President Trump’s administration can continue to detain immigrants without bond, marking a major legal victory for the federal immigration agenda and countering a slew of recent lower court decisions across the country that argued the practice is illegal.
A panel of judges on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday evening that the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to deny bond hearings to immigrants arrested across the country is consistent with the Constitution and federal immigration law.
Specifically, Circuit Judge Edith H. Jones wrote in the 2-1 majority opinion that the government correctly interpreted the Immigration and Nationality Act by asserting that “unadmitted aliens apprehended anywhere in the United States are ineligible for release on bond, regardless of how long they have resided inside the United States.”
Under past administrations, most noncitizens with no criminal record who were arrested away from the border had an opportunity to request a bond hearing while their cases wound through immigration court. Historically, bond was often granted to those without criminal convictions who were not flight risks, and mandatory detention was limited to recent border crossers.
“That prior Administrations decided to use less than their full enforcement authority under” the law “does not mean they lacked the authority to do more,” Jones wrote.
The plaintiffs in the two separate cases filed last year against the Trump administration were both Mexican nationals who had lived in the United States for more than 10 years and weren’t flight risks, their attorneys argued. Neither man had a criminal record, and both were jailed for months last year before a lower Texas court granted them bond in October.
The Trump White House reversed that policy in favor of mandatory detention in July, reversing almost 30 years of precedent under both Democrat and Republican administrations.
Friday’s ruling also bucks a November district court decision in California, which granted detained immigrants with no criminal history the opportunity to request a bond hearing and had implications for noncitizens held in detention nationwide.
Circuit Judge Dana M. Douglas wrote the lone dissent in Friday’s decision.
The elected members of Congress who passed the Immigration and Nationality Act “would be surprised to learn it had also required the detention without bond of two million people,” Douglas wrote, adding that many of the people detained are “the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens.”
She went on to argue that the federal government was overriding the lawmaking process with the Department of Homeland Security’s new immigration detention policy that denies detained immigrants bond.
“Because I would reject the government’s invitation to rubber stamp its proposed legislation by executive fiat, I dissent,” Douglas wrote.
Douglas’ opinion echoed widespread tensions between the Trump administration and federal judges around the country, who have increasingly accused the administration of flouting court orders.
U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi celebrated the decision as “a significant blow against activist judges who have been undermining our efforts to make America safe again at every turn.”
“We will continue vindicating President Trump’s law and order agenda in courtrooms across the country,” Bondi wrote on the social media platform X.
MINNEAPOLIS — Alberto Castañeda Mondragón says his memory was so jumbled after a beating by immigration officers that he initially could not remember he had a daughter and still struggles to recall treasured moments like the night he taught her to dance.
But the violence he endured last month in Minnesota while being detained is seared into his battered brain.
He remembers Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulling him from a friend’s car on Jan. 8 outside a St. Paul shopping center and throwing him to the ground, handcuffing him, then punching him and striking his head with a steel baton. He remembers being dragged into an SUV and taken to a detention facility, where he said he was beaten again.
He also remembers the emergency room and the intense pain from eight skull fractures and five life-threatening brain hemorrhages.
“They started beating me right away when they arrested me,” the Mexican immigrant recounted last week to the Associated Press, which recently reported on how his case contributed to mounting friction between federal immigration agents and a Minneapolis hospital.
Castañeda Mondragón, 31, is one of an unknown number of immigration detainees who, despite avoiding deportation during the Trump administration’s enforcement crackdown, have been left with lasting injuries following violent encounters with ICE officers. His case is one of the excessive-force claims the federal government has thus far declined to investigate.
He was hurt so badly he was disoriented for days at Hennepin County Medical Center, where ICE officers constantly watched over him.
A dubious claim
The officers told nurses Castañeda Mondragón “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall,” an account his caregivers immediately doubted. A CT scan showed fractures to the front, back and both sides of his skull — injuries a doctor told AP were inconsistent with a fall.
“There was never a wall,” Castañeda Mondragón said in Spanish, recalling ICE officers striking him with the same metal rod used to break the windows of the vehicle he was in. He later identified it as an ASP, a telescoping baton routinely carried by law enforcement.
Training materials and police use-of-force policies across the U.S. say such a baton can be used to hit the arms, legs and body. But striking the head, neck or spine is considered potentially deadly force.
“The only time a person can be struck in the head with any baton is when the person presents the same threat that would permit the use of a firearm — a lethal threat to the officer or others,” said Joe Key, a former Baltimore police lieutenant and use-of-force expert who testifies in defense of police.
Once he was taken to an ICE holding facility at Ft. Snelling in suburban Minneapolis, Castañeda Mondragón said officers resumed beating him. Recognizing that he was seriously hurt, he said, he pleaded with them to stop, but they just “laughed at me and hit me again.”
“They were very racist people,” he said. “No one insulted them, neither me nor the other person they detained me with. It was their character, their racism toward us, for being immigrants.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, did not respond to repeated requests for comment over the last two weeks on Castañeda Mondragón’s injuries.
It is unclear whether his arrest was captured on body-camera video or if there might be additional recordings from security cameras at the detention center.
In a recent bid to boost transparency, Homeland Security announced a broad rollout of body cameras for immigration officers in Minneapolis as the government draws down ICE’s presence there.
ICE deportation officer William J. Robinson did not say how Castañeda Mondragón’s skull was smashed in a Jan. 20 declaration filed in federal court. During the intake process, it was determined he “had a head injury that required emergency medical treatment,” he wrote in the filing.
The declaration also stated that Castañeda Mondragón entered the U.S. legally in March 2022, and that the agency determined only after his arrest that he had overstayed his visa. A federal judge later ruled his arrest had been unlawful and ordered him released from ICE custody.
‘Hope they don’t kill you’
A video posted to social media captured the moments immediately after Castañeda Mondragón’s arrest as four masked men walk him handcuffed through a parking lot. The video shows him unsteady and stumbling, held up by ICE officers.
“Don’t resist!” shouts the woman who is recording. “‘Cause they ain’t gonna do nothing but bang you up some more.
“Hope they don’t kill you,” she adds.
“And y’all gave the man a concussion,” a male bystander shouts.
The witness who posted the video declined to speak with AP or provide consent for the video’s publication, but Castañeda Mondragón confirmed he is the handcuffed man seen in the recording.
At least one ICE officer later told staff at the medical center that Castañeda Mondragón “got his [expletive] rocked,” according to court documents filed by a lawyer seeking his release and nurses who spoke with AP.
AP interviewed a doctor and five nurses about Castañeda Mondragón’s treatment at Hennepin County Medical Center and the presence of ICE officers inside the hospital. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss patient care and feared retaliation. AP also consulted an outside physician, who affirmed the injuries were inconsistent with an accidental fall or running into a wall.
Minnesota state law requires health professionals to report to law enforcement any wounds that could have been perpetrated as part of a crime.
A hospital spokeswoman declined to say last week whether anyone at the facility had done so. However, after the Jan. 31 publication of AP’s initial story about Castañeda Mondragón’s beating and arrest, hospital administrators opened an internal inquiry seeking to determine which staff members have spoken to the media, according to internal communications viewed by AP.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz posted a link to AP’s prior story about Castañeda Mondragón, but his office has not said whether state authorities would pursue answers.
