This week, Meta laid off 8,000 employees—10 percent of the company’s staff—and reassigned another 7,000 to train AI models. Fear of the layoffs had been building around the company for weeks, compounded by the way that Meta has taken a sharp turn from a company built by coders to a company that has staked its future on AI. So when a Meta software engineer named David Frenk posted a farewell parody video to the tune of “American Pie” in an internal message board, staff thought it perfectly captured how the culture of the company has fundamentally shifted. They begged him to post it to YouTube, making their plight inside the company public. 

“There’s a bit of a disconnect,” one former employee who asked not to be identified told Mother Jones, “This is a company of really smart people who work really hard—coders, engineers, designers—people whose creativity and intellect is a part of their job. And you are being told that this AI agent can do it better than you, and you are being asked to train it.”

At Meta, there’s a tradition: when you leave, you make a “badge post” on the company’s internal message board. Usually, it’s a tribute to coworkers and co-creation—very kumbaya. But Frenk turned his badge post into a crusade in C major. It became a runaway hit.

Frenk left of his own accord—his last day is today—and had a little time to decide how he wanted to go out. In an internal chat called “@shitposting” that has about 20,000 members, Frenk posted a high-production-value parody of the Don McLean song “American Pie.” You probably haven’t thought about “American Pie” in a while. The song is a lengthy ballad that unspools the history of rock and roll and laments the loss of innocence when the 1960s turned into the decade of disco. Frenk’s version recounts the recent history of Meta and its position at the edge of a tectonic shift as the company asks workers to train AI—and then lays off thousands of them. 

The song is a consummate parody, and the lyrics are laced with inside jokes and references best understood by those inside the company. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s Chief Technology Officer and a 20-year veteran of the company, gets name checked multiple times for promoting an internal monitoring software called MCI, or Model Capability Initiative, that the company installed on the computers of US employees this spring. MCI tracks the way humans interact with their screens, capturing mouse clicks and keyboard strokes to train AI to appear more “human-like.” 

As Frenk sings:

And now I’m singing bye, bye, to professional pride
Sign the petition, no more wishing, just deny MCI
It’s the human touch that lets you know you’re alive
Maybe this can’t be replaced with AI

When the initiative was rolled out internally, the former employee said, one of the top comments on an internal message board was “how do I opt out?”

Frenk’s video currently has tens of thousands of views on Meta’s internal messaging system, though many of the comments are from accounts deactivated after Wednesday’s layoffs. The video seems to have captured a shift inside the company where profits are at a record high, executives are receiving huge raises, and yet 8,000 people have lost their jobs. (“When investors pressed us to get more lean,” Frenk asks in his parody, “Why did execs’ paychecks grow so obscene?”)

“It all feels a bit off,” the former employee said. “In a lighthearted way, even if you really, fully believe that this is the direction to go down, everything [in the video] still rings true.” (Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The comments bled over into Blind, a message board for current and former tech workers from places like Meta and Google to chat without their companies monitoring them. On Blind, people posted that the video “made me tear up” and “touched my soul.”

But the thing that really is most evil
And the reason that morale’s in freefall
Is you forgot we’re all just people
When you abused AI

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This past Sunday, I found myself walking across the snowless ski runs of Sierra-at-Tahoe in California, which sits on public land in the El Dorado National Forest. I had come to chase down a rumor.

Numerous Tahoe-area residents had told me the Forest Service’s plan to spray the controversial herbicide glyphosate—part of the agency’s forest restoration plan for about 75,000 acres scorched by the devastating 2021 Caldor Fire—had been delayed until 2028. A local news site, along with a major local environmental group—Keep Tahoe Blue—were telling people some version of that.

But I had my suspicions. I dug up maps from the Forest Service’s website, and headed to a spot where one of them indicated spraying might already be happening. It was strange to be standing in the middle of a ski run, with neither snow nor skiers around. But I knew if spraying were happening, it would be obvious.

Public uproar has echoed across the Tahoe area since April, when our yearlong Mother Jones investigation revealed that, in California, the fastest-growing use of glyphosate—the main ingredient in Roundup—is to spray forested areas, including this massive new project around Lake Tahoe. Everyone from environmentalists to an Olympic snowboarder and a prominent voice in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement have since condemned the Forest Service’s plan. 

A petition on Change.org gathered about 10,000 signatures in less than two weeks. And people have taken to social media to call for action, generating hundreds of thousands of views, with companies and organizations like Patagonia and Greenpeace sharing information about the spraying. “Pesticides have no place in our forests!” Greenpeace wrote on its Instagram.

Snowboarder Hannah Teter, who won gold in the half pipe at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, and Silver at the 2010 games in Vancouver, has voiced her opposition on Instagram, where she has 275,000 followers, as well as on her Facebook page.

“It’s so stupid. Everyone in Tahoe is so bummed,” she told me. “How the heck did they get this approved?”

The Forest Service did allow for public comment back in 2023 on its initially smaller proposal for herbicide use in the Caldor Fire scar, which most people in the area seemingly never heard about. Then a 2025 executive order by President Trump to expand timber harvesting on national forestland allowed the Forest Service to more than double its proposed herbicide use within the Caldor Fire scar without soliciting public feedback.

As the outcry grew over the past few weeks, news begin circulating on social media that the Forest Service was backing off. “They cancelled the plan!” one person wrote. “People showed up to meetings, called our representatives and it’s finally cancelled. OUR VOICES MATTERED ON THIS ONE.”

But that wasn’t true. At Sierra-at-Tahoe, I stood on a mountainside that clearly had been doused in glyphosate. The plants around me were nearly all dead—killed with the controversial herbicide, which the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has deemed a probable human carcinogen—and that a 2020 report from the US Environmental Protection Agency said likely harms 93 percent of endangered species.

