A U.S.-born citizen who was wrestled into the dirt, handcuffed and detained in a vehicle as part of an immigration raid had a REAL ID on him that was dismissed as fake, the man’s cousin said Friday.
Video of the arrest, aired by Noticias Telemundo, showed authorities grabbing Leonardo Garcia Venegas, 25, while at a job site in Foley, Alabama, on Wednesday and bending his arms behind him. Someone off-camera can be heard yelling, “He’s a citizen.”
Garcia told Noticias Telemundo that authorities took his ID from his wallet and told him it was fake before handcuffing him. REAL ID is the identification U.S. citizens are required by law to have in order to travel through airports and enter federal buildings. It is considered a higher security form of identification.
“Apparently a REAL ID is not valid anymore. He has a REAL ID,” his cousin Shelah Venegas said. “We all made sure we have the REAL ID and went through the protocols the administration is asking for. … He has his REAL ID and then they see him and I guess because his English isn’t fluent and/or because he’s brown it’s fake, it’s not real.”
Garcia had told Noticias Telemundo that “they grabbed me real bad” and the handcuffs were placed “very hard” on him.
Garcia said he was released from the vehicle where he was held after he gave the arresting officials his Social Security number, which showed he is a U.S. citizen.
The arrest has left Garcia, who was born in Florida, shaken, particularly because the officers also arrested and detained his brother, who is not in the country legally, Venegas said. She added that Garcia lived with his brother. Their parents are from Mexico.
Leonardo Garcia Venegas.Telemundo
“He was actually pretty sore when he got back,” Venegas said of Garcia. “He said his arms were hurting and his hands. His wrists, you could see where he had all the marks from the handcuffs. … The way they put him on the ground, his knees also were hurting.”
She said they have been trying to find a lawyer but local ones have told them that it is nearly impossible to sue a federal agent. It is not clear from the video whether the authorities were federal immigration agents or local law enforcement carrying out enforcement duties.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement to NBC News that Garcia interfered with an arrest during a targeted worksite operation.
“He physically got in between agents and the subject they were attempting to arrest and refused to comply with numerous verbal commands,” said Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary. “Anyone who actively obstructs law enforcement in the performance of their sworn duties, including U.S. citizens, will of course face consequences which include arrest.”
The response did not address the dismissal of Garcia’s identification.
Garcia denied that he interrupted an arrest. He told NBC News that he was trying to take out his phone when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent took it and threw it to the ground and then an agent began grabbing him.
Venegas said Garcia’s brother has signed deportation papers because the family didn’t want him detained “forever” as they’ve seen happen to another family member, who was held for months in a Louisiana detention center.
“It’s inhumane, what they are doing to our people. They are treating them as if they were murderers,” she said.
Venegas said the immigration arrests are creating repercussions among Hispanics, even among U.S. citizens.
“It’s about race now. It’s not about whether you are here legally or not,” she said.
Her family owns a fairly large contracting company, she said, “and a lot of the people that work with us are not working. … They are refusing to go to work. They said they are not going to go until this stuff calms down.”
Venegas added that the majority of her family is self-employed and “we do the same thing every other citizen does.”
“It’s just insane we can’t be different, the color that we are. We contribute to this country the same way every other citizen does with their taxes,” she said. “But we have to be the ones that every time we go to work, we are going to be scared that we’re going to get discriminated.”
“I think about my family,” she said. “Even though a lot of them are citizens, I think about how we all work in the same area in construction and they can’t sit out there because they could literally get harassed or attacked the way my cousin did.”
ICE wrestled Alabama worker to the ground & detain him for hours—he is a U.S. citizen.
Young man was begging & shouting, "I am a U.S. citizen"—but that didn't stop ICE agents from dragging him off to a detention center.
May 23, 1838 U.S. General Winfield Scott began the forced removal of the Cherokee Indians from North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, and their detention in forts built for that purpose. He was implementing the Treaty of New Echota, signed by a few members of the tribe relinquishing their lands for a payment of $5 million, under orders from President Martin VanBuren. 16,000 Cherokee were then driven on foot to “Indian Territory” (what is now Oklahoma). Of those who set out on the forced march known as the “The Trail of Tears,” nearly one-quarter died along the way or as a result of the relocation. Detailed history of the Trail of Tears Cherokee letter protesting the Treaty of New Echota from Chief John Ross
May 23, 1982 10,000 marched in London protesting British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands War. The Falklands are islands off the coast of Argentina (known there as the Malvinas), and Great Britain was fighting to maintain colonial control over them, which they originally claimed in 1833. an anti-war demonstration in Argentina
May 23, 1982 400,000 demonstrated for peace and disarmament in Tokyo, Japan.
May 23, 1992 Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, which had inherited strategic nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union, ratified the START I treaty and joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as non-nuclear states. Through the Lisbon Protocol, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine became parties to START I as legal successors to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The breakup of the Soviet Union delayed START’s entry into force nearly three-and-a-half years. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I)
May 23, 1997 Khatami in 2009 Iranians elected a new president, Mohammad Khatami, with 70% of the vote, over hard-liners in the ruling Muslim clergy. Khatami won largely due to young people and women, who voted for him because he promised to improve the status of women and respond to the demands of the younger generation in Iran. Political situation in Iran before and after Khatami’s election Khatami today
May 23, 2003 Congress passed a third major tax cut proposed by President George W. Bush in his first two years in office: $330 billion. The budget deficit in the following year was the largest ever and a record percentage of the Gross Domestic Product.