“Law enforcement cannot be lawless,” Walz wrote in the post on X. “Thousands of aggressive, untrained agents of the federal government continue to injure and terrorize Minnesotans. This must end.”
Castañeda Mondragón’s arrest came a day after the slaying of Renee Good, the first of two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis by immigration officers, triggering widespread public protests.
Calls for accountability
Minnesota congressional leaders and other elected officials, including St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, called last week for an investigation of Castañeda Mondragón’s injuries.
The Ramsey County attorney’s office, which oversees St. Paul, urged Castañeda Mondragón to file a police report to prompt an investigation. He said he plans to file a complaint. A St. Paul police spokesperson said the department would investigate “all alleged crimes that are reported to us.”
While the Trump administration insists ICE limits its operations to immigrants with violent rap sheets, Castañeda Mondragón has no criminal record.
“We are seeing a repeated pattern of Trump Administration officials attempting to lie and gaslight the American people when it comes to the cruelty of this ICE operation in Minnesota,” U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat, said in a statement.
Rep. Kelly Morrison, another Democrat and a doctor, recently toured the Whipple Building, the ICE facility at Ft. Snelling. She said she saw severe overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and an almost complete lack of medical care.
“If any one of our police officers did this, you know what just happened in Minnesota with George Floyd, we hold them accountable,” said Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum, whose district includes St. Paul.
A native of Veracruz, Mexico, Castañeda Mondragón came to Minnesota nearly four years ago on a temporary work visa and found jobs as a driver and roofer. He uses his earnings to support his elderly father, who is disabled and diabetic, and his 10-year-old daughter.
On the day of his arrest, he was running errands with a friend when they suddenly found themselves surrounded by ICE agents. The agents began breaking the windows and opening the doors of the vehicle. He said the first person who hit him “got ugly with me for being Mexican” and not having documents showing his immigration status.
About four hours after his arrest, court records show, Castañeda Mondragón was taken to an emergency room in the suburb of Edina with swelling and bruising around his right eye and bleeding. He was then transferred to Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, where he told staff he had been “dragged and mistreated by federal agents,” before his condition deteriorated, court records show.
A week into his hospitalization, caregivers described him as minimally responsive. As his condition slowly improved, hospital staff handed him his cellphone, and he spoke with his child in Mexico, whom he could not remember.
“I am your daughter,” she told him. “You left when I was 6 years old.”
His head injuries erased past experiences that for his daughter are unforgettable, including birthday parties and the day he left for the United States. She’s been trying to revive his memory in daily calls.
“When I turned 5, you taught me how to dance for the first time,” she reminded him recently.
“All these moments, really, for me, have been forgotten,″ he said.
He showed gradual improvement and, to the surprise of some who treated him, was released from the hospital on Jan. 27.
Long recovery lies ahead
He faces a long recovery and an uncertain future. Questions loom about whether he will be able to continue to support his family back in Mexico. “My family depends on me,” he said.
Though his bruises have faded, the effects of his traumatic brain injuries linger. In addition to the problems with his memory, he also has issues with balance and coordination that could prove debilitating for a man whose work requires going up and down ladders. He said he is unable to bathe himself without help.
“I can’t get on a roof now,” he said.
Castañeda Mondragón, who does not have health insurance, said doctors have told him he needs ongoing care. Unable to earn a living, he is relying on support from co-workers and members of the Minneapolis-St. Paul community who are raising money to help provide food, housing and medical care. He has launched a GoFundMe.
Still, he hopes to stay in the U.S. and to provide again someday for his loved ones. He differentiates between people in Minnesota, where he said he has felt welcome, and the federal officers who beat him.
“It’s immense luck to have survived, to be able to be in this country again, to be able to heal, and to try to move forward,” he said. “For me, it’s the best luck in the world.”
But when he closes his eyes at night, the fear that ICE officers will come for him dominates his dreams. He is now terrified to leave his apartment, he said.
“You’re left with the nightmare of going to work and being stopped,” Castañeda Mondragón said, “or that you’re buying your food somewhere, your lunch, and they show up and stop you again. They hit you.”
Brook, Biesecker, Mustian and Attanasio write for the Associated Press and reported from Minneapolis, Washington, New York and Seattle, respectively.
Armed with that knowledge, you can now go out and win yourself a few bar bets by asking someone to name, say, even two of those running.
Meantime, fear not. Your friendly columnists Mark Z. Barabak and Anita Chabria have surveyed the field, weighed the odds, pondered California’s long history and concluded … they have absolutely no clue what will happen in the June 2 primary, much less who’ll take the oath of office come next January.
Barabak: End homelessness. Elevate our public schools to first-class rank. Make housing and college tuition affordable. Eliminate crime. End disease and poverty. Put a chicken in every pot. Make pigs fly and celestial angels sing. And then, in their second year …
Seriously, there’s a pretty large gap between what voters would like to see happen and what a governor — any governor — can plausibly deliver. That said, if our next chief executive can help bring about meaningful improvement in just a few of those areas, pigs and angels excepted, I’d venture to say a goodly number of Californians would be pleased.
Broadly speaking, my sense when talking to voters is they want our next governor to push back on Trump and his most egregious excesses. But not as a means of raising their national profile or positioning themselves for a run at the White House. And not to the exclusion of bettering their lives by paying attention to the nitty and the gritty, like making housing and higher education more readily available and, yes, fixing potholes.
Chabria: All that is fair enough. As the mom of two teens, I’d especially like to see our university system be more affordable and accessible, so we all have our personal priorities. Let’s agree to this starting point: The new governor can’t just chew gum and walk. She or he must be able to eat a full lunch while running.
But so far, candidates haven’t had their policy positions break through to a big audience, state-focused or not — and many of them share broadly similar positions. Let’s look at the bits of daylight that separate them because, Republicans aside, there aren’t canyon-size differences among the many candidates.
San José Mayor Matt Mahan, the newest entry in the race, is attempting to position himself as a “can’t-we-all-just-get-along” centrist. How do you think that will go over with voters?
Barabak: You’re having me tiptoe uncomfortably close to the Make A Prediction Zone, which I assiduously avoid. As I’ve said before, I’m smart enough to know what I don’t know. (Many readers will doubtless question the underlying premise of the former if not the latter part of that statement.)
I think there is at least a potential for Mahan to tap into a desire among voters to lower the hostilities just a bit and ease up on our constant partisan war-footing.
You might not know it if you marinate in social media, or watch the political shout-fest shows where, as in nature, the loudest voices carry. But there are a great many people working two or even three jobs, ferrying their kids to soccer practice, worrying about paying their utility and doctor bills, caring for elderly parents or struggling in other ways to keep their heads above water. And they’re less captivated by the latest snappy clap-back on TikTok than looking for help dealing with the many challenges they face.
I was struck by something Katie Porter said when we recently sat down for a conversation in San Francisco. The former Orange County congresswoman can denigrate Trump with the best of ‘em. But she said, “I am very leery of anyone who does not acknowledge that we had problems and policy challenges long before Donald Trump ever raised his orange head on the political horizon.”
California’s homelessness and affordability crises were years in the making, she noted, and need to be addressed as such.