Roundup’s manufacturer, Bayer, is currently on the hook for more than $12 billion in legal payouts to more than 180,000 people who say glyphosate made them sick—the company is now seeking immunity from some of its liability in a case recently heard by the Supreme Court. (In a statement, the company said glyphosate products are safe when used as directed and that regulators around the world have approved its use.)

Standing on the slopes of Sierra-at-Tahoe, it was clear to me that the Forest Service is moving ahead. It began spraying glyphosate in the Tahoe area last year, including here at the ski resort, and has been spraying elsewhere this spring. 

Down the ski slope from me, I could see hillsides teaming with life, painted in the lush greens and brightly colored petals of spring. But where I stood, next to a ski run called “Marmot,” the land was devoid of spring flowers; the bushes leafless, brittle, and dead by all appearances. Practically the only thing growing was what the Forest Service intended—pine trees: Its workers had hand-planted baby conifers all across the slope.

This scene of devastation is part of the Forest Service’s pivot towards embracing glyphosate in its efforts to reforest in the wake of massive wildfires. The agency’s herbicide use in the Tahoe area is mirrored by another fire-restoration plan in Northern California’s Lassen National Forest, where the Forest Service plans to spray about 10,000 acres with Roundup or a similar product.  

As our investigation revealed, the deployment of glyphosate in California’s forestlands has been growing for decades, driven in part by the worsening fires, as companies and government officials scramble to harvest burned wood and replant trees for future timber sales. Glyphosate is among the effective methods—and the Forest Service says the cheapest—to get pine trees to grow back faster, as it kills any other plant that might compete for sunlight, soil nutrients, and water.

These new projects are expanding the agency’s historic use of the herbicide. In 2023, it  sprayed 14,900 pounds of pure glyphosate across California, according to an analysis of more than 5 million state records that my colleague Melissa Lewis and I compiled as part of our investigation.

The Forest Service has authorized the spraying of glyphosate over about 75,000 acres within the Caldor Fire scar at up to the legal limit of eight pounds per acre. This means the Tahoe project could deploy more than 584,000 pounds of glyphosate over the next few years. In a document outlining how to transform the fire-scarred land into an ideal timber producing forest, the agency noted that “multiple herbicide applications may be required,” which could further increase the total.

This approach treats portions of the National Forest similarly to farmland, where managers aim to maximize yields and minimize costs. After all, the Forest Service exists within the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The agency has not said exactly how much of the designated area around Tahoe it actually plans to spray, although its documents note that spraying herbicides is “the most effective method available for achieving reforestation objectives in the majority of situations.” Officials did not respond to my questions about how much glyphosate the agency will use, nor whether it still considers the chemical safe for people and the environment—especially now that we know that key research papers vouching for glyphosate’s safety were secretly orchestrated by its manufacturer.

This month, the nonprofit Keep Tahoe Blue sent a message to a concerned local, who then posted it online, saying “no glyphosate has been applied as part of the Caldor Fire Restoration Project, and the USFS has stated the earliest any potential herbicide application could occur is now 2028.” But this was inaccurate.

The Forest Service, as part of the Caldor Fire Restoration Project, has indeed been spraying outside the Tahoe basin, where officials plans to reforest 73,000 acres, including the work already done at Sierra-at-Tahoe.

A big source of confusion is that the Caldor Fire Restoration Project actually consists of two separate plans. One involves the Lake Tahoe watershed (a.k.a. the Tahoe basin), meaning the forest creeks that drain into the lake. This smaller portion of the project includes reforestation and potential herbicide use on about 3,000 acres. It was in relation to this area that the local news site SouthTahoeNow.com reported the Forest Service had held off on spraying until 2028.

But a Forest Service spokesperson told me there has been no delay or change of plans: The agency had never intended to spray in that section—which includes areas near Meyers and Heavenly ski resort—this year or next. But its public documents are unclear on this, and they don’t reveal when or under what circumstances that spraying might commence.

On May 7, the Forest Service posted maps online showing it had sprayed glyphosate around and within Sierra-at-Tahoe in spring 2025. When I called and emailed the local officials to confirm, I got a reply saying they’d need to consult with colleagues on the “East Coast” before answering my question. That’s when I decided to drive out and see for myself.

The Forest Service later confirmed that the area I visited indeed had been sprayed, and that the maps I found online were posted this month—a year after the spraying at Sierra-at-Tahoe—“to facilitate awareness.”

It also released maps showing where the agency is spraying in 2026. Those areas were either already treated with glyphosate in April, a government spokesperson told me this week, or the spraying is “ongoing” and expected to wrap up “within the next couple of weeks, weather conditions permitting.”

All of the spraying, they said, has been accomplished by crews using backpack sprayers. These tend to be contract workers, often Spanish speaking immigrants who may not be aware of the potential safety risks. Mother Jones obtained a photo of one work crew that was cited by a county inspector for failure to wear the mandated protective gear—their exposed skin was purple, covered with the chemical.

The spokesperson said the agency posts signs at locations where it sprays herbicides—and typically removes them within 48 hours. Several research papers indicate that glyphosate can persist in the environment and even plant tissue for months, even years, raising risks to the ecology and human health.

One Forest Service map shows areas outside the Tahoe basin that the agency plans to reforest as part of its restoration project—and which it says will likely require glyphosate and other herbicides. The USDA has defended the Forest Service’s use of glyphosate, noting that it relies on the EPA’s “use of gold-standard science to assess pesticide safety.”

Attorney George Kimbrell, co-executive director of the Center for Food Safety, scoffs at that assertion. “It has a well-established toxicity to the environment. And, for endangered species, Roundup is a significant risk,” he told me.