A meeting in the Oval Office turned sour after President Donald Trump ambushed South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa with claims of a “white genocide.” But one white man standing in the back of the room stood up to Trump, and though the world might not recognize him, he continues to play a vital role in mending the countries’ shaky relationship.
Growing tensions between the two countries began after Trump’s reelection. That’s when the president cut off trade to South Africa and recently gave 59 white South Africans— better known as Afrikaners— refugee status, as we previously reported. Trump falsely argued the Afrikaners were being targeted based on their race, but in fact the amount of Black murders in the country drastically outweigh that of white killings.
The issue comes down to South Africa’s immigration and crime problems. Ramaphosa came to Washington, D.C. in hopes of refocusing his relationship with America and also get Trump’s help tackling crime.
He even brought famous guests with him to cool off the temperature in the room: Two well-known golfers and— most importantly— the second richest man in South Africa. Johann Peter Rupert is one of 22 billionaires on the entire continent of Africa and one of only seven billionaires in South Africa, according to Forbes’ 2025 report.
The 74-year-old is an international business mogul, so his appearance with Ramaphosa holds more weight than you can imagine.
Rupert got real with Trump after President Ramaphosa’s attempt to refocus the conversation to technological and trade needs was disregarded. While the president perpetuated claims that Afrikaners— the most privileged ethnic group in South Africa— are being targeted, Rupert echoed Ramaphosa’s words saying, “We have too many deaths, but it’s across the board.” The billionaire continued, “It’s not only white farmers… We need technological help.”
Experts told PBS that although white farmers have been murdered in South Africa, those killings account for less than one percent of the total 27,000 annual nationwide report— most of them being murders of native, Black South Africans. “The idea of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa is completely false,” said Gareth Newham, head of a justice and violence prevention program at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa.
Rupert even added that he’s building cottages for his grandchildren, but despite his wealth and his status as an Afrikaner, he doesn’t feel unsafe. “I often go to bed without locking the door,” he said. The 74-year-old even tried to level with Trump and Vice President JD Vance saying South Africa’s immigration and gang issues are more pressing than the fake genocide Trump continues to claim. (snip-news video on the page)
Inside the White House Meeting
What the public saw was only the meeting before the two leaders got together in a private discussion. But according to New York Times reporter, Jon Elligon, who was in the Oval Office during the media blitz, the pre-meeting not going as planned could lead to further tensions.
“The [pre]meeting essentially turned into an ambush of the South African president,” Elligon said. “It was very tense and it broke down quickly.” According to him, if there’s any hope of patching the relationship between the two countries, “a lot of it is going to depend on whether the South African delegation can successfully get Trump to not focus on the Afrikaner issue anymore.”
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Abu Dhabi-based Erem News reports that the Prime Minister of Libya’s internationally recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli, Abdul Hamid al-Dbeibeh, has vehemently denied the report in the “American Thinker” by what Libya called the “notorious conspiracy theorist” Jerome Corsi that the Trump administration is negotiating with the Libyan government to take one million Palestinians. It is an absurd allegation on the face of it. Libyans have long been extremely pro-Palestinian and any leader that cooperated with the extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in ethnically cleansing so many Palestinians from …
How much Trump Crypto to keep Diddy out of prison? Read on Substack
I was reading some of my colleagues’ work this morning at GoComics, and I came across a cartoon by Gary Varvel defending Trump’s bribes (also, Gary, plane tires don’t have treads). An idiot in the comments section wrote, “So they gave him a bribe and then they gave him trillions of investments? I don’t think you know how bribes work.” The idiot doesn’t know how bribes work… or facts.
None of these three bribing nations, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, or Saudi Arabia, is investing trillions, which is a lie mentioned in the cartoon. A good way to tell if a cartoonist is instead a propagandist is when he/she rely on Trump for their research.
A lot of the “deals” Trump announced were actually made by President Joe Biden, while the rest aren’t binding, and won’t take effect until Trump is “supposed” to leave office, like that 747, Bribe Force One, won’t be ready until then either.
By the way, Qatar had been trying to sell that plane with no takers for over five years. Grifting, er, I mean gifting it to Trump will save them millions in storage fees. The entire world is moving away from that type of jet, including Qatar, which no longer includes it in its fleet of aircraft. This jet will now cost us more than its asking price to refit it.
This is like giving a dog a pork chop to make it like you, but in this case, the pork chop is a 747 jet. Also, the Qataris could have just given Donald Trump a pork chop.
What these nations really want from Trump is the arms deals and being legitimized by an American president (sic). It’s true they like Trump more than they liked President Biden or President Obama. The Crown Prince, who had Jamal Khashoggi murdered, rarely greets visitors when they arrive at the airport. He didn’t greet Biden at the airport, but he met Trump. Naturally, corrupt fascists governing monarchies without elections, who are also murderers, would love Trump. It’s like being loved by mobsters, Jason Vorhees, Jeffrey Epstein, and Roger Stone.
They also love Trump because they got a sucker who is easy to play.
Trump has been using his entire second regime to enrich himself. He’s fired the people who root out corruption in government, and then he got busy.
