Claims about economy, war in Ukraine, measles were among the top falsehoods of past year
President Donald Trump listens during a ceremony for the presentation of the Mexican Border Defense Medal in the White House on Dec. 15, 2025. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
ANALYSIS —Since he entered politics, President Donald Trump has been a regular on our end-of-year list of the most egregious and noteworthy falsehoods and distortions. With Trump back in the White House in 2025, it’s no surprise that he dominates this year’s whoppers.
Trump is known for rhetoric that uses inaccurate and exaggerated claims, which he repeats again and again. In his second term, several such claims were used to justify a whirlwind of policy changes and announcements. Using a method economists said wasn’t legitimate, he calculated “reciprocal tariffs” for goods imported from other countries. In firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he claimed without evidence that low job growth figures were “phony” or “rigged.” In supporting a freeze on foreign aid, Trump said $50 million was being used to buy condoms for Hamas in Gaza, a claim refuted by the contractor identified by the State Department.
In a falsehood-filled press conference, Trump, along with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., touted an unproven link between autism and taking Tylenol during pregnancy. Kennedy, long known for spreading inaccurate information about vaccines, also features prominently in this year’s compilation. In his efforts to change the nation’s vaccine and public health recommendations, he pushed unproven therapeutics for treating measles and made false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines.
There are other politicians on our full list below, which is in no particular order.
Analysis
Tylenol and autism. Trump said a late September press conference would reveal “one of the biggest [medical] announcements … in the history of our country,” but instead the headline news was an unproven link between autism and the use of Tylenol, or acetaminophen, during pregnancy. Trump repeatedly told pregnant women, “don’t take Tylenol,” and offered the unsound medical advice to “tough it out.”
The administration didn’t point to any new original research on the topic, which has been studied. Some studies have shown an association between using acetaminophen during pregnancy and an increased likelihood of having a child with autism, but no causal link has been established. Recent research indicates there likely isn’t a link.As for Trump’s medical advice, untreated pain or fever during pregnancy can be harmful to both mother and child, and medical groups have long recommended pru45reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedent use of the drug — taking acetaminophen when needed in consultation with a doctor.
HHS Secretary Kennedy later falsely claimed that two circumcision-related studies provided evidence that acetaminophen causes autism when given to children. That’s not what the studies found. In November, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed a webpage to say that its previous statement that “vaccines do not cause autism” is “not an evidence-based claim,” echoing Kennedy’s prior misrepresentations of science.
Inflation has not “stopped.” As cost-of-living issues continue to be a top concern for voters, Trump has repeatedly claimed that inflation is “stopped,” “dead” or at a lower rate than it actually is, falsely saying the country saw “the worst inflation” in history (or “probably” did so) under former President Joe Biden. That’s not the case. This month, in a speech about the economy in Pennsylvania, Trump wrongly said he “inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country.”
The annualized inflation rate was 3 percent when Trump took office in January, and it was 3 percent again for the 12 months ending in September, the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Inflation did rise considerably in the first half of Biden’s term, but it then cooled substantially. From July to December 2024, the annual increase in the Consumer Price Index was below 3 percent.
The CPI went up 2.7 percent for the 12 months ending in November, BLS said today, noting that data collection for the month began Nov. 14 due to the government shutdown.
The worst inflation increase year-to-year occurred after World War I, a 23.7 percentrise from June 1919 to June 1920. There have been numerous other times with inflation higher than the peak point under Biden.
As we head into the midterms, we’d caution voters that politicians often blame their opponents for rising prices, but the causes of inflation are usually more complicated than that. For instance, Labor Day claims from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee blamed House Republicans for “driving up the price of burgers.” But drought conditions in recent years, among other factors, drove up the cost of ground beef.
Russia, not Ukraine, started the war. After U.S. and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia in February to discuss an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, Trump falsely reprimanded Ukraine, saying, “You should have never started it.” He said Ukraine “could have made a deal.” As we wrote, the war started on Feb. 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion, two days after Russia recognized two separatist territories in eastern Ukraine as independent states and sent Russian troops into Ukraine’s Donbas region. While Russian President Vladimir Putin gave “a long list of grievances” to justify the attack, Jeffrey Mankoff, a senior associate with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an April 2022 report that the “fundamental issue” was “the legitimacy of Ukrainian identity and statehood.”
Throughout the year, Trump also repeatedly and wrongly claimed that the U.S. has provided more money in aid to Ukraine than Europe has. The opposite is true.
“Twisted and manipulated” report that wasn’t.When the Washington Post reported via anonymous sources that a government intelligence assessment concluded the Venezuelan government was not directing the migration of members of the Tren de Aragua gang to the U.S., Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, dismissed the report.She said those “behind this illegal leak of classified intelligence” had “twisted and manipulated [the information] to convey the exact opposite finding.” But when a redacted copy of the intelligence memo was publicly released the following month, it corroborated the Washington Post’s account. According to the intelligence memo, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s “regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”
A few months later, Gabbard wrongly claimed to have uncovered “overwhelming evidence” that former President Barack Obama and others in his administration manipulated intelligence to “lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.”
RFK Jr.’s dubious measles therapeutics. In March, during a measles outbreak in Texas, Kennedy claimed there were “very good results” from treating patients with a certain steroid and antibiotic, as well as cod liver oil, saying “those therapeutics have really been ignored” by the CDC “for a long, long time.” Neither the steroid nor antibiotic is a specific treatment for measles, experts said, and cod liver oil, which contains vitamin A, also isn’t recommended.
Vitamin A itself is recommended around the world for measles, as a couple high-dose bursts of the vitamin have been shown to reduce measles mortality in lower-income countries where deficiencies exist. But the benefit is unclear in the U.S. and countries without such deficiencies. Cod liver oil would need to be consumed in a potentially dangerous amount to get the vitamin A dosage used for measles.
In other comments, Kennedy downplayedthe outbreak, which ultimately killed two children, and made unsupported and misleading claims about the measles vaccine, which is safe and effective in preventing the highly contagious disease.