In 2020, the EPA concluded glyphosate was safe for humans when used according to the label, and any environmental concerns were outweighed by the benefits. But that decision was quickly challenged in court by Kimbrell, who represented a coalition of environmental and farm labor groups arguing that the agency did not adequately assess health and ecological risks.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, overturning the EPA’s decision, noting that most of the studies the EPA examined had “indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma” and that the agency had shirked its duty in properly assessing the ecological risks. The EPA is expected to announce an update on its glyphosate safety assessment this year.

People in Tahoe, worried about glyphosate’s potential health and environmental harms, have begun organizing to slow or stop the Forest Service’s plan. That effort includes Kelly Ryerson—Glyphosate Girl on Instagram—an influential voice who visited the White House earlier this year with other members of the MAHA coalition.

The group met with President Trump and his staff and discussed the risks of glyphosate, among other issues. Trump has angered his MAHA base this year by taking action to protect Bayer from lawsuits, both via the Supreme Court case and in an executive order issued in February that sought to boost domestic protection of the chemical and shield it from legal liability.

Ryerson told me she is now committed to reversing the Forest Service’s plan in Tahoe. “It’s ludicrous,” she said. “To be spraying glyphosate in such an environmentally sensitive and pristine place, where it can get into the water that so many people drink, or swim in, I mean, who thought this was a good idea?”

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

The Texas sun keeps rising, as Texas coal wanes.

For the first time ever, solar is set to generate more electricity than coal in the power market managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Nobody is building new coal power plants in the state, but developers are adding more solar there than anywhere else in the country. As a result of those diverging trajectories, the federal government expects ERCOT will receive 78 billion kilowatt-hours from solar in 2026, and just 60 from coal.

This trend does have seasonal variations. Last year, solar output beat coal on a monthly basis from March through August, and this year it is expected to do so from March through December, per the US Energy Information Administration at the Department of Energy.

Nationally, the combination of wind and solar surpassed coal generation in 2024, as noted in an analysis by Ember, a think tank that conducts research on clean energy. In other words, the solar industry is further along in Texas than it is nationwide.

The Texas solar surge undercuts the prevailing energy narratives coming out of the Trump administration, which has attempted to boost coal and gas as tools of ​“energy dominance,” while blocking or canceling American energy that comes from renewables. The Department of Energy, for instance, is keeping struggling coal plants on life support at great expense to taxpayers. Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior is blocking wind and solar developments that intersect with public lands.

Trump officials have argued that coal is more reliable than solar because it can generate power around the clock. But even with that advantage, coal plants in Texas can’t keep up with the total annual and monthly production from the rapidly growing solar fleet. This has not damaged grid reliability, because ERCOT meets evening demand with a diverse portfolio, including gas plants, nuclear, wind, and, increasingly, batteries, which store all that excess solar power for use when the sun stops shining.

Of course, Texas leaders did not set out to disprove the Trump administration’s energy claims. The maverick Lone Star State kept its electricity system out of the hands of federal regulators, and in the 1990s and early 2000s reformed it to promote free market competition instead of centralized planning by monopoly utilities. That market, coupled with lots of space and lax building regulations, has made an ideal environment for wind, solar, and batteries to flourish. Now, Texas is fortified with tens of gigawatts of new capacity with which to tackle heat waves and temper price spikes.

Deep-red Texas offers lessons for the liberal states that have committed to lofty climate goals yet failed to build much solar or batteries so far. They can’t immediately switch over to an ERCOT-style market, but they can take steps to speed up the time it takes to get permits and grid connection, dial back the level of deference to habitually conservative legacy utilities, and make sure that clean energy gets a fair shot in the race to serve surging energy needs. And it’s always a good time to reexamine old market rules that subtly privilege entrenched players at the expense of new entrants that would make cheaper and cleaner power.

After more of the rapid-fire solar buildout, EIA expects ERCOT will produce 99 billion kilowatt-hours of solar power in 2027, up 27% from 2026. At that point, the upstart industry will have left its well-established coal competition in the dust.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging 94-year-old former Cuban head of state Raúl Castro with murder and conspiracy to kill US citizens. It’s a move that may signal potential military action to abduct Castro from the country, as with Donald Trump’s January raid on the compound of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. 

The indictment targets Raúl Castro, the brother of the late Fidel, and five other members of the Cuban military, for the 1991 downing by Cuban forces of two aircraft operated by anticommunist Cuban exiles. While the indictment was filed last month, the unsealing coincides with Cuban Independence Day, celebrating 124 years since the US ended its military occupation of the country. 

But Cuban Independence Day comes this year amid a debilitating oil blockade imposed by Trump, which has devastated Cuba’s already struggling health system and economic infrastructure and worsened living conditions across the board. This year alone, residents have dealt with nationwide blackouts, food shortages, hospitals without power to operate, and constant worry over their economic and political future. The Trump blockade and associated policies, which many humanitarian groups view as human rights violations, have deprived the country’s residents of basic necessities and exacerbated the impact of the decades-long US embargo on its neighbor.

Cuba produces enough oil to meet about 40 percent of its needs domestically. It imports the remainder, mostly from Venezuela and Mexico. But following the US attack on Venezuela and additional tariffs imposed on countries that sell or provide oil to Cuba, both countries halted oil exports to the island. And while the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs, the president continued his naval blockade on Cuba, seizing many vessels that have sought to ship goods to, or that have simply been linked to, the country. 

According to a March report by the Atlantic, the US attorney’s office in South Florida is building further indictments against Cuba’s military and government leadership, including Castro family members. The US cited a 2020 indictment against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to justify his capture in January. In the week prior to the report, Trump said he believed that he would have “the honor of taking Cuba.”

And earlier, at the end of his first term, Trump added Cuba to the federal list of state sponsors of terrorism, a policy that “put the brakes on some private investment on the island,” Will Freeman, a Latin America fellow at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations told me in an April email. “And [it] did no favors to tourism, which the Cuban regime had made the island’s economic engine.”