Our Attorney General, Pam Bondi, ruled that accepting Qatar’s gift of a jet doesn’t violate the Emoluments Clause, but she took a bribe from Trump years ago to stop investigating Trump University in Florida, and she used to be a lobbyist for…wait for it…Qatar.
By accepting the gift, Trump announced to the rest of the world that he’s open for business, and corruption is his business. If you thought his first regime was corrupt, as Bachman-Turner Overdrive would say, you ain’t seen nothing yet, B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-Baby.
In the first regime, Trump and the Trump Organization said it wouldn’t create “new” business with foreign nations. In Trump 2.0, they announced that they WILL take in new business from foreign nations, and they just secured a bunch of golf resorts and other real estate deals in the three nations Trump visited this week, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Trump Org. is now involved in six Middle Eastern real estate projects sponsored by Dar Global, the international subsidiary of a Saudi-based firm with close ties to the Saudi royal family. It gets worse.
Don Sniffy Jr. and his buddies have created a new private club in Washington, DC that costs $500,000 to join. It’s called the Executive Club. The purpose of the club is to sell access to Trump and officials in the regime. Remember when Republicans howled about Hunter Biden selling access to his father, and felt the need to waste a lot of our money investigating it? There’s no investigation needed here because they’re doing it out in the open.
And then there’s $Trump Crypto.
Trump used to hate crypto and has posted in the past, “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.”
He also said, “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”
And he said that bitcoin “just seems like a scam,” and it’s a “disaster waiting to happen,” and “I think they should regulate them very, very high.”
It must be true that it’s a scam that can facilitate unlawful behavior because now, Trump LOVES crypto and has created his own. In fact, $Trump Crypto was created in January, three days before he was inaugurated, and promised to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet.” And then the crypto industry donated $18 million to his inauguration, where donations go to disappear…which is much like how crypto works.
Foreigners are jumping to donate to $Trump, including a tiny TikTok e-commerce company with ties to the Chinese government that has zero revenue, yet found the funds to buy $300 million of $Trump Crypto, just when Trump is delaying the shutdown of TikTok in America. Now we know why the delay was instituted. Maybe that’s why he’s delaying tariffs on China for 90 days. There are 90s days to bribe Trump not to place 145 percent tariffs on China.
Follow the money. Follow the shell game.
If you need further proof that Trump is taking bribes, then listen to this: If you buy enough of $TRUMP Criminal, oops… $Trump Crypto to become one of its top 220 investors, then you’ll get to attend an “intimate private” dinner with him later this month. If you buy enough to become one of the top 25, you will win a “VIP White House Tour.” And if you give him a plane, you’ll get to spend the night with Trump in the Lincoln Bedroom, and with guaranteed spooning time.
Trump is not even hiding that he’s selling access and using the White House to grift.
According to Bloomberg, $Trump Criminal, I mean Crypto, is nearing the value of $1 billion. Did you know the value of the Trump family has increased by nearly $4 billion since January? At that rate, their value will be $32 billion by the time Trump 2.0 is “supposed” to end. Also, at this rate, by the time 2029 gets here, Trump will have eight 747s.
And finally, the Justice Department disbanded a division dedicated to investigating cryptocurrency crimes, declared that meme coins are no longer subject to regulatory oversight, and paused a fraud case against a top crypto mogul who pumped $75 million into $Trump Criminal…oops, I mean Trump Crypto.
Now we know how Diddy can beat the rap, and getting a pardon from Trump is not out of the question. According to Rolling Stone, Diddy’s people are talking to Trump’s people.
Trump has attended Diddy’s parties, which are often called “freak offs.” Tiffany Trump has attended the “freak offs.” Trump and Diddy have both said they like each other. They’ve both been prosecuted in cases involving sex or sex abuse. They were both tried in Manhattan. They have a lot in common. They’re both criminals because Trump stole classified documents and Diddy stole Every Breath You Take by the Police.
How much $Trump Criminal can Diddy buy? Oops.
I meant $Trump Crypto.
Creative note: One of my concerns with this cartoon is that it may be too subtle. Well, too subtle for MAGAts maybe. The bribe in the cartoon was originally a 747, but I realized I hadn’t hit the $Trump Crypto bribes yet. Oops.
I meant $Trump Criminal.
Music note: I listened to some tunes today that have been remastered, and they sounded much better before the remastering. Yo, remastering MoFos. Some of us like to hear the bass.
How does Trump sleep? Probably with a lot of fartin’ and snorin’. Read on Substack
Donald Trump loves asskissers because he is an asskisser. That explains why his lips are constantly puckered.
That’s just disturbing
During his speech in Saudi Arabia at the Investment Forum, he spent a good portion of it waxing non-eloquently about the awesomeness of Mohammed Bin Salman, the Crown Prince.
Trump said, “Riyadh is becoming not just a seat of government but a major business, cultural, and high-tech capital of the entire world.”
MBS was sitting in the audience directly across from Trump, and Trump asked rhetorically, “Mohammed, do you sleep at night? How do you sleep? Critics doubted that it was possible, what you’ve done, but over the past eight years, Saudi Arabia has proved the critics totally wrong.”
“He’s your greatest representative, greatest representative. And if I didn’t like him, I’d get out of here so fast. You know that, don’t you? He knows me well. I do — I like him a lot. I like him too much.”