No evidence of “phony” Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers. After a BLS report showed less-than-stellar job growth, Trump lashed out at the BLS commissioner, saying “her numbers were wrong,” “phony” and “rigged,” and firing her. There’s no evidence anyone manipulated the data.William Beach, the BLS commissioner during Trump’s first term, wrote on X that the firing of Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, a Biden appointee who had worked in the federal government for more than 20 years, was “totally groundless” and “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau.”
Trump also wrongly claimed that “days before the election,” McEntarfer “came out with these beautiful numbers trying to get somebody else elected” and then reduced the employment estimates “right after the election.” That’s not what happened. On Nov. 1, 2024, just before the election, the BLS report showed growth of just 12,000 jobs in October and downward revisions for the prior two months.
Signalgate: Not “total exoneration.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that he received “total exoneration” in an investigative report by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General regarding a Signal group chat about a military attack in Yemen. But the report contradicted that assessment, concluding that Hegseth’s messages “created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.” The report also faulted Hegseth for using a personal cell phone to relay sensitive DoD information and for not retaining the Signal conversations as official records, as required by federal law and Pentagon policy.
Trump’s chart on “reciprocal” tariffs. In a Rose Garden announcement in April of sweeping new “reciprocal tariffs,” Trump held aloft a chart that claimed to give a breakdown of the tariffs other countries charge the U.S. and the corresponding tariff that the U.S. would as a result impose against those countries. But it turned out the values assigned to other countries were not, in fact, the tariff rates other countries were placing on imports of U.S. goods, but rather a calculation of what the administration deemed would be necessary to balance trade with various countries. Economists told us that was not a legitimate way to calculate reciprocal tariffs for countries.
The misleading “reciprocal tariffs” chart, which informed the tariff rates he then set, was just one of the president’s false and misleading talking points on tariffs. Among them, Trump repeatedly, and wrongly, claimed that the tariffs he imposed would be paid by other countries and not, at least partly, by American consumers in the form of higher prices.
mRNA vaccine misinformation. Kennedy, and HHS, made a series of false statements about mRNA vaccines, the technology behind the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. In announcing the termination of half a billion dollars of funding for mRNA vaccine projects, Kennedy said: “We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” claiming that “the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”
The science — peer-reviewed scientific literature — and many experts refute that. Studies repeatedly demonstrated the vaccines’ effectiveness and safety, with some estimates of millions of lives saved during the pandemic, and the technology has shown encouraging results against the flu. HHS later released a 181-page list of papers that claimed to show vaccine harms, a document that wasn’t peer-reviewed and was written by people who have spread unsupported claims about COVID-19 vaccination and treatment.
Kennedy also claimed the COVID-19 vaccines posed a “profound risk” to children, even though serious side effects are rare. In ending funding to Moderna for developing mRNA vaccines against influenza viruses, HHS spokespeople wrongly said the mRNA technology is “under-tested.”
DOGE distortions, $50 million not for condoms for Gaza. Before taking office, Trump said entrepreneur Elon Musk would head his new Department of Government Efficiency. Musk had initially promised to cut “at least $2 trillion” in wasteful government spending. Foreign aid was one of the first targets, with Trump setting the tone for questionable information that would plague the program by claiming, “We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.” The contractor identified by the State Department said it provides hospital services in Gaza and has not used U.S. funds “to procure or distribute condoms.”
In his address to Congress in March, Trump made the inflated claim that DOGE had “found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud.” However, the DOGE website at the time stated that the department had only generated $105 billion in savings and only purported to provide evidence to support $19.8 billion of that total. (The website currently claims DOGE created $214 billion in savings, providing information on about $61 billion. It’s unclear how much, if any, of that is related to fraud.)
Trump also claimed DOGE had identified millions of dead individuals who were incorrectly labeled as alive in the Social Security database, and misleadingly claimed that “money is being paid to many of them.” Social Security Administration internal audits showed that the number of dead recipients still being sent benefits is likely in the thousands, not the millions.
Crime claims behind National Guard deployments. In making claims about high crime or lawlessness in cities as justification for the deployment of National Guard troops, Trump at times exaggerated or got the facts wrong. In early October, he claimed that Portland, Oregon, “is burning to the ground” or has “fires all over the place.” But Portland Fire & Rescue reported few calls about potential fires near a federal building, the site of protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Portland Police told us the protests “are nowhere near city-wide.”
Trump’s statements about the need for National Guard troops in Portland and Chicago focused on overall crime. “These are unsafe places,” he said. But in court filings and other correspondence, the administration said troops were needed to protect ICE officials and federal property.
In Washington, D.C., where the president is the commander in chief of the National Guard, Trump wrongly said that “murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever.” Murders had been declining since 2023, when the rate was less than half the rate in 1991. After a federal takeover of the city’s law enforcement, Trump falsely said an 11-day period with no murders was the “first time that’s taken place in years.” There was a 16-day period earlier this year.
Trump has retaliated against Colorado Gov. Jared Polis by denying FEMA reliefs for floods and wildfires and by ordering the dismantling of the nation’s premiere climate research facility.
tRump bribes / Fascism / Right wing media take over /
Mr. Trump has privately said Larry Ellison assured him that he would turn CBS News, which the Ellisons took over when they bought Paramount, into a more conservative outlet, two people with knowledge of the president’s comments said.
What Trump means is that he has to confer with his master in Moscow first.
Hate / DEI / Bigotry / Christians trying to take over the US / Christians forcing their church doctrines on all / Using the US might to enforce the Christian view / ICE / DHS
Earlier this month it was reported that Mahmoud, who remains jailed without bond, may present a “gay panic” defense, which is legal in Florida but banned in 20 states and Washington DC.
Government officials have traditionally steered clear of such overtly religious language, as the Constitution bans an official state religion. The First Amendment’s establishment clause prohibits the government from establishing a religion or favoring one religion over another, while the free exercise clause protects the religious expression of all faiths.
Earlier this month, members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee — whom Kennedy selected after firing the previous group — suggested digging into concerns about aluminum salts, though large studies have found them to be safe.
