who’s going to be armed by the government,” says Claire Trickler-McNulty, an ICE official in the Biden and first Trump administrations. Making matters worse, ICE records suggest that David may have been eligible to skip a significant portion of the agency’s training for new recruits, given his prior work history. ICE asked for additional time to respond after missing an initial deadline for this article last week, and we were not able to reach David. The agency has not yet confirmed that he was the shooter.

Ashley believes her ex-husband should have never had access to a weapon in a personal capacity, much less in an official one: “He does not belong in careers that involve guns.”

David Brouillette joined ICE earlier this year. He’d long wanted to be a police officer, even in high school, according to one of his childhood best friends, Scott Collins. “I always thought it was a superiority thing,” Collins told us. “He always wanted to be in a position of power.”

After Gardiner Area High, David joined the Maine National Guard in 2007 and then the Army in 2010, deploying to Afghanistan for about nine months. “Afghanistan destroyed him,” an estranged relative told the Associated Press. Afterward, he worked as a corrections officer, then as a police officer with the Department of Veterans Affairs. He was also briefly a volunteer firefighter, though Frank Wozniak, his former boss at the Town of Manchester Fire Department, told Mother Jones he fired David for threatening to “punch me in the face and take my job.” (Wozniak told David to get out of the firehouse and never come back; the town’s next fire chief rehired him.)

David struggled financially. In 2020, he pleaded for a Maine court to reduce child support payments required by his second divorce. “I am NOT ABLE to survive,” David wrote in a handwritten statement. He added, “PLEASE PLEASE reduce my [child support].”

In January 2025, he quit a truck-driving job due to unspecified health issues, but a judge argued he was actually “voluntarily underemployed” and declined to reduce his child support payments that November. About two weeks later, he told Ashley he was going to work for ICE, which was offering signing bonuses of up to $50,000. After years of bouncing between jobs with little apparent success, ICE’s recruitment drive offered a lifeline.

Ashley didn’t believe the agency was actually hiring him; he’d previously claimed he was joining the Secret Service, which never happened. “Yeah, sure, buddy,” she recalls thinking. Collins, his childhood friend, only found out that David had joined ICE after the July 13 shooting. “I think it speaks volumes of the vetting process, and how little these ICE agents are trained,” Collins says. “To be honest, I was surprised anybody would give that man a gun.”

For months, Democratic lawmakers have raised concerns that ICE, while hiring more than 12,000 new officers and agents, has rushed them onto the street without adequate preparation. Calls for more training and for the dissolution of the agency have grown as ICE has launched high-profile and violent campaigns in cities from Minneapolis to Chicago, brutalizing protesters around the country and fatally shooting at least five people in their vehicles.

An ICE spokesperson emphasized to the AP that David had “nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience,” and that he had “required training, including use of force training.” But what vetting did he undergo before hitting the streets? According to a current job posting for deportation officers, David may have been eligible to skip a significant portion of ICE’s training for new recruits because of his tenure with the VA Police; the posting notes that anyone with “Local, State or other Federal Law Enforcement training with arrest authority will be exempted” from ICE’s basic training program in Georgia—a multiple-week program where recruits learn the ins and outs of their new job, including de-escalation techniques designed to prevent the use of force.

Marc Brown, who retired from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers in 2024 and is now a policing expert at the University of South Carolina, told us that under the Biden administration, it was not common for recruits of any federal law enforcement agency to skip large parts of training, even if they had prior experience. “You don’t usually get a full pass, especially if you go into a totally different program,” he said, noting that working for the VA Department or many other federal departments is different from working for ICE. “Those are two totally separate systems; they need training on that new mission,” he said. 

VA police aren’t like municipal police who patrol streets and conduct traffic stops. Instead, Brown said, they primarily function as security guards for VA hospitals. (The VA Department did not respond to questions about whether its officers receive training on use of force against people in vehicles; ICE did not respond to questions about David’s training.)

The ICE job posting says that while recruits with former law enforcement experience can skip basic training, they do need to complete the “Deportation Officer Transition Program,” a newer program that Brown was unfamiliar with. In total, training for deportation officers takes about 50 days, according to the posting—though in a Reddit forum 10 months ago, recruits with law enforcement experience shared that they were allowed to do a virtual training from home. One officer with prior experience at the Department of Homeland Security said it only took him three days. 

Trickler-McNulty, the former ICE official, confirmed that allowing former law enforcement officers to skip ICE’s basic training is a new change under Trump 2.0. She worries that instructors are losing an opportunity “to lay eyes” on these recruits, and to see “how they’re interacting and responding to training before they’re out in the field.”