The crowd applauded and giggled as Trump flirted with the man who directed the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist living in the United States for his safety. The crowd was made up of the world’s most powerful CEOs, like Jensen Huang, Larry Fink, and Sir Shit-for-Brains Elon Musk. So naturally, this audience lacked morals and integrity. What’s a little murder when it comes to making billions of dollars? These people, like Trump and MBS, aren’t the biggest fans of journalists.
I shouldn’t have to refresh your memory, but just in case, in 2018, Jamal Khashoggi was lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, murdered and hacked up with bone saws by Saudi agents on the orders of Trump’s buddy, Mohammed Bin Salman.
After the murder, Trump said it was a “bad event,” and went on to defend MBS. He said, “Nobody has directly pointed a finger.” That’s a lie. Our intelligence agencies have “directly pointed a finger at him.” The United Nations has “directly pointed a finger at him.”
Trump also said that MBS is “innocent until proven guilty.” But MBS will never be proven guilty because they don’t have fair trials in Saudi Arabia. The nation doesn’t have due process, freedom of speech, human rights, or elections. Those are things Trump hates, which is probably why he spent another portion of his speech whining and lying about our elections. He lied that he won the 2020 election to people who don’t hold elections.
There will never be an investigation into Khashoggi’s death in Saudi Arabia. MBS will never stand trial. This man didn’t just order the murder, but that Khashoggi be cut into pieces with bone saws. Mohammed Bin Salman is a sick murderous fuck.
When Jared Kushner, who worked directly with MBS as a White House adviser, was asked about the murder last year, he said, “Are we really still doing this?” Jared said he hadn’t seen the US Intelligence report that concluded MBS ordered the murder of Khashoggi, finding fault with it because it was made during the Biden administration.
Of course, not reading the report made it a lot easier for Jared to accept $2 billion from MBS. Jared acts like being made to feel uncomfortable about accepting a $2 billion gift from a murderer is worse punishment than being sliced apart by a bone saw.
Under the Trump regime, our nation feels it’s more important to secure arms deals with Saudi Arabia than to stand up for our American principles. Plus, those arms deals deliver a quid pro quo as the Saudi Government will conduct golf tournaments at Trump golf courses, and invest in new Trump resorts in their nation.
Just remember that all the money Trump and Jared take from MBS is blood money.
How does Donald Trump sleep at night? Probably in a bed full of KFC and Big Mac crumbs.
Did I do that? ToonAmerica, the site using AI to steal my cartoons, is down.
Why is it down? Because of this.
The thieves can’t fight my reports or those from my colleagues, so they remove the videos, avoiding copyright strikes and saving their channel from deletion. They saved the channel, but now there’s no content because all their content was stolen copyright. That’s all they had.
I’m not declaring victory yet because I don’t know if the ToonAmerica YouTube channel will start over, create a new channel, find another scam to fuck people over with, or give up. But for now, they can’t monetize the cartoons they stole, at least not on YouTube.
But TikTok is something else.
Now I have to take them down on TikTok.
AmeriSatire, the other one stealing cartoons with AI, is still up, but they’re next on my target. Thanks to my friend and colleague, Pedro Molina, I now know that they’ve stolen one of my cartoons.
That means I can file a report on them. And why did AI make Flynn a donkey?
Creative note: I almost did my bone saw cartoon yesterday, but went for the Pete Rose one instead. I think this cartoon is better and more important.
I have bitterly wondered why people wouldn’t just go vote for whoever they had to, but to just vote, especially in the 2024 election. I’ve had a hard time with the non-voters. But, turns out, some of them have legitimate reasons (I’ve spoken with none,) but it turns out that not all the non-voters are asses. -A
Political tension and fears of violence may have depressed voter turnout in 2024
Women and gender-nonconforming people were more likely than men to fear violence and harassment while voting in the 2024 election, and those who expressed concerns about safety were more likely not to vote at all, new research shows.
The study, released Monday and shared first with The 19th, was conducted by States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization focused on promoting fair and secure elections and upholding the rule of law.
“Tens of millions of Americans ultimately cast their ballots in 2024 without incident,” the report said. “But voting was not straightforward and safe for all Americans. Many were harassed, and a limited number were subjected to physical violence.”
The study found that the 2024 election was, as a whole, safe, fair and securely conducted, with voters overwhelmingly reporting feeling safe at the polls and confident in the safety and security of the election. But rising incidents of political violence, heightened political polarization and gender-based harassment had a measurable impact on how women and gender-noncomforming people especially viewed the safety of voting in the 2024 election — and whether they turned out to vote at all, the study says.
Researchers surveyed voters before and after the 2024 election in partnership with research data and analytics group YouGov and held a series of seven focus groups before the election — with three groups of White women, three groups of women of color and one made up of gender-nonconforming participants. They also fielded surveys of state lawmakers, election administrators and law enforcement officials in partnership with the nonprofit CivicPulse. The study is also one of the first of its kind to study the voting experiences of gender-nonconforming voters, who are subject to gender-based discrimination and harassment at the polls.
Women, people of color and gender-nonconforming people were more likely to have perceived the election environment as being unsafe, reported experiencing higher rates of voting-related harassment and were more likely to take precautionary measures when going to the polls. The study also compared pre-election survey responses to voting records and found that higher expectations of experiencing violence or harassment at the polls was correlated with lower voting rates.