For me, considering going through the adoption process as an adult is about having the right to configure my family the way that’s best for me—a right we should all have.
The word adoption is synonymous with babies and expectant parents, joy and dreams come true. For most, it’s about families becoming complete and children becoming a permanent part of a legally recognized household.
My story is more complicated.
Recently, I found myself in the atypical and unexpected position of discussing adult adoption with the woman who became my roommate two-and-a-half years ago when I desperately needed a safe place to collapse and recover from a lifetime of trauma. We were strangers who became fast family; she was the perfect big sister and, after understandable initial trepidation about opening her home to a stranger, her extended family and friends have become my family and friends.
Last year my childhood stocking hung on the fireplace and there were gifts under the tree for me—the first time I’ve had a family Christmas since my adopted mother decided I was gay and told me not to come home for the holidays in December 2011.
It hadn’t always been that way. Growing up, my adoptive parents would tell me the bedtime story about how I was wanted, desperately, for the ten years they waited for me. They loved me before they even knew me. While I still believe the sentiment to be true, I have learned over the past 38 years that loving someone does not a healthy environment or nurturing relationship make.
It’s also become clear to me that the caregiving contract between parents and children hardly ends at age 18—especially at a time when we are watching our social safety net be dismantled piece by piece—and it flows in two directions. Unless you are in a family with wealth and security spanning generations, concern about whether the kids will be able to land a good enough job (or jobs, let’s be frank) to support themselves and whether parents and grandparents will have enough in their retirement for their elder care has only increased over the past few decades. (snip-go read it, it’s great info)
The daughter of Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz didn’t start posting until after the 2024 election—and she’s starting to become a leading young political voice.
Hope Walz had no intention of becoming a social media sensation when she first whipped out her phone to shoot a video with her brother, Gus. A few months ago, the Walz siblings—children of former Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz—were headed back to their home state of Minnesota. Their father and his running mate, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, had just lost the 2024 presidential election. And Hope Walz wanted to post an update.
From the front seat of a car, the pair described what it was like to drive without a Secret Service detail for the first time in months.
“We’re finally free,” Gus said from the driver’s seat.
“I would not describe it like that,” Hope replied. “It is a little weird, but it does feel freeing.”
“We’re going to be okay everyone,” she added, before posting the video to TikTok.
After spending months on the campaign trail with her dad, and watching Donald Trump and JD Vance clinch the White House, Walz was ready to return to her everyday life in Montana, where she’d settled after graduating college in 2023. Instead, the video she posted in the aftermath of the election quickly amassed more than 400,000 views. And her next video, breaking down her post-election thoughts, garnered 1 million. Now, Walz is navigating her newfound public platform while trying to map out a future career in public service—a decision inspired by her time on the campaign. (snip-go read the rest of this one, too!)
The head of one group decried the ADL’s “disproportionate attention on left-of-center activists’ views on Israel while failing to apply the same scrutiny to the Trump administration.”
The heads of three left-leaning US Jewish groups on Monday admonished the Anti-Defamation League after the controversial watchdog once again conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism in its latest report on New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and his transition team.
The Anti-Defamation League noted approvingly in its updated “Mamdani Monitor” that “at least 25 individuals” in the democratic socialist’s transition team “have a past relationship with the ADL or partner organizations, or a history of supporting the Jewish community.”
The group also appreciated that “Mamdani’s team can and will respond appropriately” to actual incidents of antisemitism, pointing to last week’s resignation of Catherine Almonte Da Costa, Mamdani’s former director of appointments, following the revelation of antisemitic social media posts she published in the early 2010s.
However, the ADL said it remains “deeply concerned” by Mamdani’s statements and actions, highlighting what the group claimed were “many examples of individuals who have engaged in some type of antisemitic, anti-Zionist, or anti-Israel activities and/or have ties to groups that engage in such activities” among the mayor-elect’s transition team appointees.
“These activities include spreading classic antisemitic tropes, vilifying those who support Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland, seeking to undermine the legitimacy and security of the Jewish state, and more,” the ADL said, adding that “at least a dozen transition committee appointees expressed support for the anti-Israel campus encampments in the spring of 2024.”
The Mamdani Monitor also noted that “at least 20% of the 400-plus appointees have ties to anti-Zionist groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which openly glorifies Hamas’ October 7 attack… Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a fringe group that advocates for the eradication of Zionism and demonizes Zionists; Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a New York-based radical anti-Zionist organization… and others.”
Asked about the report during a Monday press conference, Mamdani said, “We must distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli government.”
“The ADL’s report oftentimes ignores this distinction, and in doing so it draws attention away from the very real crisis of antisemitism we see not only just in our city but in the country at large,” he continued. “When we’re thinking about critiques of Zionism and different forms of political expression, as much of what this report focuses on, there’s a wide variety of political opinion, even within our own 400-plus transition committee.”
Critics say the ADL’s claim in the update that it “has long distinguished between legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies and antisemitism” is belied by not only the Mamdani Monitor’s language, but also its own significantly expanded definition of antisemitism and antisemitic incidents, which include protests against Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza.
Jamie Beran, CEO of the progressive group Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, said in an X thread that “we were disappointed but not surprised to see today’s ADL report continue their conflation of criticism of the Israeli government’s actions with antisemitism” and the group’s “favoring of Trumpian tactics over bridge building and its prioritization of fearmongering over the safety of American Jews and our neighbors.”
Beran continued:
The ADL of today seems to have three interests: keeping their right wing megadonors happy, protecting the current Israeli government’s violent far-right agenda by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and cozying up to [US President Donald] Trump to stay close to power.
None of this fights antisemitism. Their McCarthyist Mamdani Monitor is the first of its kind because the ADL chose not to deploy a similar tactic when their bedfellows offered Nazi salutes, hired and pardoned neo-Nazis, and continued to openly spread dangerous antisemitic conspiracy myths.