The Biden administration largely carried on Trump’s Cuba policy, further hindering Cuba’s tourism in 2022 by barring foreign travelers from visa-free travel to the US if they visited Cuba after the Trump-initiated state sponsor of terrorism designation went into effect in January 2021.

Claims of state terrorism, as M. Victoria Murillo, a professor of political science and international and public affairs at Columbia University, said to me last month, were the linchpin of US justifications for military assaults on Venezuela, and for the campaign of attacks on civilian vessels by US naval forces in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

In January, Trump declared Cuba an “extraordinary threat” to national security on the basis of its alignment with countries like Russia, China, and Iran and his allegations, made without evidence, that Cuba “welcomes transnational terrorist groups” like Hamas and Hezbollah. The executive order imposed additional US tariffs on goods from countries who supply oil to Cuba, which effectively eliminated all support for Cuba from Venezuela and Mexico. 

These latest restrictions have been implemented amid a US embargo that has stopped US businesses from trading with Cuba since the 1960s. While former President Barack Obama eased many economic constraints on Cuba and allowed some travel, he ended the policy that gave Cubans arriving in the United States a guaranteed pathway to legal status. That, according to Murillo—along with Trump and Biden’s reimplementation of economic restrictions—led to growing inequality between Cubans with access to foreign currency and those who rely wholly on state salaries, wages that in 2025 amounted to about $18 a month.

The first group, who constitute an upper class, may have connections to private businesses, tourism, or remittances from relatives who live abroad.

“Cuba is in a situation similar to when the Soviet Union fell,” Murillo says. The US embargo, starting in the 1960s, led Cuba to depend on the Soviet Union, which supplied the island with oil at subsidized prices. Early oil shipments were delivered to US-owned refineries, but they refused to refine in part due to pressure from the US government.

“That started the escalation of nationalization,” Murillo says. “They had no energy, they had to bike places because they had no gas, [and] they lacked food.”

This time, Murillo says, it’s even worse: “Cuba is now on its own.”

The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba to supposedly encourage popular rebellion against the island’s government has not worked. “Social movement theory says that when people are really desperate, they cannot protest. That requires certain resources,” Murillo says. “If you are spending all your time trying to get food, you don’t even have the time to protest.” Anti-government protests in Cuba are rare.

The failure to rouse popular protest—even against unpopular leaders—is increasingly familiar to the Trump administration, which expected an Iranian public uprising to follow its war on that country. In the immediate wake of the Iranian government’s violent crackdown on a series of protests that began in December, I had the opportunity to talk to historian Behrooz Ghamari, who explained the situation succinctly:

“The paradox is the US imposes crippling sanctions while also saying, ‘I’m going to liberate your people.’ This rhetoric about helping people contributes to delegitimizing the Iranian people’s legitimate protests. It gives the Iranian government the excuse to claim conspiracy and say that protesters are acting on behalf of foreign interests and can react severely and violently. If the US actually wanted to help, the only offer is to not intervene and allow these movements to unfold on their own terms.”

In 2021, President Miguel Díaz-Canel called large-scale protests then taking place “a plan orchestrated by the exterior,” claiming that the US government was directing protesters.

Why does Cuba think the US is directing opposition to its government? Historically, it has—Cuba is a longstanding fixation of US foreign policy, dating to generations before Castro. In 1898, Murillo explained, after winning the Spanish-American War, the US began driving towards hegemony, taking Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain and establishing a protectorate in Cuba. Cuba had no choice but to sign off on the Platt Amendment, which guaranteed the US sweeping powers—including the right to intervene unilaterally in Cuba’s politics, as Trump seeks to do again now—in return for withdrawing its troops from the island at the end of the war.

US domination remained the status quo for more than half a century. At the time of the Cuban revolution, in the late 1950s, American companies owned or controlled 90 percent of Cuba’s electricity, as well as significant parts of its sugar, communications, and mining industries. In large part to take ownership of domestic industries, the Cuban revolution established a socialist political system—one that the US wanted rid of by any means possible.

The rush of exiles from that revolution, and the proximity between the two countries, helped facilitate the establishment of a powerful Cuban-American lobby, founded by Cuban elites who were exiled after the revolution—which got us our current Secretary of State.

Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban parents who fled to the US in the 1950s, announced in March that Cuba would “have to get new people in charge.” Rubio has become by far the most visible and influential face of the Cuban-American exile movement, pushing the Trump administration to heap pressure on the country. (Rubio’s family, ironically, fled the country under the US-aligned government of Fulgencio Batista—the one Castro toppled. Rubio has repeatedly claimed otherwise.)

“The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to an oil ‘blockade’ by the US,” Rubio said in a Spanish-language video message to the Cuban people Wednesday, but because Cuba’s ruling officials “have plundered billions of dollars” from the nation.

Although some Democratic US lawmakers have called for the end of the oil blockade, only one oil tanker has reached Cuba. “We have absolutely no fuel [oil] and absolutely no diesel,” Cuba’s energy minister, Vicente de la O Levy, said last week.

In February, United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk called for the lifting of US sanctions that impede oil deliveries to Cuba: “Policy goals cannot justify actions that in themselves violate human rights,” Marta Hurtado, Türk’s spokesperson, said at the time.

“Cubans should be able to exercise their rights freely, including their rights to political participation, and the Cuban government’s policies of repression and censorship should stop,” the Washington Office on Latin America, a US advocacy organization promoting human rights and social and economic justice in Latin America and the Caribbean, wrote in a statement last month. “At the same time, U.S. policy towards Cuba, focused on coercive measures such as the embargo and other sanctions, is outdated and has failed to produce U.S. policy goals, while causing severe harm.”

“It is the Cuban people, with the concerted support of the international community, who should determine their future and be a core part of any bilateral discussions,” the statement continued.