“Concerns about violence or harassment depressed turnout, likely turning millions of voters into non-voters,” the report said.
The pre-election survey, conducted September 23 to 30, 2024, surveyed 4,016 American adults with a margin of error of plus or minus 1.7 points. The post-election survey, conducted November 7 to 19, surveyed a separate group of 4,017 registered voters with a margin of error of plus or minus 1.6 points. The researchers asked a series of questions to identify gender-nonconforming respondents in its surveys with YouGov, resulting in a sample of 81 gender-nonconforming voters in the pre-election survey and 103 in the post-election survey.
To measure fears of harassment and violence, researchers asked respondents how likely they thought it was to experience events ranging from verbal or written harassment to property damage and acts of physical violence. While all gender groups provided average responses of “somewhat unlikely” across all five, gender-nonconforming respondents had a higher expected likelihood of harassment or violence.
Overall, 91 percent of men, 89 percent of women and 73 percent of gender-nonconforming respondents said in the post-election survey that they felt safe voting. But respondents’ perceptions and feelings of safety varied by race among women and gender-nonconforming people. In the post-election survey, 92 percent of White respondents said they felt completely or mostly safe voting, compared with 85 percent of Black voters and 84 percent of Hispanic voters.
In pre-election surveys, women and voters of color were more likely than men and White respondents to view voting as unsafe and to say they were taking precautions as a result. Among women, the most common safety precaution respondents said they were likely to take was not bringing their children to the polls (32 percent), while the most common safety precaution for gender-nonconforming people was not interacting with others at the polls (46 percent). About a quarter of women and gender-nonconforming respondents said they were likely to vote by mail.
Several women voters in focus groups cited the potential of gun violence as a concern.
“I don’t go to the polls, because you never know what you will encounter there,” said a White independent woman voter who participated in one of the focus groups. “It seems like everybody in Arizona has a gun. We vote by mail, because it’s safer. Everybody has an opinion; you get in line, and you hear it all. You never know, if they don’t agree with you, they’ll shoot you. People are crazy.”
Others spoke to the heightened political climate and general political tensions around the election as a reason they feared threats, harassment and even heated conversations in line.
“I go early, or late, when I won’t run into anybody I know, and there won’t be any conversation,” said a Black Republican woman focus group participant. “I don’t want to deal with the emotional, ‘Who did you vote for?’ And me saying, ‘I don’t want to discuss it.’ So there are no issues, fighting, cussing, yelling. Save my peace of mind.”
People who feared violence and harassment at higher levels were less likely to vote, researchers found by comparing survey responses to verified voting records. When controlling for turnout differences based on demographic considerations, the study still found an average three percentage point decline in the likelihood of voting.
“For context, differences in voter behavior based on education level, one of the strongest predictors of turnout, are only half as large as differences explained by expectations of violence or harassment,” the report said. “Put another way, generalizing our results to the nationwide electorate, roughly 6 million Americans may have decided not to vote in 2024 because of concerns about violence or harassment.”
Gender-nonconforming voters face particularly unique challenges and barriers when it comes to voting.
A rise in anti-transgender political rhetoric from the right has been accompanied by a slew of laws targeting transgender people in Republican-controlled states. Some of these laws have sought to create strict definitions of gender and bar transgender individuals from changing the sex listed on their official identification to align with their gender identity. In states that require voters to show photo identification at the polls, that could open up transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals to scrutiny and potential harassment. In the pre-election survey, a third of gender-nonconforming voters said they were likely to dress differently at the polls.
“I’ve been a registered voter for decades. When I attempted to vote last time, they had a hard time ‘finding’ my registration,” said a gender-nonconforming Black independent who participated in a focus group. “I could tell I was being judged. The attitude of the person looking at your information to give you the voting packet can be intimidating. My documents have been submitted, I have my ID, what’s the problem? I felt there was judgment as far as was my information correct or was it fraudulent.”
In the post-election survey, over half of gender-nonconforming respondents said they took at least one safety precaution when voting, compared with about a third of men and women who said they took at least one precaution. Thirteen percent of gender-nonconforming respondents reported experiencing verbal harassment, intimidation and threats compared to 5.2 percent of men and 4.8 percent of women. In all, 18 percent of gender-nonconforming voters reported experiencing violence or harassment during the 2024 election season.
“I am obviously queer when you look at me, and I’ve been harassed for it,” said another focus group participant, an Asian-American Democratic voter. “Depending on how I do my hair or what I wear [on election] day, it’s a higher chance I’ll get harassed. If I was girly, I would be afraid someone could see through that and do me harm.”
This story has been updated to clarify support and funding for the report.
The scarcity of the President’s Daily Briefings comes as he pursues high-stakes diplomacy with America’s friends and foes.
The low number of briefings this time around is troubling to many in and around the intelligence community, who were already concerned about Trump’s act-first-evaluate-after approach to governing. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, he has sat for just 12 presentations from intelligence officials of the President’s Daily Brief.
That’s a significant drop compared with Trump’s first term in office, according to a POLITICO analysis of his public schedule.
In much of his first term, Trump met with intel officials twice a week for the briefing, which provides the intelligence community’s summary of the most pressing national security challenges facing the nation.