“If the ADL truly wanted to fight antisemitism—like we do every day—they would actually confront it at its roots and how it works alongside all forms of bigotry, not instrumentalize it for an unpopular political agenda that has nothing to do with Jewish safety,” Beran added.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Jewish group J Street, also rejected the ADL’s “continued conflation.”
“J Street continues to be deeply concerned by the ADL’s ongoing use of its so-called ‘Mamdani Monitor,’ which goes well beyond combating antisemitism and too often conflates legitimate political speech with hate,” Ben-Ami said in a statement Monday.
Ben-Ami asserted that there is “something deeply wrong when major Jewish leaders and institutions focus disproportionate attention on left-of-center activists’ views on Israel while failing to apply the same scrutiny to the Trump administration and MAGA leaders, whose blatant antisemitism and ties to white nationalist movements pose a clear and dangerous threat to American Jews.”
“Our communal institutions should fight antisemitism consistently and credibly, wherever it appears—not selectively, and not in ways that inflame fear or deepen division,” he added.
Another liberal Jewish antisemitism watchdog, Nexus Project, also decried the ADL update, which it said “repeatedly blurs the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.”
J Street among the groups supporting the Antisemitism Response and Prevention Act (ARPA), legislation introduced last week by US Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Becca Balint (D-Vt.), and Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) in the wake of the Sydney Hanukkah massacre.
According to Nadler’s office, the bill “clearly states that it is against the policy of the United States to use antisemitism as grounds to pursue ulterior political agendas, including attacks on educational institutions, suppressing constitutionally protected speech, or any other enforcement of ideological conformity.”
ARPA stands in stark contrast with the Antisemitism Awareness Act (ARA), which was introduced in 2023 by Reps. Mike Lawler (R-NY), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ, Max Miller (R-Ohio), and Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) in the House of Representatives and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) in the Senate.
The bill would require the Department of Education to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism when determining whether alleged harassment is motivated by anti-Jewish animus.
The ADL has pushed a wide range of governments, institutions, and organizations to adopt the IRHA definition, which conflates legitimate criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry, and forces people to accept the legitimacy of a settler-colonial apartheid state engaged in illegal occupation and colonization, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
House lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the legislation last year; however, the bill remains stalled in the Senate.
Zionism—the settler-colonial movement for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine—is being rejected by a growing number of Jewish Americans due to the racism, settler-colonialism, illegal occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide perpetrated by Israel and rooted in claims of divine right and favor.
Jewish-led groups like JVP, IfNotNow, and Jews for Economic and Racial Justice (JERJ) have been at the forefront of pro-Palestine demonstrations since the start of Israel’s war and siege on Gaza, which have left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing; 2 million others displaced, starved, and sickened; and most of the coastal strip in ruins.
tRump’s illegal military war crime actions / tRump’s gift to the oil companies that paid him prior / This is a war crime and illegal / tRump trying to get other countries resources for his own profits / tRump grifts and seeking bribes
It has nothing to do with US national security and all the minerals / traffic rights to make ships pay / and the “rare earth” metals that tRump wants a piece of. It is about profit. Hugs
The paying tribute and bribes to tRump and his slush funds is so anti what the US should and used to stand for. It is the very thing the founding fathers were most against. The courts have gutted the holding of tRump to account but the emoluments cause is what this was designed to stop. Ask yourself if Biden / Obama / Clinton had been so blatant in demanding bribes would you tRump cult supporters be OK with it still? Hugs
The appeals court told her to have it completely wrapped up by the first week of January and this is not doing that. I expect more to happen fast with this. She ignored the appeals court order to please tRump.
“There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” the college student from Venezuela who sought U.S. asylum, said. “Four guards grabbed me, and they beat me until I bled until the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall. That was when they broke one of my teeth.”
Mr. Miller’s belief that seven decades of immigration has produced millions of people who take more than they give — an assertion that has been refuted by years of economic data — is at the heart of the Trump administration’s campaign to restrict immigration and deport immigrants already in the country.
tRump trying to hold on to power illegally / Jan 6th insurrectionists / trying to change the history everyone seen live / Scamming / Using the US treasury & taxpayer funds to pay off tRump cult members.
The U.S. Air Force will provide Jan. 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt with military funeral honors, reversing a Biden-era decision that denied her family’s request, according to a legal group that has represented her family.
In June 2025, the Pentagon agreed to pay the Babbitt family a $5 million “wrongful death” settlement. Below, see the latest from Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who is himself reportedly suing the DOJ for $100 million.
This is not true. The construction industry has crashed in Florida. No workers so nothing being built. Half crews means nothing built. The work is far to hard for most people. Hugs
In his first year back in office, Mr. Trump has unabashedly adopted the trappings of royalty just as he has asserted virtually unbridled power to transform American government and society to his liking. In both pageantry and policy, Mr. Trump has established a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency that goes far beyond even the one associated with Richard M. Nixon, for whom the term was popularized half a century ago.
Trump is expected to announce plans to build a new, large warship that Trump is calling a “battleship” and is part of his larger vision to create a “Golden Fleet” that includes as many as 50 support ships, according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized comment publicly.
Bigotry / Hate / Racism / DEI Misinformation / White Supremacy
I can’t understand living just to hate and harm others who are not doing anything that harms you. To carry that bitterness and to work so hard to deny to others what you demand for yourself seems like poisoning one’s self. With so much to enjoy in diversity and inclusion why work so hard to create a homogeny of everyone being the same. Hugs
As the M4L annual summit kicks off this weekend, here’s how one of the group’s original chapters is sowing chaos and pushing anti-LGBTQ policies in Indian River County.
Mink Tyner says some people call her a “helicopter parent” because of how protective she is over her kids. Despite this, she wasn’t concerned about bringing her daughter, then 14, to the Indian River County, Florida, school board meeting in August 2023, where they were discussing changes to the state’s curriculum relating to race and slavery.
That’s why she was shocked when she saw community members at the podium reading excerpts of sexual content from books.
“I hate lights out now because my D has a mind of its own,” one woman read. Then a man came up and read, “When Doris had just turned 11, her current stepfather started having sex with her.” And a third person read, “He took a long long time peeling off my jeans and T-shirt, pink bra and panties, and a longer time stroking and kissing me.”