I heard Antonio Villaraigosa suggest something similar in last week‘s gubernatorial debate, when the former Los Angeles mayor noted the state has spent billions of dollars in recent years trying to drastically reduce homelessness with, at best, middling results. “We cannot be afraid to look in the mirror,” he said.
That suggests to me Mahan is not the only candidate who appreciates that simply saying “Trump = Bad” over and over is not what voters want to hear.
Chabria: Certainly potholes and high electricity bills existed before Trump. But if the midterms don’t favor Democrats, the next governor will probably face a generational challenge to protect the civil rights of residents of this diverse state. It’s not about liking or disliking Trump, but ensuring that our governor has a plan if attacks on immigrants,the LBGTQ+ community and citizens in general grow worse.
I do think this will matter to voters — but I agree with you that candidates can’t simply rage against Trump. They have to offer some substance.
Porter, Swalwell and Becerra, who have the most national experience and could be expected to articulate that sort of vision, haven’t done much other than to commit to the fight. Steyer and Thurmond want to abolish ICE, which a governor couldn’t do. Mahan has said focusing on state policy is the best offense.
I don’t think this has to be a charisma-driven vision, which is what Newsom has so effectively offered. But it needs to bring resoluteness in a time of fear, which none of the candidates to my mind have been able to project so far.
But this all depends on election results in November. If Democrats take Congress and are able to exert a check to this terrible imbalance, then bring on the asphalt and fix the roads. I think a lot of what voters want from a governor won’t fully be known until after November.
Barabak: The criticism of this collective field is that it’s terminally boring, as if we’re looking to elect a stand-up comic, a chanteuse or a juggler. I mean, this is the home of Hollywood! Isn’t it the birthright of every California citizen to be endlessly entertained?
At least that’s what the pundits and political know-it-alls, stifling yawns as they constantly refresh their feeds on Bluesky or X, would have you believe.
Voters elected Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor — that’s two movie stars in the state’s 175-year history — and, from the way the state is often perceived, you’d think celebrity megawattage is one of the main prerequisites for a chief executive.
But if you look back, California has seen a lot more George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Gray Davis types, which is to say bland-persona governors whom no one would mistake for box-office gold.
It seems to me no coincidence that Schwarzenegger, who arrived as a political novelty, was replaced by Jerry Brown, who was as politically tried-and-true as they come. That political pendulum never stops swinging.
Which suggests voters will be looking for someone less like our gallivanting, movie matinee governor and someone more inclined to keep their head down in Sacramento and focus on the state and its needs.
Who will that be? I wouldn’t wage a nickel trying to guess. Would you care to?
Chabria: I certainly don’t care to predict, but I’ll say this: We may not need or get another Terminator. But one of these candidates needs to put some pepper flakes in the paste if they want to break out of the pack.
In recent weeks, Marin County Registrar Natalie Adona has been largely focused on the many mundane tasks of local elections administrators in the months before a midterm: finalizing voting locations, ordering supplies, facilitating candidate filings.
But in the wake of unprecedented efforts by the Trump administration to intervene in state-run elections, Adona said she has also been preparing her staff for far less ordinary scenarios — such as federal officials showing up and demanding ballots, as they recently did in Georgia, or immigration agents staging around polling stations on election day, as some in President Trump’s orbit have suggested.
“Part of my job is making sure that the plans are developed and then tested and then socialized with the staff so if those situations were to ever come up, we would not be figuring it out right then and there. We would know what to do,” Adona said. “Doing those sort of exercises and that level of planning in a way is kind of grounding, and makes things feel less chaotic.”
Natalie Adona faced harassment from election deniers and COVID anti-maskers when she served as the registrar of voters in Nevada County. She now serves Marin County and is preparing her staff for potential scenarios this upcoming election, including what to do if immigration agents are present.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Across California, local elections administrators say they have been running similar exercises to prepare for once unthinkable threats — not from local rabble-rousers, remote cyberattackers or foreign adversaries, but their own federal government.
State officials, too, are writing new contingency plans for unprecedented intrusions by Trump and other administration officials, who in recent days have repeated baseless 2020 election conspiracies, raided and taken ballots from a local election center in Fulton County, Ga., pushed both litigation and legislation that would radically alter local voting rules, and called for Republicans to seize control of elections nationwide.
California’s local and state officials — many of whom are Democrats — are walking a fine line, telling their constituents that elections remain fair and safe, but also that Trump’s talk of federal intervention must be taken seriously.
Their concerns are vastly different than the concerns voiced by Trump and other Republicans, who for years have alleged without evidence that U.S. elections are compromised by widespread fraud involving noncitizen voters, including in California.
But they have nonetheless added to a long-simmering sense of fear and doubt among voters — who this year have the potential to radically alter the nation’s political trajectory by flipping control of Congress to Democrats.
An election worker moves ballots to be sorted at the Orange County Registrar of Voters in Santa Ana on Nov. 5, 2024.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Trump has said he will accept Republican losses only if the elections are “honest.” A White House spokesperson said Trump is pushing for stricter rules for voting and voter registration because he “cares deeply about the safety and security of our elections.”
Rick Hasen, an election law expert and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, said some of what Trump says about elections “is nonsensical and some is bluster,” but recent actions — especially the election center raid in Georgia — have brought home the reality of his threats.
“Some worry that this is a test run for trying to seize ballot boxes in 2026 and prevent a fair count of the votes, and given Trump’s track record, I don’t think that is something we can dismiss out of hand,” Hasen said. “States need to be making contingency plans to make sure that those kinds of things don’t happen.”
The White House dismissed such concerns, pointing to isolated incidents of noncitizens being charged with illegally voting, and to examples of duplicate registrations, voters remaining on rolls after death and people stealing ballots to vote multiple times.
“These so-called experts are ignoring the plentiful examples of noncitizens charged with voter fraud and of ineligible voters on voter rolls,” said Abigail Jackson, the White House spokesperson.
Experts said fraudulent votes are rare, most registration and roll issues do not translate into fraudulent votes being cast, and there is no evidence such issues swing elections.
A swirl of activity
Early in his term, Trump issued an executive order calling for voters nationwide to be required to show proof of U.S. citizenship, and for states to be required to disregard mail ballots received after election day. California and other states sued, and courts have so far blocked the order.
President Trump walks behind former chairperson of the Republican National Committee Michael Whatley as he prepares to speak during a political rally in Rocky Mount, N.C., on Dec. 19.
(Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)
Longtime Trump advisor and ally Stephen K. Bannon suggested U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will be dispatched to polling locations in November, reprising old fears about voter intimidation. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said she couldn’t rule that out, despite it being illegal.
Democrats have raised concerns about the U.S. Postal Service mishandling mail ballots in the upcoming elections, following rule changes for how such mail is processed. Republicans have continued pushing the SAVE America Act, which would create new proof of citizenship requirements for voters. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering multiple voting rights cases, including one out of Louisiana that challenges Voting Rights Act protections for Black representation.
Charles H. Stewart, director of the MIT Election Data + Science Lab, said the series of events has created an “environment where chaos is being threatened,” and where “people who are concerned about the state of democracy are alarmed and very concerned,” and rightfully so.
But he said there are also “a number of guardrails” in place — what he called “the kind of mundane mechanics that are involved in running elections” — that will help prevent harm.