The low number of briefings this time around is troubling to many in and around the intelligence community, who were already concerned about Trump’s act-first-evaluate-after approach to governing.
“It’s sadly clear that President Trump doesn’t value the expertise of and dangerous work performed by our intelligence professionals each and every day, and unfortunately, it leaves the American people increasingly vulnerable to threats we ought to see coming,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement to POLITICO.
The sporadic pace of briefings comes as Trump has been working to broker an end to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and to jump-start nuclear talks with Iran — all while navigating increasing potential threats from adversaries such as Russia and China.
Each president is different in the manner and pace at which they receive their briefings, and Trump is not entirely out of step with some of his predecessors.
But with Trump, there is added concern as he is known not to read the accompanying briefing document, referred to as “the book,” that is put together by intelligence analysts in a highly labor-intensive process. This document is delivered in hard copy or on a tablet device to the president and his key advisers five days a week.
The briefings from senior intelligence officials are often a chance for the president to hear detailed assessments on global crises and to receive updates on highly classified covert operations overseas — along with blunt facts about the state of the world, regardless of policy implications or the president’s own views.
Trump received just two in-person PDB briefings per month in January, February and March, before settling into a more regular rhythm of once per week in April and May, according to the president’s daily schedule maintained by Faceba.se, a website that collates the president’s statements as well as his public calendar.
PDB presentations are typically tailored toward informing the president as he conducts high-stakes diplomacy, detailing what a foreign government may be thinking and what its intentions are, former intelligence officials said.
“The point of having an $80 billion intelligence service is to inform the president to avert a strategic surprise,” said a former CIA analyst who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters.
Trump’s top national security aides and Cabinet officials receive similar intelligence briefings and can ensure that critical information reaches the president’s ears.
Senior administration officials said Trump gets the information he needs through frequent communication with his intelligence chiefs.
“The president is constantly apprised of classified briefings and is regularly in touch with his national security team,” said Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson. “The entire intelligence community actively informs President Trump in real time about critical national security developments.”
Ingle declined to comment on why Trump has received fewer daily PDB presentations compared to his first term..
Former intelligence officials argued that the PDB sessions are an opportunity for the president to hear from career intelligence officials who are skilled in imparting information regardless of whether it complements or contradicts the president’s foreign policy strategies.
They questioned whether other top advisers or Cabinet officials would be able — or willing — to relay these stark realities to the president.
And the circle of officials receiving the PDB may also be smaller than in Trump’s first term. CNN reported last month that the Trump administration has tightly restricted the number of people who have access to the intelligence report.
Trump’s first term in office was marked by a high turnover in his national security team, a trend that looks set to continue. Last week, Trump ousted his national security adviser Mike Waltz, who had long been on thin ice with other administration officials.
“The advantage of an IC briefer is its somebody who is trained to tell the hard truths to the president,” said Larry Pfeiffer, who served as chief of staff to CIA Director Michael Hayden.
“They are going to be more inclined to provide him with more nuanced information — information that’s not been parsed through a policy perspective,” Pfeiffer said.
Presidents vary in how often they have received in-person briefings. George W. Bush saw briefers from the intelligence community almost every day and preferred hearing directly from analysts, while Obama was a studious reader of the PDB book itself.
Obama received in-person briefings 44 percent of the days he was in office during his first term, according to a 2012 analysis by the conservative research group the Government Accountability Institute, which would equate to multiple briefings a week. He was attacked by the conservative media and former Vice President Dick Cheney for not attending more.
Biden received one to two briefings a week, according to a former U.S. intelligence official familiar with the matter and a former Biden White House official.
But Biden was known to regularly read the PDB briefing book, the former intelligence official said. A former official who served in Biden’s National Security Council said that the president would use the delivery of the book as an opportunity to gather his top national security aides and Cabinet officials to discuss its contents and foreign policy implications.
At the time, intelligence officials found Trump to be more responsive to graphics, maps and a more storified approach to recounting the intelligence, according to interviews with his briefers published in “Getting To Know The President,” a history of intelligence briefings of candidates and presidents-elect, authored by John Helgerson, a former senior CIA official.
Trump had a fraught relationship with the intelligence community during his first term. But the cadence of briefings almost three months into his second term represents a stark drop when compared to his first four years in office, and offers insight into how Trump might prioritize these briefings throughout the next four years.
In the first five weeks following his inauguration in 2017, Trump received an average of 2.5 briefings a week before settling into an average of two briefings a week in the latter half of his presidency, according to a detailed historical account published by the CIA’s own in-house academic research center.
Trump’s briefings during his first term were substantive, the former U.S. intelligence official said, noting that the president listened and was interactive during the presentations.
And during Trump’s first term, Vice President Mike Pence was an “assiduous, six-day-a-week reader,” of the PDB, Helgerson noted in his book.
A second former senior U.S intelligence official stressed that there are other avenues for Trump’s spy chiefs to get information to him, beyond his daily briefing, including standalone memos and articles based on the latest intelligence findings.
“It’s not the be all and end all,” they said, speaking of the PDB. The person also noted, as the White House did, that the president’s top advisers can also serve as a conduit for relaying information to the president.
A person familiar with how Trump takes his PDB briefings said that the president has received standalone briefings on global flashpoints on an ongoing basis separate from the PDB and that it would be incorrect to imply he wasn’t fully briefed. They were granted anonymity to discuss how Trump receives his intelligence.