The meeting had turned into more of a stunt led by protestors affiliated with the local chapter of Moms for Liberty (M4L), a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated far-right extremist group.
“I’m not gonna have my kid in here listening to these adults doing this shit,” Tyner remembers thinking.
She took her daughter out of the room and pleaded with security to intervene, but they refused. So she spoke up to disrupt the meeting herself, only for security from the Sheriff’s office—who told Uncloseted Media their deputies responded “appropriately and in accordance with established procedures”—to escort her out.
As she was leaving, conservative pastor John Amanchukwu, who had attended the meeting with M4L, confronted her while recording a video that he would later post to X calling her “demonic” and lashing out about her being pro-LGBTQ: “You’re okay with DEI. … You’re okay with Pride Month. You’re okay with the rainbow flag. You’re okay with all that junk,” he yelled. Tyner responded by calling him a “fucking weirdo” and walked out.
That video opened a floodgate of harassment that tormented Tyner and her family for years: She received insults, accusations of pedophilia, and persistent threats of violence from a Facebook account displaying the name CURTIS COUSINS who called her a “fent-using fat fucking dyke” and told her she deserved to have “a potato peeler peel her clit right off to the bone.”
“I never know if this week or 10 years from now somebody’s gonna show up [to my business] based on some kind of misinformation that Moms for Liberty started about me [or] want to harm me and my family,” Tyner, who owns a tattoo shop, told Uncloseted Media.
Indian River County is home to one of the first of M4L’s 320 chapters nationwide. The group’s annual summit is this weekend and will feature a variety of politicians with anti-LGBTQ track records, including Oklahoma’s former state superintendent Ryan Walters, who made headlines for making anti-trans comments after the death of 16-year-old trans teen Nex Benedict. Last year, conservative heavyweights spoke at the event, including President Trump, Tulsi Gabbard and Sebastian Gorka.
Over the last four years, M4L have built a reputation for chaos and controversy. Members have made the news for quoting Hitler, stripping at a school board meeting and offering bounties to report teachers who teach about “critical race theory.”
At one point in Indian River County, close allies of M4L made up a majority of the school board where they pressured the district to ban scores of books, many of which contain LGBTQ themes, and reverse a racial equity policy—all while harassing, doxing and defaming their adversaries.
Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science from the University of Massachusetts, says what’s playing out in Indian River County is a microcosm for so many other chapters across the country.
“[The media are] falling like suckers for this story that they’re a grassroots moms organization. They are not, they are connected to … the far right establishment,” he says. “And that’s become … more and more apparent. So this whole grassroots thing is hogwash.”
Beginnings
Moms for Liberty was founded in Florida in 2021 by three current and former school board members: Tiffany Justice, Tina Descovich and Bridget Ziegler, the latter of whom has since left the group after being involved in a sex scandal wherein her husband allegedly prowled local bars to solicit women for threesomes.
Shortly after M4L launched, Justice tapped Jennifer Pippin, who had made a name for herself for leading activism against COVID-19 restrictions, to lead the chapter for her home county, Indian River.
While the anti-mask circles that would later be folded into M4L always had a conservative lean, multiple county residents told Uncloseted Media that the group’s discriminatory views were not initially apparent.
Tyner, a lesbian who identifies as politically independent, actually felt welcomed by the group when she worked with them on their anti-mask mandate advocacy. However, that changed as M4L’s focus turned towards opposing LGBTQ inclusion measures in schools.
“Once they organized and got the appearance of a grassroots start … and many people in the community that were siding with them, it’s like they took the steering wheel and they just steered another direction,” she says.
When Tyner began speaking up against this rhetoric, she says she was blocked from the group’s Facebook pages. But as she continued to oppose them publicly, Justice offered to meet with her to address her concerns.
Over breakfast at a local cafe, Tyner says Justice gave her a “scripted” response in the hopes of winning back her support. She even invited Tyner to an M4L chapter meeting. However, Tyner declined as the meeting was allegedly to be hosted by a community member who had made an online post suggesting necrophilia and pedophilia are part of the LGBTQ umbrella.
“I was like, ‘Alright, this is not a good or a safe movement,” says Tyner.
Justice did not respond to a request for comment. In an email, Pippin told Uncloseted Media that M4L have “members and members children that are LGB in [their] chapter and across the country.”
Another local parent, who requested anonymity due to concerns about his job security, says while he’d initially been on board with M4L’s parental rights advocacy, he ran into conflict with the group when they started opposing the school district’s racial equity policies and tried to ban books with antiracist themes, including Ibram X. Kendi’s “Antiracist Baby”and “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You.” Like Tyner, he says he was approached by Justice and Pippin to win him over again but was ultimately unconvinced.
After he split from M4L, he began publicly criticizing the group’s book bans. In retaliation, some M4L members accused him of supporting pedophiles.
When he reached out to Pippin to ask for the people making such accusations against him to be held accountable, he says she waved him off—all while blocking him on social media and accusing him of “bullying.” He also says that she doxed him after another dispute—a major factor in his decision to remain anonymous.
“Her response to me basically was ‘free speech,’ ‘we don’t control what our members say.’ And I’m like, ‘But Jennifer, you know me, and you know I’m not a pedophile, and this is unacceptable,’” he told Uncloseted Media.
Building Political Power
The Indian River County School District’s J.A. Thompson Administrative Center. Photo by Kiran891.
Efforts to ban LGBTQ and racial justice-related books in schools are part of M4L’s national ammo that helped them quickly explode in popularity.
Cunningham says M4L were boosted by high-profile connections on the right. Ziegler and Descovich both served as presidents of the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, a group billed as a conservative alternative to the Florida School Board Association. Ziegler’s husband, Christian, was vice chairman of Florida’s Republican Party at the time and worked as a media surrogate for the Trump campaign in 2016.