California prepares
California leaders have been vociferous in their defense of state elections, and said they’re prepared to fight any attempted takeover.
“The President regularly spews outright lies when it comes to elections in this country, particularly ones he and his party lose,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “We will continue to correct those lies, rebuild much-needed trust in our democratic institutions and civic duties, and defend the U.S. Constitution’s grant to the states authority over elections.”
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber take questions after announcing a lawsuit to protect voter rights in 2024.
(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said in an interview that his office “would go into court and we would get a restraining order within hours” if the Trump administration tries to intervene in California elections, “because the U.S. Constitution says that states predominantly determine the time, place and manner of elections, not the president.”
Weber told The Times that the state has “a cadre of attorneys” standing by to defend its election system, but also “absolutely amazing” county elections officials who “take their job very seriously” and serve as the first line of defense against any disruptions, from the Trump administration or otherwise.
Dean Logan, Los Angeles County’s chief elections official, said his office has been doing “contingency planning and tabletop exercises” for traditional disruptions, such as wildfires and earthquakes, and novel ones, such as federal immigration agents massing near voting locations and last-minute policy changes by the U.S. Postal Service or the courts.
“Those are the things that keep us up at night,” he said.
Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan said the county no longer has ballots from the 2020 election.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
Logan said he is not currently concerned about the FBI raiding L.A. County elections offices because, while Fulton County still had its 2020 ballots on hand due to ongoing litigation, that is not the case for L.A. County, which is “beyond the retention period” for holding, and no longer has, its 2020 ballots.
However, Logan said he does consider what happened in Georgia a warning that the Trump administration “will utilize the federal government to go in and be disruptive in an elections operation.”
“What we don’t know is, would they do that during the conduct of an election, before an election is certified?” Logan said.
Kristin Connelly, chief elections officer for Contra Costa County, said she’s been working hard to make sure voters have confidence in the election process, including by giving speeches to concerned voters, expanding the county’s certified election observer program, and, in the lead-up to the 2024 election, running a grant-funded awareness campaign around election security.
Connelly — who joined local elections officials nationwide in challenging Trump’s executive order on elections in court — said she also has been running tabletop exercises and coordinating with local law enforcement, all with the goal of ensuring her constituents can vote.
“How the federal government is behaving is different from how it used to behave, but at the end of the day, what we have to do is run a mistake-free, perfect election, and to open our offices and operation to everybody — especially the people who ask hard questions,” she said.
Lessons from the past
Several officials in California said that as they prepare, they have been buoyed by lessons from the past.
Before being hired by the deep-blue county of Marin in May, Adona was the elected voting chief in rural Nevada County in the Sierra foothills.
In 2022, Adona affirmed that Trump’s 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden was legitimate and enforced a pandemic mask mandate in her office. That enraged a coalition of anti-mask, anti-vaccine, pro-Trump protesters, who pushed their way into the locked election office.
Protesters confronted Adona and her staffers, with one worker getting pushed down. They stationed themselves in the hallway, leaving Adona’s staff too terrified to leave their office to use the hallway bathroom, as local, state and federal authorities declined to step in.
“At this point, and for months afterwards, I felt isolated and depressed. I had panic attacks every few days. I felt that no one had our back. I focused all my attention on my staff’s safety, because they were clearly nervous about the unknown,” Adona said during subsequent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In part because she knows what can go wrong, Adona said her focus now is on preparing her new staff for whatever may come, while following the news out of Georgia and trying to maintain a cool head.
“I would rather have a plan and not use it than need a plan and not have one,” she said.
Clint Curtis, the clerk and registrar of voters in Shasta County — which ditched its voting machines in 2023 amid unfounded fraud allegations by Trump — said his biggest task ahead of the midterms is to increase both ballot security and transparency.
Since being appointed to lead the county office last spring, the conservative Republican from Florida has added more cameras and more space for election observers — which, during the recent special election on Proposition 50, California’s redistricting measure, included observers from Bonta’s and Weber’s offices.
He has also reduced the number of ballot drop boxes in the vast county from more than a dozen to four. Curtis told The Times he did not trust the security of ballots in the hands of “these little old ladies running all over the county” to pick them up, and noted there are dozens of other county locations where they can be dropped off. He said he invited Justice Department officials to observe voting on Proposition 50, though they didn’t show, and welcomes them again for the midterms.
“If they can make voting safer for everybody, I’m perfectly fine with that,” he said. “It always makes me nervous when people don’t want to cooperate. Whatcha hiding? It should be: ‘Come on in.’”
Election workers inspect ballots after extracting them from envelopes on election night at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center on Nov. 5, 2024, in the City of Industry.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Weber, 77 and the daughter of an Arkansas sharecropper whose family fled Southern racism and threats of violence to reach California, said that while many people in the U.S. are confronting intense fear and doubt about the election for the first time, and understandably so, that is simply not the case for her or many other Black people.
“African Americans have always been under attack for voting, and not allowed to vote, and had new rules created for them about literacy and poll taxes and all those other kinds of things, and many folks lost their lives just trying to register to vote,” Weber said.
Weber said she still recalls her mother, who had never voted in Arkansas, setting up a polling location in their home in South L.A. each election when Weber was young, and today draws courage from those memories.
“I tell folks there’s no alternative to it. You have to fight for this right to vote. And you have to be aware of the fact that all these strategies that people are trying to use [to suppress voting] are not new strategies. They’re old strategies,” Weber said. “And we just have to be smarter and fight harder.”
SAN FRANCISCO — As California struggles with homelessness and healthcare cuts, some activists are taking on an unexpected cause: fighting for billionaires.
About a dozen people took part in the “March for Billionaires” on Saturday morning in San Francisco to raise awareness about the plight of the ultrarich. Although some assumed the event was satire, organizer Derik Kauffman said it was a sincere protest against a potential new tax on the state’s wealthiest residents.
“We must not judge billionaires as a class but by their individual merits,” he said, speaking outside the San Francisco Civic Center. “There are good billionaires and bad billionaires, just like there are good people and bad people. California is extraordinarily lucky that this is where people come to start companies and build fortunes and we should do our best to keep it that way.”
The Billionaire Tax Act is a proposed state ballot initiative that would levy a one-time, 5% tax on the state’s billionaires to help offset recent federal cuts that have affected healthcare and food-assistance programs. The tax would apply to their overall net worth but would exclude pensions, real estate and retirement accounts.
Supporters say it would benefit the majority of the state’s residents and help ensure billionaires pay their fair share. Opponents — including Gov. Gavin Newsom — argue it will cause billionaires and the businesses they own to flee the state, taking jobs and tax dollars with them.
Kauffman echoed those concerns Saturday and said everyone should want billionaires to remain in California.
“This tax will drive billionaires out; it already has,” he said. “The founders of Google — they left the state and they are taking their money with them.”
Google is still headquartered in California, but other companies tied to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recently lef the state, including T-Rex Holdings, which moved from Palo Alto to Reno last year.
San Francisco Jan. 7, 2026 Two counter-protesters mockingly impersonated billionaires by playing characters they dubbed “Oli Garch” and “Trilly O’Naire.”