“He’s calling people all day. If he wants an update on some of these things, he’ll call Ratcliffe, Rubio, Witkoff, Waltz, kind of in an ad-hoc fashion throughout the day, receiving this stuff,” said the person, who spoke before Waltz was removed from his position as national security adviser last week.
Asked for comment about the president’s briefing schedule, National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes said “President Trump has multiple high-level, national security briefings every day. While the scope can range from a comprehensive presentation of global intelligence, to meeting with senior national security officials on an issue of immediate importance, the daily engagement of President Trump is prolific.”
Former intelligence officials argue that the in-person presentations from experienced briefers offer a further opportunity for the president to receive important context on the intelligence delivered, ask questions and relay any requests for additional information back to the intelligence agencies.
That feedback gives the country’s spy agencies an opportunity to learn more about the president’s needs and interests. “We learn too,” said a third former senior U.S. intelligence official.
May 10, 1857 The Sepoy Rebellion was triggered in Meerut, India, when native troops (known as Sepoys, which also designated a rank equivalent to private) turned on their British officers.It was the first instance of armed resistance against colonial rule. Indians constituted 96% of the 300,000-man British Army.Loading the Lee-Enfield Rifled Musket assigned to the Sepoys involved biting the end of a cartridge greased in a combination of pig fat and beef tallow. “Attack of the Mutineers,” a British illustration of the Sepoy Rebellion The former is haraam (forbidden) under Islamic law, the latter offensive to Hindus who consider the cow as aghanya (that which may not be slaughtered). When the Sepoys, including both Hindu and Muslim Indians, became aware of this, some refused to load their weapons. Mangal Pandey, a soldier in the Army shot his commander for forcing the Indian troops to use the controversial rifles. When others were charged with mutiny for refusing, Sepoys turned on their officers and released the imprisoned soldiers. The rebellion is now considered the first Indian war for independence. More on the rebellion
May 10, 1967 Army Captain Howard Levy, a physician, was imprisoned three years for refusing to train U.S. Special Forces soldiers for Vietnam. He refused an order to perform the training as he considered it a violation of his medical ethics. “The United States is wrong in being involved in the Viet Nam War. I would refuse to go to Viet Nam if ordered to do so. I don’t see why any colored soldier would go to Viet Nam: they should refuse to go to Viet Nam and if sent should refuse to fight because they are discriminated against and denied their freedom in the United States, and they are sacrificed and discriminated against in Viet Nam by being given all the hazardous duty and they are suffering the majority of casualties.” – From the Supreme Court case, Parker, Warden, et al. v. Levy.
May 10, 1968 Peace talks began in Paris between the U.S. and North Vietnam with businessman, former New York governor, ambassador and cabinet secretary W. Averell Harriman representing the United States. Former Foreign Minister Xuan Thuy, heading the North Vietnamese delegation, immediately demanded cessation of U.S. bombing.
May 10, 1972 Jane Briggs Hart, the wife of Senator Philip A. Hart (D-Michigan), informed the Internal Revenue Service that she wouldn’t pay some of her taxes; instead, she deposited her quarterly estimated tax of $6,200 in a special bank account. She wrote: “I cannot contribute one more dollar toward the purchase of more bombs and bullets.” Jane Briggs Hart More about Jane Briggs Hart
May 10, 1980 A federal judge in Salt Lake City, Utah, found the U.S. government negligent for its above-ground testing of nuclear weapons in Nevada from 1951 to 1962. The land of the Nevada Test Site is scarred with craters from nuclear testing.
May 10, 1994 Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president. He had won the country’s first election in which all South Africans could vote, regardless of race. Mandela had spent nearly three decades imprisoned for his part in the struggle to attain political and civil rights for black and colored citizens. This ended more than three centuries of white rule, beginning with the Dutch in 1652. Biography of Nelson Mandela South African chronology
When books burn, humans follow – a warning we cannot afford to ignore Read on Substack
When I tell you that fascists don’t start with violence—they start with books—I’m not speaking in fucking hypotheticals. On May 6th, 1933, while the ink was barely dry on Hitler’s chancellorship, young Nazis stormed the Institute of Sexual Research. They ransacked the place that night, and then four days later, they took more than 20,000 books from the Institute’s library to Berlin’s Bebelplatz Square and burned them.
They didn’t just burn paper. They burned hope. They burned sanctuary. They burned the world’s first transgender clinic and decades of groundbreaking research that might have spared generations of queer people unimaginable suffering.
I’m not being dramatic when I say this is one of the most gut-wrenching episodes in queer history. The visceral image of Magnus Hirschfeld—a gay Jewish doctor and pioneering advocate for gay and transgender rights—watching on television as his life’s work went up in flames should haunt us all. Because make no mistake: these weren’t military operations. These were everyday people, your neighbors, your classmates, who decided certain knowledge was too dangerous to exist.
A Haven of Revolutionary Care
The Institute for Sexual Research wasn’t just ahead of its time—it was blazing the trail for a future we’re still fighting to reach nearly a century later. Opened in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin, this non-profit institution provided care that modern transphobes claim is “experimental” today, despite the fact that Hirschfeld was performing these procedures over a hundred years ago.