Since their launch, M4L have had their conferences and events sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and the Leadership Institute; were directly advised by Leadership Institute founder Morton Blackwell; and were a part of Project 2025’s advisory board. And this summer, Justice was hired as executive vice president of Heritage Action.
In 2022, the Indian River County chapter leveraged this influence to carve out power in local government: They got two close allies, Jacqueline Rosario and Dr. Gene Posca, elected to the school board, and they developed closerelationships with the Ron DeSantis-backed county sheriff Eric Flowers. Pippin was even appointed by Florida’s Department of Education to a statewide workgroup to develop compliance training for Florida’s classroom censorship policies, including the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law.
As M4L became notorious for pushing exclusionary measures in schools, some officials—including school board member Peggy Jones—criticized the group. In retaliation, Jones reportedly received so many death threats that the district had to increase security detail at all school events where she was present.
In the midst of increasing chaos surrounding M4L, the group mounted a campaign of hundreds of requests to ban books containing “sexual content.”
While some librarians continued to hold the majority of books where bans were unsuccessful, M4L convinced Flowers to investigate one school library, alleging that keeping the books on the shelf could constitute a sex crime. While the investigation found that no crime had been committed, Flowers concluded that “we do not feel that this content is appropriate for young children,” putting even further pressure on local librarians.
Pippin at the school board meeting in August 2023. Photo via YouTube.
This kind of direct action proved very effective. Even the reading protest where Tyner was escorted out won them 34 additional book bans from a unanimous board vote.
“You can’t deny that the kind of tactics that they have have been useful,” Cunningham says. “Some of the places they’ve taken over, [including] Sarasota County, where Bridget Ziegler was on the board, became much more conservative over the past few years.”
Silencing Opposition
In addition to school board meetings, the group has a track record of trolling progressive events. Tyner and the anonymous parent remember an incident where a group of M4L members showed up to a local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) meeting that had been organized to discuss plans for opposition against new state regulations that required classes to portray slavery in a more positive light.Tyner says white M4L members attempted to shout down NAACP speakers, with one member allegedly using the n-word. Thomas Kenny, a M4L member who was at the event, said this “did not happen” and that one of their members using the n-word is “an absolute lie.”
Cunningham says these disruptions are part of M4L’s playbook. He pointed to the example of Jennifer Jenkins, the liberal school board member who unseated Tina Descovich in neighboring Brevard County, who says protestors spurred by M4L have turned up outside her home calling her a pedophile and burning “FU” in her lawn.
“They [use the] same kind of tactics … over and over again,” says Cunningham.
Pippin
Chapter leader Jennifer Pippin has mastered those tactics, becoming widely known as one of the most influential book banners in the country. She’s also made headlines for filing a complaint against the Kilted Mermaid, a Vero Beach wine bar, alleging that they had hosted an all-ages drag event with sexual content, which the bar owner denies. M4L rallied against the bar online, spamming the posts of one of the bar’s drag performers, telling the queen to “stay away from children.” This stunt caught the attention of Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier, who launched an investigation and issued subpoenas for video recordings of the bar on the day of the event as well as identifying documents for employees and performers.
Pippin has also claimed to be a nurse, despite no public records showing that she has a license, and appeared on the antisemitic and homophobic far-right news website TruNews, where she claimed, without evidence, that anti-M4L activists have been killing pets and livestock owned by the group’s members.
Fear
Tyner and the other anonymous parent both say that they’ve had to take a step back from the school board and local activism because of the toxic environment M4L have created.
“It’s been turned into such a circus,” Tyner says.
In the meantime, things have gotten worse for the LGBTQ community in Indian River County, and in Florida overall, between the “Don’t Say Gay” law and anti-LGBTQ legislation that requires teachers to deadname trans students unless they have signed parental permission slips. The anonymous parent says he’s watched many of the LGBTQ people in his life, including one of his own children, who is a teacher, leave the state due to the hostile environment.
“It’s not safe for a lot of people,” he says.
Greener Pastures?
Despite all of this, a sea change may be on the horizon. A 2024 Brookings report found that the success rates of M4L-endorsed candidates were on the decline, and in Indian River County’s elections last year, both of M4L’s school board candidates lost. With the continued controversies of the Trump administration and the growing popularity of groups that oppose M4L’s ideology, Cunningham feels the tide may be turning for M4L’s influence in Indian River County and across America.
“In school board races, the Moms for Liberty label is toxic, so try to not get attached to that,” he says. “They’ve had quite an impact … I don’t wanna downplay that. But in terms of popular appeal and growth, I think it’s much more limited than it is portrayed.”
Editor’s Note: In an email, Jennifer Pippin responded to the allegations made about her in this story. You can read them here.
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Steve Bannon, former advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, arrives for a hearing at Manhattan Criminal Court on February 11, 2025 in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
With Republicans and Democrats embroiled in a fight over redistricting around the country, GOP operatives are beginning to openly discuss their plan to leverage institutional power — from statehouses to the Supreme Court — to usher in a near-unbreakable House majority.
In Texas, Republicans are pushing forward a plan to create five new GOP House seats, which alone could be enough to prevent Democrats from retaking the House in the 2026 midterms. The new Texas maps are part of a larger redistricting play, in which Republicans think they can squeeze out a dozen new GOP seats from states such as Texas, Florida, Missouri and Indiana.
The redistricting play from Republicans, however, is only part of a larger campaign to totally change the state of play in the House of Representatives. If successful, that effort could see Republicans pick up more than 40 seats without having to win any more support from voters, according to GOP operatives.
GOP strategist Alex deGrasse, an advisor to Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., spoke about the emerging plan on Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” outlining three changes that Republicans are counting on to bail them out of potential democratic accountability: partisan gerrymandering; a Supreme Court ruling that guts the Voting Rights Act; and an unprecedented and unconstitutional mid-decade Census.
“You’ve got these three vectors,” deGrasse said. “Back of the envelope map this morning — when I woke up with a smile — was Democrats could lose 42 seats.”