(Katie King / Los Angeles Times)
The event attracted a few dozen humorous counterprotesters.
Razelle Swimmer carried around a puppet of the Swedish Chef from the Muppets, brandishing knives and wearing an apron that said “Eat the Rich.” Swimmer told The Times she doesn’t believe billionaires need more protections.
“If they aren’t willing to pay more taxes, then I don’t really care if they leave,” she said.
Other counterprotesters mockingly impersonated billionaires by donning crowns or top hats. A man and woman, playing characters called Oli Garch and Trilly O’Naire, said they worried what would happen if the tax passed.
“There is a small chance that my helicopter won’t be able to have a sauna in it just because apparently some kids want dental work or something,” said the woman, as she adjusted her tiara.
At one point, a man wearing a gold crown and carrying a sign that said “Let them eat cake” ran through the crowd shouting, “Keep the poors away from me.”
The Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the main backer of the tax proposal, needs to collect about 875,000 signatures by June 24 in order to get the measure on the November ballot.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office, which offers guidance to the Legislature about budgetary issues, has cautioned that the tax might lead to only short-term benefits.
“It is likely that some billionaires decide to leave California,” the agency stated in a recent analysis. “The income taxes they currently pay to the state would go away with their departure. The reduction in state revenues from these kinds of responses could be hundreds of millions of dollars or more per year.”
California has roughly 200 billionaires, the most of any state. Their collective wealth was $2.2 trillion in October, up from $300 billion in 2011, according to a December report from law and economics professors at UC Berkeley, UC Davis and the University of Missouri.
The researchers concluded that billionaires in the United States pay less in taxes, relative to income, than the average American.
“It is estimated that, including all taxes at all levels of government, billionaires paid only 24% of their true economic income in taxes in years 2018-20 while the U.S.-wide average was 30%,” the report states.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman is running for mayor, shaking up the field of candidates one final time.
Raman said she will challenge Mayor Karen Bass, her onetime ally, campaigning on issues of housing and homelessness, transparency and “safety in our streets.”
In an interview, Raman called Bass “an icon” and someone she deeply admires. But she said the city needs a change agent to address its problems.
“I have deep respect for Mayor Bass. We’ve worked closely together on my biggest priorities and her biggest priorities, and there’s significant alignment there,” said Raman, who lives in Silver Lake. “But over the last few months in particular, I’ve really begun to feel like unless we have some big changes in how we do things in Los Angeles, that the things we count on are not going to function anymore.”
Saturday’s announcement — hours before the noon filing deadline for the June 2 primary election — capped a chaotic week in L.A. politics, with candidates and would-be candidates dropping in and out of the race to challenge Bass, who is seeking a second four-year term.
Raman would immediately pose a formidable challenge to Bass. She was the first council member to be elected with support from the Democratic Socialists of America, which scored an enormous victory last fall with the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Councilmember Nithya Raman jumps in the race for mayor, challenging former ally Karen Bass in the June primary.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
At the same time, Raman has deep ties to leaders in the YIMBY movement, who have pushed for the city to boost housing production by upzoning single-family neighborhoods and rewriting Measure ULA, the so-called mansion tax, which applies to property sales of $5.3 million or more.
Raman’s eleventh-hour announcement caps what has been the most turbulent candidate filing period for an L.A. mayoral election in at least a generation. She launched her bid less than a day after another political heavyweight, L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, decided against a run.
Until Raman’s surprise entry, the field had seemed to be clear of big-name challengers. Former L.A. schools superintendent Austin Beutner ended his campaign on Thursday, citing the death of his 22-year-old daughter. That same day, real estate developer Rick Caruso reaffirmed his decision not to run.
Bass campaign spokesperson Douglas Herman did not immediately provide comment.
Raman’s announcement comes as Bass continues to face sharp criticism over the city’s handling of the Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes. Unlike some of the candidates, Raman has not publicly criticized Bass about the city’s preparation for, or response to, the disaster.
Bass, 72, faces more than two dozen opponents from across the political spectrum.
Reality TV star Spencer Pratt, a Republican, has received praise from an array of Trump supporters, including Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, of Florida. Pratt has focused heavily on the city’s handling of the fire, which destroyed his home.
Spencer Pratt poses for a portrait in Pacific Palisades.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Democratic socialist Rae Huang is running against the mayor from her political left. Huang has called for more public housing and for a reduction in the number of police officers, with the cost savings poured into other city services.
Brentwood tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, who has described himself as a lifelong Democrat, said the city is on a downward trajectory and needs stronger management. The 56-year-old nonprofit executive plans to tap his personal wealth to jump-start his campaign.
Also in the race is Asaad Alnajjar, an employee of the Bureau of Street Lighting who sits on the Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council. Alnajjar has already lent his campaign $80,000.
At City Hall, Raman’s entrance into the mayor’s race is a bombshell, particularly given her relationship with Bass.
Mayor Karen Bass addresses the crowd at the Shine LA event at Hansen Dam Recreation Area in Lake View Terrace, Calif., on Saturday.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
In December 2022, not long after taking office, Bass launched her Inside Safe program, which moves homeless people indoors, in Raman’s district.
Two years later, while running for reelection, Raman prominently featured Bass on at least a dozen of her campaign mailers and door hangers. Raman’s campaign produced a video ad that heavily excerpted Bass’ remarks endorsing her at a Sherman Oaks get-out-the-vote rally.
Raman, whose district stretches from Silver Lake to Reseda, ultimately won reelection with 50.7% of the vote. In the years that followed, she continued to praise Bass’ leadership.
In November, while appearing at a DSA election night watch party for Mamdani, Raman told The Times that Bass is “the most progressive mayor we’ve ever had in L.A.”
Last month, Bass formally announced that she had secured Raman’s endorsement, featuring her in a list of a dozen San Fernando Valley political leaders who backed her reelection campaign.
Raman ran for office in 2020, promising to put in place stronger tenant protections and provide a more effective, humane approach to combating homelessness. On her campaign platform, she called for the transformation of the LAPD into a “much smaller, specialized armed force” — but never specified what exactly that would mean.
A woman takes a photo with her phone at the C. Erwin Piper Technical Center on Saturday.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Since then, the LAPD has lost about 1,300 officers — a decrease of about 13%. The City Council has put in place new eviction protections for tenants, while also capping the size of rent increases in the city’s “rent stabilized” apartments, which were mostly built before October 1978.
Raman does not face the same political risks as Horvath, who had already been running for reelection in her Westside and San Fernando Valley district. Horvath, had she run for mayor, would have had to forfeit her seat on the county Board of Supervisors.
If Raman loses, she would still hold her council seat, since she does not face reelection until 2028.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass was having a really bad week.
But then it turned into a pretty good week, and she must have breathed a sigh of relief.
Until the Saturday morning surprise.
I had to set fire to my scorecard, and to the column I had just drafted, which touched on all the expected big-name challengers who had bowed out of the mayoral race in the past several days: L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, billionaire businessman Rick Caruso (who forced a runoff with Bass the last time around), and former L.A. Unified schools chief Austin Beutner.