Since then, the Trump administration has increased sanctions on Cuba, and Wednesday’s news of Castro’s indictment is the strongest signal that the Trump administration is considering switching from mostly economic and diplomatic pressure to military assault. The US military has sent at least 25 intelligence-gathering flights since February and has begun to increase its number of ships in the area.

In response, Cuba President Miguel Díaz-Canel warned that US military strikes could lead to a “bloodbath” on Monday. A Sunday Axios report cited classified intelligence that Cuba had acquired more than 300 military drones and were discussing a possible attack on the US base at Guantánamo Bay.

In his public rhetoric, Trump appears to be framing Cuba and Venezuela similarly. On Wednesday, he called the indictment of Castro a “very big moment” for Cuban Americans but suggested that he didn’t expect there to be an increase in hostilities between the two countries; Trump surprised and upset much of the Venezuelan opposition by taking such a tack with Venezuela, leaving its ruling party in power after the initial assault that abducted Maduro. “Look, the place is falling apart,” Trump told reporters that same day. “[The Cuban government has] really lost control of Cuba.”

But Trump’s remarks on Thursday may be more revealing. “Other presidents have looked at [Cuba] for 50, 60 years, doing something,” Trump said. “And, it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So, I would be happy to do it.”

If Trump—a teenager when Fidel Castro came to power—sees overthrowing Cuba’s leadership as part of the legacy he’s increasingly concerned with, then a US escalation may well be in the cards.

Among the more than 50,000 words in the DNC’s 192-page autopsy of why it lost the 2024 presidential election, here are a few that do not appear even once: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Jewish, Muslim, foreign policy, protest, genocide.

The report—which was released today, and simultaneously disavowed by DNC Chair Ken Martin—is already generating its fair share of controversy for its typo-ridden, unfinished nature.

“For full transparency,” Ken Martin said in a note released alongside the report, “I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged. It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”

It is understandable that an unedited and unendorsed draft would include numerical and grammatical errors, as well as notes saying things like “No sourcing provided for this claim” and “Methodology appears internally inconsistent.” Paul Rivera, the Democratic strategy consultant hired to write the autopsy, arguably can’t be blamed for his spelling errors—that’s what first drafts are for. But there are also more substantial omissions to consider: the report appears to neglect any of the actual policy reasons some Democrats might have chosen not to vote for Harris.

During the 2024 election cycle, tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military, often using US-supplied bombs. At every turn, when confronted by protesters asking her to do more to stop the slaughter, the party’s nominee, Kamala Harris, demurred. When Democrats outraged by the war asked that a single Palestinian speaker be allowed to speak onstage at the DNC—and endorse Harris in doing so—they were snubbed.

In February, Axios reported that some of the strategists conducting the autopsy report believed that Gaza cost Harris votes. That did not make it into the now-published version. As horrifying testimonies of violence emerged from Gaza, and sources from the United Nations to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem agreed this was a US-aided genocide, Harris did not promise to stop the flow of arms to Israel. In key swing states like Michigan—where thousands of voters cast “Uncommitted” ballots—that made a difference.

Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson for the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, told Axios in February that his organization met with DNC officials. “The DNC shared with us that their own data also found that policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election,” Bendaas said at the time.

According to polling by the IMEU, 29 percent of former Biden voters who did not choose Harris—equivalent to roughly 122,380 votes across six swing states—were influenced by Gaza. There were of course other factors: broad economic dissatisfaction, as well as a late-game candidate switch, among them—but to omit mention of Gaza is avoidant at best and dishonest at worst.

The release of the autopsy raises as many questions as it answers. Why is there no discussion of Palestine or Israel? Was Rivera told not to include them, or did he leave them out of his own accord? Neither option is flattering to Democrats. In the former, they are still in denial—trying to paper this over won’t make it go away. In the latter, they still can’t pick the right person for the job at hand.

On Thursday, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to dismiss the Hamm v. Smith case, effectively upholding its rulings that people with intellectual disabilities should not be executed, and that IQ tests alone are not enough to determine whether someone has an intellectual disability. A one sentence, unsigned opinion held that the court’s earlier decision to hear the case was “improvidently granted.” Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

“The Court is not equipped in this case to provide any meaningful guidance on how courts should assess multiple IQ scores,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a concurrence, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “All the parties here agree that the Eighth Amendment does not prescribe a single formula for weighing multiple IQ scores.”

Intellectual disabilities, the Supreme Court has ruled, should be determined holistically, as I explained in an article previewing December’s oral arguments in Hamm v. Smith:

The Supreme Court has previously stated that IQ tests alone fail to holistically determine intellectual disability, in 2002’s Atkins v. Virginia—which also established that executing people with intellectual disabilities violated the Eighth Amendment—reaffirmed in 2014 in Hall v. Florida, and most recently in 2017’s Moore v. Texas.

The state of Alabama argued Smith could be executed because he had no intellectual disability. As I previously wrote, Smith had shown that he arguably does:

Long before he was convicted of murder in 1997, Joseph Clifton Smith was placed in schooling for an intellectual disability. Smith had five documented IQ test scores by the time he was tried, all around the bottom five percent of the population—four of which, his legal team has argued, fall in the range of mild intellectual disability.

“The Court’s review is further complicated by the fact that the issue of how to consider multiple IQ scores was neither meaningfully raised nor passed upon below,” Sotomayor wrote.

Even though the court has banned executing people with intellectual disabilities, some advocates have raised concerns it still happens. For instance, Alabama executed Willie Smith in 2021, who some argued had an intellectual disability—though, like the Smith at the center of the Hamm v. Smith case, this was debated.

This gray area—judging who is disabled enough to be spared, and who is fit to be killed—raises questions about the ethics of the death penalty generally, including how racial bias may shape these determinations. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, nearly three out of four people sentenced to death under federal prosecution are people of color.