Potentially the most important part of this plan hangs on the fate of Section Two of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This section of the landmark civil rights law generally bans race-based discrimination in voting laws, and has been an important part of the legal framework that currently guarantees House districts where the majority of the voters are a minority group. This then allows members of that minority group the ability to elect their chosen representative.
The case before the court directly concerns one of Louisiana’s two majority-Black districts, with the group of voters who brought the case seeking to overturn the current map used in the state. Republicans, however, are hoping the Supreme Court will issue a maximalist ruling that would allow their party to dilute minority voters in the South, effectively eliminating Black representation in Congress in swaths of the country. This would also, in effect, eliminate many Democratic seats across the South.
The Republican dominated Supreme Court has steadily dismantled the Voting Rights Act in recent decades, with Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 allowing some states, mostly concentrated in the South, to change the rules and procedures around voting without a federal review.
The potential gains for Republicans here are huge. In 2024, there were 141 majority-minority House districts;119 of these districts elected Democrats to represent them.
The specific number of seats that Republicans would be able to pick up through a change in the Voting Rights Act would depend on the specifics of the ruling, as well as practical constraints on the GOP’s ability to gerrymander. Still,it’s clear Republicans are hoping to be given a free hand to eliminate majority-minority districts altogether.
“The other third aspect that we’re talking about here, Steve, is that voting rights are up in the Supreme Court; they said, ‘Hold on, do we need race-based seats? Does this go against the 14th and 15th Amendments? And does the Constitution supersede racial seat drawing?” deGrasse said.
The third part of the GOP plan, alongside the current round of redistricting and their hopes at the high court, has to do with President Donald Trump’s ordering of a new mid-decade Census.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff, signaled at the purpose of Trump’s mid-decade Census plan when he claimed on Fox News that “Democrats rigged the 2020 Census by including illegal aliens.” Miller made these claims despite the fact that Trump was president and in charge of the 2020 Census.
For context, non-citizens have been counted in every Census since 1790, and the framers of the Constitution explicitly included non-citizens in the Census by stating in Article One that it shall count the “whole number of persons in each state.” For the 2020 Census, Trump also pushed to have a question about citizenship included in the Census, acknowledging that the Census was meant to count all persons in the United States, including noncitizens.
Miller went on to reveal the goal of Trump’s mid-decade Census plan, saying that “20 to 30 House Democrat seats wouldn’t exist but for illegal aliens.”
Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist who maintains a personal line of communication with Trump, indicated in an interview with the Daily Caller that the Census scheme would also help to lock Democrats out of the presidency and “potentially subtract 20 electoral votes from Democrats in the electoral college system, as congressional seat appropriation is directly correlated with Electoral College totals.” Kirk is a co-founder of Turning Point USA, an organization dedicated to indoctrinating high school and college-age students in conservative ideology. The organization was also among the groups Trump’s 2024 campaign delegated get-out-the-vote efforts to.
The GOP’s Census plan will almost certainly be challenged in court. Federal law holds that a mid-decade Census can be conducted, but not used for apportionment. And, since the country’s founding, the U.S. has conducted a Census once a decade for the purposes of apportionment.
Democrats in Texas say that this current push from the Republicans — to totally reconfigure American elections to retain power — should be a wake-up call.
Texas state Rep. Venton Jones, the House minority whip in Texas, told Salon that national Democrats need to realize that “there’s a bigger plan at play and we need to wake up and address that as a nation.”
“We have to continue to overperform to at least get back the majority and be ready for an electoral fight when that happens, because we’ve already seen what happens when this president, or even this Congress, doesn’t get what they want,” Jones said. “They don’t always play by the rules. They just change the rules to make it benefit them.”
So much for the will of the voters and the desires of the public. Republicans do not want democracy, they want a one party authoritarian rule with them in charge. Hugs
Voters in GOP-controlled states are passing progressive policies at the ballot—only to watch Republican legislators repeal them. Will it change how voters choose candidates?
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe
Last November, Missouri voters approved a ballot measure guaranteeing paid sick leave to workers in the state and raising the minimum wage, which will reach $15 an hour in 2026. It passed by a solid 58 percent.
But last month the Missouri legislature,where Republicans have a supermajority in both chambers,overturned the paid sick leave part of the law, as well as a provision that would have continued to automatically increase the minimum wage in the future. “Today, we are protecting the people who make Missouri work—families, job creators, and small business owners—by cutting taxes, rolling back overreach, and eliminating costly mandates,” Republican Governor Mike Kehoe said in a statement. That’s disingenuous, to say the least. They simply disagreed with the majority of voters—and were under pressure from industry groups like the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry that called the law a “job killer.”
Completely overturning a ballot measure passed by a substantial margin is fairly new and bold, but it’s part of a more recent trend in red states to undermine the will of voters who have passed progressive initiatives at the polls. Increasingly, these approved initiatives are being challenged and weakened by their state legislatures, which may blunt ballot initiatives in general as a progressive policy tool. What happened in Missouri also illustrates the unusual nature of our current state of politics: We’re in the midst of a huge disconnect between what voters want and who they’re voting for to get it. Ballot initiatives make voters feel like they can have it all, choosing policies they like à la carte while voting for candidates based on completely unrelated criteria. It lets legislators off the hook while giving voters a false sense of control. But what’s happening to ballot initiatives in Missouri and other states could be a wake-up call for voters about how they choose candidates.
Twenty-six states allow some kind of ballot referendum process, usually either to amend the state’s constitution or pass new laws, or both. In the recent past, conservative ballot initiatives, like the same-sex marriage ban that passed in California in 2008 (and was overturned by the courts in 2013), were used to drive Republican turnout in an otherwise blue state and try to sway the presidential election. More recently, organizers have focused on passing popular progressive initiatives that legislatures were reluctant to take up, like increasing minimum wages, medical and recreational marijuana legalization, and expanding Medicaid. Many of these measures have proven popular even in majority-Republican states like Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, and Ohio. Last year, Nebraska and Alaska joined Missouri in passing referenda on paid sick leave and the minimum wage.