It was looking as though we wouldn’t get a badly needed, monthslong, toe-to-toe face-off about all that’s right and wrong in the sprawling metropolis of high hopes and low expectations. In a conversation I had with Loyola Marymount University’s Fernando Guerra, a decades-long observer of the local political scene, he made this observation about the dull political season that was shaping up:
“What is interesting to me is that no one from the establishment political class is running against [Bass] when she is clearly vulnerable.”
Vulnerable because of her handling of the Palisades fire and its aftermath.
Vulnerable because of limited progress on core issues such as homelessness, housing affordability and the shameful condition of streets, sidewalks and parks.
But then came Saturday morning, when, in an unexpected move, L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman decided to step up, injecting a new element of drama into the race.
It was a surprise because Raman and Bass are not political enemies. In fact, they’ve largely been allies and have endorsed each other’s reelection bids.
So what was Raman thinking in signing up for a challenge in which she is clearly the underdog?
“I have deep respect for Mayor Bass. We’ve worked closely together on my biggest priorities and her biggest priorities, and there’s significant alignment there,” Raman told The Times. “But over the last few months in particular, I’ve really begun to feel like unless we have some big changes in how we do things in Los Angeles, that the things we count on are not going to function anymore.”
There’s more to it than that, in political terms. Raman is to the left of Bass and the traditional left in Los Angeles. She and three other council members supported by the Democratic Socialists of America have changed the conversation at City Hall, with more emphasis on social service, housing and labor issues, and less on traditional law enforcement.
Among their supporters are renters, immigrants, young adults, the underserved, and the frontline workers in the minimum-wage economy.
Raman’s candidacy — along with DSA candidates for other city offices — makes the election something of a referendum on the evolving center of political clout in L.A. It raises the question of whether the city is ready to blow things up and move further in the direction of New York City, which just elected as mayor the ultra-progressive Zohran Mamdani.
And for all of that, it also raises the question of whether progressives can both deliver on their promises and also balance a budget. No easy task, there.
As for Bass, you don’t get as far in politics as she has — from the state Legislature to Congress to City Hall — without sharp survival skills and without collecting friends you can count on, even when the road to reelection is filled with potholes.
And even when an ally comes after you.
“Wow, what a surprise,” Guerra said upon Raman’s entry into the race.
He considers her a formidable foe who was the first to prove “that the DSA can win in Los Angeles” and who brings several advantages to a campaign against Bass.
For one, she has a record of some success on homelessness in her district and was involved in that cause in the Silver Lake area before she was in public office, when she identified a startling lack of coordination and continuity. And by virtue of her age, 44, she’s aligned with younger voters hungry for change in political leadership.
It’s possible that with Raman in the race, and the nuts-and-bolts issues of governance now center stage, there will be slightly less emphasis on Bass’s handling and mishandling of the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of properties, wiped out a vibrant community and killed 12 people.
When I said at the top of this column that Bass was having a really bad week, I was referring to the Palisades fire and the latest story from Times investigative reporters Alene Tchekmedyian and Paul Pringle. They had already established that the Los Angeles Fire Department had failed to pre-deploy adequately for the fire, and that it had failed to extinguish an earlier fire that later triggered the epic disaster.
The reporters had also established that the so-called “after-action” report on the fire had been altered to downplay failures by the department and the city, all of which was scandalous enough.
But on Wednesday, Tchekmedyian and Pringle reported that Bass was involved in the revisions despite her earlier denials. The mayor “wanted key findings about the LAFD’s actions removed or softened before the report was made public,” according to sources.
Bass vehemently denied the allegations and blasted The Times. But even before the latest story, Bass’s Palisades report card was one that a prudent person might have fed to the dog. She had left the country just before the fire despite warnings of potentially cataclysmic conditions. And multiple other missteps followed, including the botched hiring and early departure of a rebuilding czar.
Raman has not targeted Bass’ handling of the fire, and we’ll see if that changes. I don’t consider the response to the ICE raids to be a point of contention between Raman and Bass. One of the mayor’s strengths in office has been her defense of the city’s immigrants and her pushback against President Trump.
“Bass gets high marks resisting ICE,” Guerra said of polling and public opinion surveys he has either conducted or reviewed. “But on other issues, including homelessness, she does not do well.”
Two-thirds of voters in one poll said they would not back Bass in the June primary, Guerra said. But that poll did not offer an alternative to Bass, and now there is one.
Actually, several. The others include Brentwood tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, who’s got money to spend; reality TV personality Spencer Pratt, a Republican who lost his Palisades home and has been hammering the mayor; and minister/community organizer Rae Huang, a Democratic socialist.
Do they matter, given the odds against them and the entry of Raman into the race?
Yes, they might. Bass needs more than 50% of the June primary vote to win outright. But with Raman and the others grabbing varying percentages of the vote, a two-person November runoff is likely and the candidates will almost surely be Bass and Raman.
NEW YORK — A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore funding to a new rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey, ruling just as construction was set to shut down and amid reports that President Trump was withholding the money unless Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer saw to it that Penn Station and Washington Dulles International Airport were renamed in the president’s honor.
The administration had sought to pressure Schumer (D-N.Y.) to help get the facilities renamed for Trump in exchange for releasing the money to fund the massive infrastructure project, according to the New York Times, citing top administration officials.
The judge’s decision Friday came months after the administration announced it was halting $16 billion in support for the project, citing the then-government shutdown and what a top federal budget official said were concerns about unconstitutional spending around diversity, equity and inclusion principles.
U.S. District Judge Jeannette A. Vargas in Manhattan approved a request by New York and New Jersey for a temporary restraining order barring the administration from withholding the funds while the states seek a preliminary injunction that would keep the money flowing while their lawsuit plays out in court.
“The Court is also persuaded that Plaintiffs would suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction,” the judge wrote. “Plaintiffs have adequately shown that the public interest would be harmed by a delay in a critical infrastructure project.”
The White House and the Department of Transportation did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment Friday night.
New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James called the ruling “a critical victory for workers and commuters in New York and New Jersey.”
“I am grateful the court acted quickly to block this senseless funding freeze, which threatened to derail a project our entire region depends on,” James said in a statement. “The Hudson Tunnel Project is one of the most important infrastructure projects in the nation, and we will keep fighting to ensure construction can continue without unnecessary federal interference.”
The panel overseeing the project, the Gateway Development Commission, had said work would stop late Friday afternoon because of the federal funding freeze, resulting in the immediate loss of about 1,000 jobs as well as thousands of additional jobs in the future.
It was not immediately clear when work would resume. In a nighttime statement, the commission said: “As soon as funds are released, we will work quickly to restart site operations and get our workers back on the job.”
The new tunnel is meant to ease strain on an existing one that is more than 110 years old and connects New York and New Jersey for Amtrak and commuter trains, where delays can lead to backups up and down the East Coast.
New York and New Jersey sued over the funding pause this week, as did the Gateway Development Commission, moving to restore the Trump administration’s support.
The suspension was seen as a way for the Trump administration to put pressure on Schumer, whom the White House was blaming for a government shutdown last year. The shutdown was resolved a few weeks later.
Speaking to the media on Air Force One, Trump was asked about reports that he would unfreeze funding for the tunnel project if Schumer would agree to a plan to rename Penn Station in New York and Dulles International Airport in Virginia after the president.
“Chuck Schumer suggested that to me, about changing the name of Penn Station to Trump Station. Dulles airport is really separate,” Trump responded.