“In a country that created a system of law based around racial hierarchy, it’s no wonder that people of color, particularly Black people, are more likely to be executed, especially if they are disabled,” says Dom Kelly, the CEO of the disability justice organization New Disabled South. “In 2026, capital punishment is the next generation of racial lynching and the state’s way of keeping the eugenics movement alive.”

In a dissenting opinion signed by no other justice, Thomas blatantly called for the Atkins ruling to be rolled back. “As this case shows,” Thomas wrote, “Atkins has bred only confusion and absurdity. Nothing in the text or history of the Constitution supports Atkins. It should be overruled.”

Smith, who was convicted of capital murder in 1998 for beating a man to death during a robbery, is expected to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

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

For decades, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), worked across many of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-besieged regions, funding thousands of humanitarian, healthcare, food, and disaster relief programs. That all changed last year when, days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration issued a stop-work order that suspended nearly all of USAID’s overseas programs. Then, last July, the administration informally dissolved the agency—leading to the largest withdrawal of American international development aid in more than 60 years. 

A new study published May 14 in the journal Science suggests the sudden USAID shutdown could have been linked to an uptick in violent conflict across much of Africa, with some of the most politically fragile regions seeing the largest spikes. Outside experts, however, caution that the findings are preliminary and may not capture the bigger picture. 

Farming and agricultural markets are easily disrupted by conflict, and when conflict occurs, food security worsens because fighting can limit communities’ access to food. At the same time, deepening food insecurity in fragile political states contributes to social unrest. Climate impacts then layer onto this fragility. Extreme weather is second only to conflict in having the greatest effect on global hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition, according to a UN report. That’s in part because it causes people to migrate as they flee places destroyed by rising seas and cataclysmic storms, which, in turn, can fuel conflict. 

“It is undeniable that USAID programming around food aid, including emergency food kitchens, therapeutic foods, and health and water programming on which basic food and nutritional security is built, provided a critical lifeline to millions of women, children, and families in severe nutritional deficits,” said Zia Mehrabi, a food security and climate change researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Who in their right mind would retract healthcare and food so abruptly, in so many places, when the direct result is people suffering and dying?”

In analyzing the impact of funding cuts on conflict across 870 subnational African regions that had been receiving different levels of USAID services, the Science paper’s authors found that in the roughly 10 months that followed the administration’s immediate withdrawal of aid, areas that had previously received more USAID support may have experienced more or different types of conflict.

Using two global datasets that track funding disbursements and violent conflict, the study suggests that, in areas with high historical USAID funding, there was a 12.3 percent increase in conflict overall and a 7.3 percent surge in armed battles; protests and riots in these areas rose by 6.8 percent and battle-related fatalities by 9.3 percent after the shutdown. 

According to Austin Wright, a University of Chicago researcher who studies the political economy of conflict, and a co-author of the paper, the effects have been swift and destabilizing. “There is nothing that we’re aware of in recorded human history of the magnitude of that shutdown, in terms of ending a country’s commitment at a global scale,” said Wright. 

Established in 1961, USAID was created to encourage economic and social development in emerging nations while countering the Cold War influence of the Soviet Union. Building resilience in foreign political systems has, in recent decades, been “one of the main goals of the work of USAID,” said Chelsea Marcho, a senior director for research and policy at the Food Security Leadership Council and former USAID official under former President Joe Biden, who was not involved in the Science paper.

The study showing that violence may have been less severe in places where USAID had helped build stronger institutions, she said, only underscores the value of those aid investments. One example is the largely discontinued work to develop more resilient food systems across sub-Saharan African nations facing higher rates of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. 

But what many tend to forget, said Marcho, is that USAID also funded the bulk of pivotal data collection efforts across much of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-vulnerable regions. The dissolution of the agency has prompted widespread disruptions in everything from localized weather monitoring to one of the primary global famine early-warning systems. Although some of these systems have since been restored, the gaps in monitoring coupled with the decreased capacity across aid organizations means it is all the more difficult to understand what is happening on the ground. 

Indeed, the end of USAID has buckled our ability to measure the very outcomes of the end of USAID. “The visibility that we have around food security is potentially in decline at the same time that the risks to the system are increasing,” said Marcho. “How do we actually get the data we need?”

Mehrabi finds the new paper creates “more questions than answers.” He argues the mechanisms of measurement are unclear, the analysis period is too short, and the authors don’t adequately disentangle USAID’s specific effects from Trump’s simultaneous cuts to other US international funding sources, such as the State Department. “The results are clearly early and tentative,” he said. “I think it is a leap to say this is all attributable to USAID.” 

Wright, for his part, acknowledged the study has limitations, including a short post-shock observation window of just 10 months, a disbursement baseline drawn from the first Trump administration rather than the period immediately before the cuts, and a geographic scope confined to Africa—leaving much open to future research. He says the team ran extensive robustness checks addressing these concerns, detailed in the paper’s appendix. 

After running his own reanalysis of their data, Mehrabi, however, remains unconvinced. What’s more, he warns against the possible takeaway that the presence of American developmental intervention equates to stability. The US, he argues, could more effectively help deter widespread conflict and hunger in nations like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, through more equitable benefit-sharing of natural resource extraction from critical mineral supply chains. This would “far outweigh any benefits from foreign aid,” proposed Mehrabi. 

Nevertheless, with an annual budget of tens of billions and an institutional history spanning 64 years, USAID’s developmental footprint throughout the African continent was no small thing. “One cannot simply create USAID all over again, or give it a mandate and give it funding and assume that we have waved a wand and we can reverse the damage done,” said Wright.

Longtime and controversial anti-vaccine activist David Geier is still working at the Department of Health and Human Services—and the agency is still refusing to specify exactly what he’s doing. In mid-April, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the Senate Finance Committee that he would give them a copy of Geier’s contract. According to a member of the committee, he has still not.