Ryan Schwank, an ICE instructor and attorney who resigned in February, says that even recruits who do attend ICE’s full training program are not prepared for the jobs they’re asked to do. The agency’s instruction on vehicle stops is “fairly short and kind of rote,” he told WBUR last week, noting that officers are tested on their ability to pull over a vehicle under ideal conditions. “We don’t test them on their ability to handle complex crises or how to handle the types of situations we’re seeing happen,” he added, like the situation in Maine. “The officers are being put in a situation where they’re dealing with the public and these vehicles, and their training doesn’t line up with the role they’re expected to fulfill,” Schwank said. “It’s very clear at this point that officers are being rushed out to make these arrests, and there’s an operational failure taking place.”

Starting this month, ICE is reportedly increasing its core training program from 42 days to about 71, with more instruction about high-risk vehicle stops. But the agency is still not always conducting full background checks before sending recruits out, which means it may not have known about David’s history when it hired him. The AP recently found other officers who were hired despite questionable records; one was accused of lying in a police report to justify a charge against an innocent woman. Another failed to graduate from a police academy. 

A DHS spokesperson told the AP, “ICE is committed to ensuring its law enforcement personnel are held to the highest standards and rigorously vets them throughout the hiring process.” But the spokesperson acknowledged that some applicants receive “tentative selection letters” and are allowed to begin working “on a temporary status” before the full background check is complete. 

ICE has still not explained how thoroughly it investigated David’s background before giving him a gun. What is clear from court records and interviews is that the agency hired him despite accusations of abuse by two ex-wives and years of professional struggles.

In Maine, Durán’s family is living with the results. At the press conference, Durán’s partner, Rojas, described Durán’s devotion to their 3-year-old: “He lived for her; everything he did, he did in the name of his gorda.” Through tears, Rojas said her daughter asks for her dad every night, but that she has not had the strength to tell her that he is not coming home.

The family’s lawyer has called ICE’s decision to arm Brouillette so “reckless” that it could justify criminal charges against the people who hired him.

On Monday night, Senate candidate Troy Jackson, Maine Democrats’ likely replacement for Graham Platner, was the subject of reports from colleagues accusing him of bullying.

According to the Washington Post and CNN, Jackson, a leading Maine Democrat who served most recently as the state Senate president, has a history of shouting and cursing at co-workers, and allegedly threw a water bottle toward another lawmaker, Heather Sanborn, when he couldn’t convince her to vote his way—an incident that became infamous within the state Senate.

Many of his Democratic colleagues described Jackson’s conduct to the Post and CNN as a recurring feature of his time in Maine’s senate, and eventually a pressing problem that they raised with Gov. Janet Mills, who was defeated in her own primary candidacy for the Senate seat at stake—and some said that much of the behavior was directed at women. 

Sanborn, whom Jackson allegedly also screamed at “an inch from her nose,” did not return to the Senate for several days after the incident. While Jackson later apologized, his statements did not impress some colleagues, according to CNN.

Several said that despite a Democratic majority in both legislature chambers and a Democratic governor in Janet Mills, they couldn’t achieve as much as they could have because leaders didn’t get along. 

“It was so difficult to maneuver because none of them would even speak to each other,” one top Maine Democratic official told the Post. “It was inept.”

The campaign, and some other Maine lawmakers, tell a different story. “Over 22 years in public office, there have been moments when he let his frustration get the better of him,” Jackson’s campaign told CNN in a Monday statement. “Troy regrets the moments when disagreements became too heated, but passion for the issues he advocates for should not be confused with physical intimidation or bullying.”

Many prominent voices who initially backed Platner have dismissed or ridiculed the reports:

But do the particular incidents Democratic lawmakers cited sound like the “passion” needed in a political “moment [that] calls for a rabble-rouser”? Not really. Is it bad to demand more from elected representatives? Or bad not to want to normalize the kind of workplace behavior that’s alleged of Jackson? No. As to whether it’s an excuse to go after white men: Remember the extensive coverage of Kamala Harris’ allegedly unhealthy workplace culture? Or Amy Klobuchar’s?

To be clear, CNN noted that the dozens of Democrats it interviewed said they did not find Jackson’s behavior comparable to that of former nominee Graham Platner, who is alleged to have raped Jenny Racicot, a woman he previously dated, and exhibited troubling behavior toward at least six other women. And some told CNN that they spoke out because they wanted Jackson to publicly acknowledge his conduct and make an effort to seriously address it ahead of the general election.

People speaking out about Jackson’s alleged history of bullying are not, in effect, siding with or disregarding Maine Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins and her disturbing record.

Democrats picked Jackson as their leader in part because of his chances to win in more conservative areas of the state, and were willing to overlook his opposition to abortion and years as a Republican.

That’s already a lot to look past. It’s reasonable to demand better.