Schumer responded on social media: “Absolute lie. He knows it. Everyone knows it. Only one man can restart the project and he can restart it with the snap of his fingers.”
At a hearing in the states’ lawsuit earlier in Manhattan, Shankar Duraiswamy of the New Jersey attorney general’s office told the judge that the states need “urgent relief” because of the harm and costs that will occur if the project is stopped.
“There is literally a massive hole in the earth in North Bergen,” he said, referring to the New Jersey city and claiming that abandoning the sites, even temporarily, “would pose a substantial safety and public health threat.”
Duraiswamy said the problem with shutting down now is that even a short stoppage would cause longer delays because workers would be laid off and go off to other jobs and it would be hard to quickly remobilize if funding becomes available. And, he added, “any long-term suspension of funding could torpedo the project.”
Tara Schwartz, an assistant U.S. attorney arguing for the government, disagreed with the “parade of horribles” described by attorneys for the states.
She said that the states had not even made clear how long the sites could be maintained by the Gateway Development Commission. So the judge asked Duraiswamy, and he said they could maintain the sites for a few weeks and possibly a few months, but that the states would continue to suffer irreparable harm because trains would continue to run late because they rely on an outdated tunnel.
Izaguirre and Collins write for the Associated Press and reported from New York and Hartford, Conn.
WASHINGTON — Ever since a racist video was posted on President Trump’s social media account, the White House has offered shifting responses.
First it dismissed “fake outrage” by those denouncing it as racist, then it deleted the post and blamed a staff member.
Trump later told reporters Friday that “I didn’t make a mistake.” The Republican president claimed that before the video was posted, he did not see the part that depicted former President Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.
The chair of the Congressional Black Caucus was unsparing in her criticism when she spoke to the Associated Press.
“It’s very clear that there was an intent to harm people, to hurt people, with this video,” Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) said.
The AP interviewed Clarke, who leads the group of more than 60 Black House and Senate members, hours after the video was deleted Friday.
Here is an interview transcript, edited for length and clarity.
What was your reaction when you saw that the post?
We’re dealing with a bigoted and racist regime. … Every week we are, as the American people, put in a position where we have to respond to something very cruel or something extremely off-putting that this administration does. It’s a part of their MO at this point.
Do you buy the White House explanation that this was an aide’s mistake?
They don’t tell the truth. If there wasn’t a climate, a toxic and racist climate within the White House, we wouldn’t see this type of behavior regardless of who it’s coming from…. Here we are, in the year 2026, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, the 100th anniversary of the commemoration of Black history, and this is what comes out of the White House on a Friday morning. It’s beneath all of us.
Has there been any contact between the White House and the Congressional Black Caucus on this? Could there be any good-faith exchange?
There has been no outreach from the White House. We certainly didn’t expect there to be. The outreach has to happen prior to these type of juvenile antics.
Republican criticism built more quickly Friday than it has during previous Trump controversies. What do you make of that?
It’s not lost on them, our communities that we represent, that elections are coming up. So it’s not lost on my colleagues, either. If they want to align themselves with this type of really profane imagery, this type of bigoted and racist attack on a former sitting president and his wife, they are throwing their lot in with an individual who has shown himself to be a disgrace.
It’s not common for President Trump to retract anything. What does that indicate to you that he did?
I think it’s more of a political expediency than it is any moral compass. … As my mother would say, “Too late. Mercy’s gone.”
What more do you hope to see from the White House about this?
My hope is that we can contain the harm that they’re doing. There are Black children who are listening to their president … seeing what he’s posting on Truth Social, [and] it will have an impact on how they view leadership of their own country. … I think that this administration has an opportunity to change course. They always do. We leave room for that. But, unfortunately, Donald Trump is hardwired this way.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
As a democracy, we have to stand up together against this type of racism, this type of bigotry, this kind of hatred that is coming from the president of the United States and those who surround him. … It’s very clear that there was an intent to harm people, to hurt people, with this video. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have stayed up for 12 hours.
Barrow and Zhang write for the Associated Press and reported from Atlanta and Washington, respectively.
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday reapproved the weed killer dicamba for use on genetically modified soybeans and cotton, a pesticide that has raised widespread concern over its tendency to drift and destroy nearby crops.
The agency said dicamba was critical for farmers who would otherwise have their crops threatened by fast growing weeds. To ensure the pesticide is used safely, the agency said it imposed strong protections and limits on its use.
Dicamba is a common weed killer that can be sprayed on top of genetically engineered crops. It kills the weeds but doesn’t hurt the crops. It has been in use for decades, but it has become more widespread on farms in recent years.
Advocates sharply criticized the agency, saying they are moving forward after courts blocked similar efforts in 2020 and 2024. Allowing its use on these two common crops will drastically expand how much is applied and increase harm, advocates say.
Kelly Ryerson, an activist with the Make American Healthy Again movement that has forged a fragile political allegiance with the Trump administration, said she was disheartened by the decision.
“A top priority of mine was to have the use of Dicamba for over-the-top applications permanently discontinued because” of their harm, she said. “New restrictions on use are not sufficient, and will perpetuate the chemical treadmill where many farmers are trapped.”
The EPA said growers want the weed killer and they need to be supported — and that it isn’t a MAHA versus EPA issue.
The agency said concerns about dicamba drifting to places where it was not intended are real and must be managed. It set limits on how much can be applied per acre, how much can be applied on hot days and established buffer zones to prevent harm to nearby crops. If followed, the chemical can be used without threatening humans or the environment, according to EPA.
The American Soybean Assn. applauded the decision, saying clear rules would help farmers prepare for the next growing season and control destructive weeds.
Environmental groups said dicamba drift has damaged immense acreage, devastating vegetable farms, trees and other critical plants.
“When push comes to shove, this administration is willing to bend over backward to appease the pesticide industry, regardless of the consequences to public health or the environment,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity.
Environmentalists said the EPA’s use restrictions are insufficient, allowing application for too much of the time and for too many days of the year. The buffer the agency uses to prevent harm to nearby plants has already proved ineffective, they said.
Researchers have been working to better understand its health risks. A 2020 study in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that dicamba exposure was linked to an increased risk for some cancers, including liver cancer and a type of leukemia affecting the blood and bone marrow.
Bayer, a manufacturer of dicamba, said the federal registration will allow them to now seek state approvals. They’ll launch training for applicators in the coming weeks.
Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s Noah Goldberg, giving you the latest on city and county government.
For six days this week, anybody could dream at the L.A. city clerk’s office.
Angelenos seeking elected office had to file their declarations of intent between Monday and Saturday to be eligible for the June 2 primary.
All week, the third floor courtyard of the C. Erwin Piper Technical Center was abuzz with candidates milling about, filling out paperwork, signing ethics forms and writing down their job histories.
Some will win elected office, which, naturally, means others will lose.
And some may not get on the ballot — each candidate must gather 500 legitimate voter signatures by March 4, which is relatively easy in citywide races but harder in council districts.
A candidate arrives to file to run for office in the the 2026 Municipal elections at the city clerk’s office in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“I know I won’t win,” said Joseph Garcia, a gardener, former screenwriter and member of the Venice Neighborhood Council who filed Tuesday to run for mayor.