“Three weeks after Secretary Kennedy committed to providing details regarding David Geier’s work at HHS (something he committed to doing within 3 days), our office has yet to hear from HHS on anything related,” says a spokesperson for Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.). 

Geier and his late father Mark, a physician who eventually lost his license, spent years presenting themselves as experts on alleged vaccine injuries and pursuing discredited and dangerous “treatments” for autism in children, including Lupron, a drug that inhibits testosterone production and is used to chemically castrate sex offenders. 

From Mark’s home in DC’s Maryland suburbs, the pair presented themselves as experts on autism, running organizations with serious-sounding names, including the Institute for Chronic Illness and the Genetic Centers of America. Their work has been widely panned: in 2003, the American Academy of Pediatrics said a study they published—which purported to show a link between thimerosal, a preservative previously used in some vaccines, and autism—not only “contains numerous conceptual and scientific flaws, omissions of fact, inaccuracies, and misstatements,” but made inappropriate use of data from HHS’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. For another paper in the journal Autoimmunity Review, which was subsequently retracted, the Geiers’ apparent review board, journalist Brian Deer wrote, consisted of the Geiers themselves, Mark Geier’s wife, along with “two of Dr Geier’s business associates; and two mothers of autistic children, one of whom has publicly acknowledged that her son is a patient/subject of Dr Geier, and the other of whom is plaintiff in three pending vaccine injury claims.”

Both Geier and his father were banned in 2004 from accessing the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a federal database which records adverse vaccine reactions and contains medical information on millions of Americans. At the time, a National Immunization Program official wrote in a warning letter that the men had attempted “to merge data files” from the VSD in a way that could have created “complete medical records on subjects, and if so, could have increased the risk of a breach of confidentiality.” Mark Geier’s Maryland medical license was revoked in August 2012 for prescribing children the synthetic hormone Lupron as a supposed autism treatment. David Geier, who has a bachelor’s degree in biology but no other certifications, was himself fined $10,000 in 2011 by the Maryland medical board for practicing medicine without a license.

David Geier’s hiring, which was first reported by the Washington Post in March 2025, generated serious concern among autism organizations. The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network bluntly termed him “a quack,” adding that by “hiring David Geier, the Trump administration has abandoned its responsibility to safeguard public health and promote science.”

The situation has also raised concerns about Geier’s potential access to sensitive medical or personally identifying information. Senator Luján’s office sent a pointed letter to Kennedy on April 1, asking, among other things, “what specific research questions” Geier is investigating, and “what data use agreements are in place to ensure that privacy of the data is maintained.”

Geier’s employment is just one of many concerning changes that Kennedy has made at HHS. He’s also taken steps to weaken the federal vaccine court system, and “retired” every member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a key vaccine review board, attempting to replace many of them with allies from the anti-vaccine movement. (The board remains in limbo after a judge issued an injunction against Kennedy’s appointments.)

Under Kennedy, the FDA also deleted a warning page outlining debunked autism treatments. One, chelation therapy, which removes heavy metals from the body, was practiced by the Geiers. (Some anti-vaccine activists falsely claim that vaccines impart heavy metals into the body; a separate FDA page which has not yet been removed warns against chelation therapy for autism.)

This month the New York Times reported that Kennedy has quietly continued driving what the paper described as a “vast inquiry” into vaccines, again attempting to link them to autism and various autoimmune conditions—theories that have been repeatedly debunked. The Times also reported that Kennedy has publicly deemphasized his inquiry at the behest of the White House, due to fears his anti-vaccine initiative will hurt Republicans in the midterm elections.

Neither David Geier nor HHS responded to requests for comment about his employment. The office of Senate Finance Committee chair Senator Mike Crapo, (R-Idaho) also didn’t respond to a request for comment.

On Tuesday, six states held primary elections to select which Republican and Democratic candidates will advance to the general election in November. The primaries were seen not only as contests within the states, but also as potential referendums on President Donald Trump’s staying power within the Republican party. By Wednesday morning, it was clear that Trump’s influence is as strong as ever.

In Kentucky, for example, a Trump-endorsed Republican challenger toppled incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie, a thorn in the president’s side who clashed with Trump over deficit spending and the administration’s handling of the Epstein files.

But the MAGA mandate was arguably even clearer in Georgia, in which a number of contests culminated in rebukes of Trump foes and support for his friends.

In the GOP primary for governor, the Trump-endorsed current lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, received roughly 40 percent of the votes—more than any of the other seven candidates. Because of Georgia’s unique primary rules, in which a candidate has to receive more than half of the vote to become their party’s nominee, Jones will have to compete in a June runoff against the Republican who placed second. He’ll face billionaire health care executive Rick Jackson, who supported Trump’s competitors in the 2024 election and donated money to Liz Cheney’s PAC after she voted to impeach Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection. Jackson’s foes used these donations to label him a “never-Trumper.”

Meanwhile, Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state who famously refused to “find” 11,000 votes for Trump following the president’s 2020 loss, is out of the running for governor, having received just 15 percent of the vote despite national name recognition.

In the GOP primary for secretary of state, former top Raffensperger aide Gabriel Sterling fared about as poorly as his former boss. Despite having more experience running elections than any of his competitors, he received less than 12 percent of the vote. Sterling spent his campaign trying to persuade Georgia voters that Georgia had some of the safest elections in the country. The candidates who advanced to the GOP runoff, state representative Tim Fleming and former state representative Vernon Jones, largely did the opposite. Jones is the more extreme of the two, having said there were “many irregularities” in 2020 and that he “stand[s] with those who believe there was election fraud.”

In the competition to see which Republican will face incumbent Senator Jon Ossoff in November, Rep. Mike Collins performed best. A Trump loyalist, Collins once called for the Episcopal Bishop of the Washington diocese to be deported (despite being an American citizen) after she asked Trump to have sympathy for immigrants. The second-term congressman will face Derek Dooley—son of famous University of Georgia football coach Vince Dooley—in the June runoff.