Initially hesitant about gender-affirming surgeries, Hirschfeld changed his mind when he recognized a simple truth: this was life-saving care that prevented suicide. Think about that—while most of the world was still living in willful ignorance, this man understood that people would rather die than live in bodies that betrayed them. The Institute provided facial feminization and masculinization surgeries, hair removal, and complex gender reassignment procedures when most doctors wouldn’t even recognize trans people as human.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around just how revolutionary this place was. Hirschfeld recognized that gender identity and sexual orientation were entirely separate entities—a concept some people still struggle with a century later. He coined the terms “transsexual” and “transvestite,” creating language for experiences that had been silenced for millennia. The Institute was staffed with every specialist imaginable—psychologists, gynecologists, radiologists, lawyers, general practitioners—providing low-cost or free care to those whom society had abandoned.
History Doesn’t Repeat, But It Does Rhyme
My friend (and my Editor-in-Chief) thepoetmiranda saw the dark echoes of history when one of Trump’s first orders was for the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control to start scrubbing medical literature related to healthcare for transgender Americans from government databases (an erasure policy that has spread beyond healthcare to all historical references of transgender people—even on the Stonewall National Memorial website). She wrote the poem linked below, which is a fucking must read:
Hirschfeld’s clinic wasn’t just a clinic. It was a fucking sanctuary. Hirschfeld and his partner Karl Giese lived in the building, creating a warm, plush space filled with life. They hosted costume parties where queer people could express themselves freely. They recommended local bars and venues where LGBTQ+ folks could find community instead of isolation.
When trans women struggled to find employment after transitioning, Hirschfeld hired five of his own patients to work at the clinic. He fought for the repeal of Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality, and even secured legal identification passes for his trans female patients with a “transvestite” gender marker to prevent them from being arrested for crossdressing.
Instead of the torturous conversion therapy that was common practice, the Institute taught “adaptation therapy,” instructing queer people how to navigate a hostile world while staying true to themselves. Their motto was “Through science to justice”—a radical notion that education and understanding were the path to equality.
The Day Knowledge Became Dangerous
When the Nazi youth and the German Student Union piled the contents of the Institute in the square on May 10th, 1933, they topped it with Hirschfeld’s bust before setting it ablaze. This wasn’t random destruction—it was a deliberate erasure of knowledge they deemed threatening. This happened just three months after Hitler was named Chancellor. It wasn’t soldiers who did this; it was civilians, ordinary Germans who had been convinced that minorities were the root cause of inflation and social problems.
Anyone who wasn’t white, cisgender, and Christian was deemed immoral and dangerous to German youth and the “traditional family.” Sound familiar? It should, because we’re hearing the same bullshit rhetoric recycled today by people who would burn books all over again if given half a chance.
Hirschfeld, who was out of the country, watched the destruction on television. He never returned to Germany and died of a stroke in 1935, his life’s work reduced to ashes. The loss was immeasurable—not just papers and books, but decades of research that could have advanced trans healthcare by generations.
The Brutal Reality of Lost Knowledge
We lost so much ancestral knowledge about our community in this one raid. The world’s first transgender clinic—gone. Groundbreaking research on gender identity—gone. Records of successful gender-affirming surgeries—gone. Resources for queer people to find community—gone. All of it, up in smoke because knowledge in the wrong hands threatened the status quo.
The memorial for this event bears the quote, “Where they burn books, in the end, they will burn humans, too”—a line from Hirschfeld’s own library that would prove prophetic. The Nazis began with books but ended with concentration camps where thousands of queer people wore pink triangles to their deaths.
Practical Tools for Preserving Our History
Document and digitize queer history in multiple locations and formats
Support LGBTQ+ archives financially and through volunteer work
Learn and share the stories of pioneers like Magnus Hirschfeld
Recognize warning signs when marginalized communities are blamed for societal problems
Protect trans healthcare by understanding its long history and scientific basis
Community Connection
The story of the Institute’s destruction isn’t ancient history—it’s a warning. When you hear politicians targeting trans healthcare, when you see books about queer experiences being banned from libraries, when you witness the demonization of drag performances, remember the Institute. Remember what happens when fear and ignorance are weaponized against knowledge.
Today, organizations like the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation continue his legacy, but the threat remains. Every time a state bans gender-affirming care, every time a library removes LGBTQ+ books, every time a transgender person is denied basic dignity, we’re watching echoes of that burning pile in Berlin.
Conclusion
Knowledge is a form of rebellion, and the facts and history you carry in your mind can never be taken away from you. Education and queer joy are our greatest protections right now, just as they were in Hirschfeld’s time.
When we learn about the Institute for Sexual Research, we’re not just studying history—we’re resurrecting knowledge that fascists tried to erase. When we speak the names of Magnus Hirschfeld and his patients, we’re undoing their work of erasure. Every time we share these stories, we’re rebuilding what they tried to destroy.
The memorial’s warning echoes across time: “Where they burn books, in the end, they will burn humans, too.” We must never forget this. We must never allow it to happen again.
Because our history isn’t just about the past—it’s about fucking surviving the present and building a future where institutes like Hirschfeld’s aren’t revolutionary; they’re just how we treat each other.
References:
Hirschfield, M. 1912 “Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb”
Hirschfield, M. 1920 “Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes”
Hirschfield, M. 2017 (Reprint) “Berlin’s Third Sex”
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