After the success of those initiatives, states with Republican legislatures hostile to those changes have been trying to find ways to undermine direct democracy. Most often, they pare back statutes so that the laws are less powerful than voters perhaps intended, as Florida has done with felon enfranchisement and gerrymandering initiatives, and Nebraska did with its own paid sick leave law. Other times, states try to revamp the ballot referendum process to make it more difficult to get through. The Arkansas legislature has tried in the past to require a supermajority of 60 percent to pass initiatives, and this year groups in the state are working to enshrine direct democracy rights into the state constitution to prevent more of these efforts. Florida voters passed a ballot initiative requiring a supermajority of 60 percent to amend the constitution in 2006, making a lot of popular changes harder to enact. (Notably, this initiative got 58 percent and wouldn’t have passed under the new rules.)
“We’re in a phase of pushback against the process right now, because the policies have been responding to one direction that the state legislatures have been going for about 15 years, which is in a more conservative direction,” said Craig Burnett, the chair of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University. Responding to the moment may limit conservative lawmakers’ tools in the future, though. “That does swing. You may think this is a good idea today, but you know, tomorrow it may work against you.”
Constitutional amendments are more resilient than new laws passed by referenda because state legislatures can’t tinker with them, and they’ve recently become a battleground over state-level abortion rights. When states try to implement voter-passed statutes, though, the legislatures generally have some authority to decide how they should be implemented, but it’s not always clear what the limits are. Efforts by Republicans to change a referendum that passed in Michigan raising the minimum wage, eliminating the tipped minimum wage, and requiring paid sick leave were overturned by the state’s Supreme Court, and there are questions about how some of those laws will be implemented.
This isn’t always nefarious. Deciding how to implement laws is the job of the legislature, and voters are essentially hiring legislators to do that job for them when they elect candidates. In some cases, asking voters to consider too many referenda, or overly complicated ones, could be seen as shirking their responsibility. In California, for example, voters are asked to weigh in on dozens of initiatives, some of them redundant and counterproductive. Many of these are complicated questions that are better left to legislators.
There’s also a lot of evidence voters don’t always know about the initiatives before they vote on them. That doesn’t mean they don’t realize what they’re voting for—protections like paid sick leave and even longer-term family leave are extremely popular, for example—but they’re not always researching how their elected officials feel about them or what the policies are in their states before Election Day. Practically, that means they might be casting votes in favor of measures while also voting for candidates who wouldn’t support them.
Initiatives also require organized campaigns to collect the signatures and other qualifiers necessary to make it to the ballot, which means the process can be hijacked by millionaires and billionaires who back those campaigns. State officials and campaigns also often wrangle over the language used on the ballot itself, leading to court fights and sometimes to language that is unnecessarily confusing. That can overwhelm voters, turning what is supposed to be direct democracy into another area of politics where big money can distort the process.
Outright repealing popular provisions, however, is new. “Missouri is very pro economic policy, and to see that, it definitely shows that there’s like a new resolve from Republicans to really dismiss the will of the voters and really not care about who they represent,” said Caitlyn Adams, executive director at Missouri Jobs With Justice, which supported the initiative. She said there were some districts where the initiative passed with more votes than the Republican candidates in those districts who later voted to overturn it had. The initiative also had support from small businesses in the state, but the state’s Chamber of Commerce lobbied against it anyway, she said.
Still, ballot initiatives give voters only limited power. Voters approve initiatives they support, but that doesn’t always mean they care enough about the issue they voted for—like paid sick leave—to later vote against a politician who helped to overturn it. Typically, voters have felt more strongly motivated by culture-war issues like abortion than by things like minimum wage laws. Missouri Jobs With Justice is in the early stages of trying to get a constitutional amendment guaranteeing paid sick leave, which would not be vulnerable to legislative tinkering, on the ballot next year. “Ballot initiatives were never a silver bullet,” Adams said. Referencing the Republicans who overturned paid leave, she added, “I think we are going to be spending time telling voters who did this to them; making sure they know who took this away.”
Voters will be impacted by the repeal in varying ways, of course. Many workers already have sick days and paid family leave available from their employers, and since the law had kicked in and some workers were already accruing sick days before its repeal, some businesses may decide to keep the benefits in place. It’s the lowest-paid, most vulnerable workers in the economy who are the least likely to have sick leave and are probably the most vulnerable without laws to enforce. And since the repeal also scrapped a provision that would have protected Missouri workers who actually used their sick leave from being retaliated against, the most vulnerable workers might be unable to actually use any leave they technically have.
We are in the middle of a huge partisan reshuffling. In the past three election cycles, non–college educated voters have shifted to the Republican Party, while the Democratic base, once full of blue-collar and union rank-and-file workers, is now full of college-educated, relatively well-paid white-collar workers. These are workers who already have access to benefits through work, but they are voting for the party with a platform that supports increasing the same benefits for others. At the same time, Republicans seem to have successfully painted Democrats as elite and culturally remote, even while they’re the ones passing tax cuts for the wealthy and generally catering to the whims of business interest groups.
It means that the values that drive people to vote aren’t neatly aligned with personal economic interests—though the degree of this disconnect is still in flux. “We’re not going to be marching to one side of the spectrum and staying there,” Burnett said. “It’s probably more likely to be how it’s been for the last hundreds of years in American politics, which is, we kind of go back and forth, but there is a reasonable expectation that we are going to reshuffle people.” We just don’t know what issue will be the big one that will make that reshuffling settle down a bit, at least until the next major issue upends politics again.
This is the big question hanging over the Democratic Party. For now, however, it’s clear that many of the people who benefited from Biden’s populist economic agenda had no hesitation in voting against him. Adams said future campaigns will also focus on educating voters on candidates who support the initiatives and those who don’t. “We do have to be able to do multiple things at the same time—pass really great statewide policies, and create consequences for elected officials who go against the will of the voters,” Adams said.
But given the Republican assault on ballot initiatives, perhaps it’s also time to educate voters on the problem with depending on these initiatives in the first place. Voters need to decide what policies they want from their political parties—and actually demand them, by choosing candidates accordingly. That remains the surest path to change in this rickety democracy.