While technically non-partisan, the three seats up for grabs on Georgia’s Supreme Court also went Trump’s way. Former Democratic state lawmaker Jen Jordan and personal injury attorney Miracle Rankin failed to topple conservative incumbents in each of their races. Conservative Justice Benjamin Land was also re-elected, having run unopposed.

The majority ideology of the court would not have changed if Jordan and Rankin beat the incumbents, but the race gained outsized attention after a Supreme Court decision last month that enables states to weaken voting power among people of color in ways that will disproportionately improve Republicans’ odds at picking up seats. (Trump called it “the kind of ruling I like.”)

Following the decision, Governor Brian Kemp called a special legislative session for June so legislators can redraw congressional maps ahead of the 2028 election cycle. The Georgia Supreme Court will be asked to review these maps, so Republicans will presumably benefit from conservatives ruling the court.

The state supreme court races aside, most high-profile Georgia primary races will have question marks beside them until the June 16 runoffs. But one thing was fairly clear across the Peach State: Trump won up and down the ballot.

This story was originally published by Popular Information, a substack publication to which you can subscribe here.

On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”

Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own US manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”

Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.

Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.

The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock—and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit—has not previously been reported.

The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions—many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor.

“President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”

The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document.

An “unsolicited” trade is one that is initiated by the customer, not recommended by a broker. If Trump wanted to legally remove himself from investment decisions he could do so by creating a qualified blind trust. Instead, before returning to the White House, Trump transferred his assets in a trust that is managed by his son Donald Trump Jr.

There are no legal or practical barriers preventing Trump from being involved in the management of his assets. But it’s a whopper of an ethical conflict. “When we say Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history, it’s because of conduct like this,” says Meghan Faulkner, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which has been involved in several lawsuits involving Trump and his administration. “It could not be clearer that he views the presidency as a get-rich-quick scheme, and that’s a slap in the face to countless Americans struggling financially thanks to Trump administration policies.” 

Thermo Fisher was not the only company featured in Trump’s official remarks and his investment portfolio that day.

After touring the Thermo Fisher facility in Ohio, Trump traveled to Kentucky and delivered a speech that afternoon. During his remarks, Trump singled out Apple and CEO Tim Cook for praise. “Apple, a great company, $2.5 billion to manufacture 100 percent of the glass for iPhones and Apple Watches right here in Kentucky factories,” Trump declared. “Apple [is] spending $650 billion on new plants all over the United States. Think of that. Who the hell else could have done this, nobody else. Nobody else. I say it kiddingly, but I’m actually not kidding. Nobody else could…He’s done a good job, Tim Cook.”

The same day, March 11, Trump purchased between $250,000 and $500,000 of Apple stock. The entry on the disclosure form is also marked unsolicited.

Trump had purchased between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000 of Apple stock in an unsolicited purchase on March 2. In total, Trump purchased between $2 million and $7.2 million in Apple stock during the month of March 2026, including five unsolicited purchases. (He sold smaller amounts of Apple stock on March 6 and March 27.)

During the speech, Trump also worked in another plug for Thermo Fisher. “I just came from Thermo Fisher Scientific in Reading, Ohio, right across the way, the great American company that’s investing $2 billion in domestic manufacturing,” Trump told the crowd.

On March 25, Trump purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 in Micron stock. The transaction was marked unsolicited.

The next day, Trump called in to Fox News’ popular talk show, “The Five.” In the interview, he said he had recently met with Micron’s top executive and talked up the company’s prospects. “I just left the head of Micron. It’s one of the hottest companies,” Trump said.

Overall, Trump purchased between $217,000 and $530,000 in Micron from March 2 to March 25, including four unsolicited transactions. The fact that Trump touted Micron after building up a large position in its stock has not been previously reported.

There was also overlap between Trump’s public remarks and his investment in Dell Technologies. On February 10, Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock.

During an economic speech in Georgia nine days later, Trump told the audience to “go out and buy a Dell computer,” adding the company made “phenomenal products.” Trump also praised Dell CEO Michael Dell and his wife for financially supporting “Trump Accounts” for newborns. The proximity of Trump’s February 19 speech to his purchase of at least $1 million in Dell stock has not been previously reported.

Trump also purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Dell stock on March 2 and again on March 11. Both transactions were marked unsolicited. He made a final purchase of Dell stock, valued between $1,000 and $15,000 on March 23.

Trump also continued to encourage people to buy Dell computers. He pitched Dell products on February 27, March 9, April 16, and May 8. The May 8 remarks, delivered at a Mother’s Day event, helped propel Dell’s stock to an all-time high.

Trump’s buy-and-pump routine, Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) said in a statement, underscores the importance of legislation such as the bipartisan bill he co-introduced with hard-right Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy that would ban stock trading by members of Congress, and another bill he cosponsored that also addresses trading by the president and vice president.

Trump’s trades, Magaziner noted, “show that he continues to put his own self-enrichment ahead of the interests of the American people,” and outlawing such behavior “is a necessary step to cleaning up the corruption that has plagued Washington for too long.”

Trump’s “financial self-dealing is a profound betrayal of the citizens he is supposed to serve. This is about trust. Elected officials—especially the president—shouldn’t be trading stocks,” added Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who coauthored a Senate companion to the Magaziner-Roy bill.

Other Trump stock purchases appear well timed to take advantage of Trump administration policies. For example, NOTUS reported that Trump “purchased $500,000 to $1 million worth of Nvidia stock on January 6, a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China.” Similarly, NOTUS found that Trump, on January 6, purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in AMD, another chipmaker that was approved to do business with China on January 13.

By law, Trump was required to report all of these trades within 45 days. He missed that deadline for many of his trades. As a result, he was fined $200.

This article has been revised to include reactions to the revelations in the original.