During an interview, Garcia removed his shoe to show an injury to his foot. City clerk staffers politely asked him to put his shoe back on.
One candidate showed up on colorful roller skates wearing a wreath of flowers on her head. Another came in scrubs.
Other aspiring politicians were ready to get down to brass tacks.
Tim Gaspar, a business owner who is running to represent Council District 3, purchased a strawberry Pop-Tart from a vending machine and spoke about his fundraising numbers.
In the race to replace Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who is terming out, Gaspar has raised more than $300,000, which is $100,000 more than the two other candidates who have raised any cash at all.
Gaspar, who was wearing a blue suit, said the money came from more than 900 donors.
“It’s been a grassroots campaign,” he said.
Minutes earlier, former reality television star Spencer Pratt stepped out of his Ford F150 and changed from flip-flops into sneakers before walking into the building to file his declaration to run for mayor.
Pratt wore shorts, a hat that said “Heidiwood” — for his wife, Heidi Pratt — and a shirt for Heidi’s “Superficial” album tour. He was flanked by two private security guards and two aides.
As Pratt was walking in, Jose Ugarte, a top aide to Councilmember Curren Price who is running to replace his boss in Council District 9, was walking out.
“F— that guy,” Ugarte said about Pratt, a registered Republican who has received endorsements from many in the MAGA world. Ugarte has been explicit in his anti-Trump sentiment, specifically over the summer’s immigration raids.
Henry Mantel files to run for City Council District 5 at the city clerk’s office on Wednesday.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
In the elevator, Pratt edited a social media video in which he railed against Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Jaime Moore for not looking into who watered down the after-action report into the Palisades fire.
About 30 minutes later, after he finished filing, Pratt took questions from a gaggle of reporters huddled beyond a barrier that said “No media beyond this point.”
“It’s me or Karen Bass. We have no other choice,” said Pratt, one of more than 30 candidates who have filed to run against Bass, who is seeking a second term as mayor.
Watching from under a white tent as she filled out her declaration was Dylan Kendall, who is trying to oust Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez in District 13.
“I think Spencer Pratt kind of sucked the air out of the room,” Kendall said.
The former bartender said it took her about an hour to fill out her forms. She feels that Soto-Martínez has “neglected and ignored” residents in her district, which spans Echo Park and Hollywood, all the way to Atwater Village.
In the parking lot, Keeldar Hamilton, who sported a long ponytail, had just finished filing.
Asked what he was running for as he got into his Tesla Cybertruck, Hamilton said, “Governor … I mean mayor.”
You’re reading the L.A. on the Record newsletter
State of play
— MAY-OR MAY NOT: The filing deadline to run for mayor is Saturday at 12 p.m., and some candidates have really taken it down to the wire. L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath is still weighing a run. Former schools Supt. Austin Beutner dropped out on Thursday, following the death of his 22-year-old daughter. Billionaire developer Rick Caruso, meanwhile, decided not to run — for the second time in less than a month.
— FIRE WATER: Two sources told The Times that two people close to Bass informed them that Bass wanted key findings in the LAFD after-action report on the Palisades fire softened. Bass denied The Times’ report, calling it “dangerous and irresponsible” for the newspaper to rely on third-hand information.
— SOTC PART 1: Bass delivered the first of two States of the City Monday, urging Angelenos to come together ahead of the 2028 Olympics while announcing a push to clean up Los Angeles’ busiest streets in the run-up to the Games. The second speech will take place in April.
— WASSERMANIA: LA28 Olympics committee Chair Casey Wasserman faced calls from L.A. officials to resign following revelations about racy emails he exchanged with convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s former romantic partner. Bass did not take a stance, saying it was up to the LA28 board.
— FREE OF FEE: Palisades fire victims rebuilding homes, duplexes, condominium units, apartment complexes and commercial buildings will not have to pay permit fees, the City Council decided Tuesday. Forfeiting those fees is expected to cost as much as $90 million over three years, according to Matt Szabo, the city’s top budget analyst.
— PRICE FAINT: Councilmember Curren Price, 75, was taken to the hospital Wednesday after fainting during a Black History Month event at City Hall. Price was “in stable condition, is in recovery and doing well,” said Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson.
— HALL PASS: Former State Assemblymember Isadore Hall dropped out of the race for L.A. city controller, saying in a statement to The Times that a death in his family had prompted his decision.
— SHERIFF SUITS: L.A. County spent $229 million on legal payouts and lawyer bills last fiscal year. Nearly half of that — $112 million — went to defend the Sheriff’s Department against lawsuits, a 12% uptick in the department’s payouts from the year before.
Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature homelessness program went to Lincoln Heights, bringing 17 unhoused Angelenos indoors from an encampment.
On the docket next week: A plan to build 1,000 units of housing at the Row DTLA goes before the Planning Commission on Thursday.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
WASHINGTON — The White House’s TrumpRx website went live Thursday with a promise to instantly deliver prescription drugs at “the lowest price anywhere in the world.”
“This launch represents the largest reduction in prescription drug prices in history by many, many times, and it’s not even close,” President Trump said at a news conference announcing the launch of the platform.
Drug policy experts say the jury is still out on whether the platform will provide the significant savings Trump promises, though it will probably help people who need drugs not commonly covered by insurance.
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, called the site a “vanity project” and questioned whether the program presents a possible conflict of interest involving the pharmaceutical industry and the Trump family.
What is TrumpRx, really?
The new platform, trumprx.gov, is designed to help uninsured Americans find discounted prices for high-cost, brand-name prescriptions, including fertility, obesity and diabetes treatments.
The site does not directly sell drugs. Instead, consumers browse a list of discounted medicines, and select one for purchase. From there, they either receive a coupon accepted at certain pharmacies or are routed directly to a drug manufacturer’s website to purchase the prescription.
The White House said the reduced prices are possible after the administration negotiated voluntary “most favored nation” agreements with 16 major drugmakers including Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
Under these deals, manufacturers have agreed to set certain U.S. drug prices no higher than those paid in other wealthy nations in exchange for three-year tariff exemptions. However, the full legal and financial details of the deals have not been made public, leaving lawmakers to speculate how TrumpRx’s pricing model works.
What does it accomplish?
Though the White House has framed TrumpRx as a historic reset for prescription drug costs, economists said the platform offers limited new savings.
But it does move the needle on the issue of drug pricing transparency, away from the hidden mechanisms behind how prescription drugs are priced, rebated and distributed, according to Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.
“This has been a murky world, a terrible, obscure, opaque marketplace where drug prices have been inconsistently priced to different consumers,” Joyce said, “So this is a little step in the right direction, but it’s mostly performative from my perspective, which is kind of Trump in a nutshell.”
Still, for the uninsured or people seeking “lifestyle drugs” — like those for fertility or weight loss that insurers have historically declined to cover — TrumpRx could become a useful option, Joyce said.
“It’s kind of a win for Trump and a win for Pfizer,” Joyce said. “They get to say, ‘Look what we’re doing. We’re lowering prices. We’re keeping Trump happy, but it’s on our low-volume drugs, and drugs that we were discounting big time anyway.’”
Where does it fall short?
Early analyses by drug policy experts suggest many of the discounted medications listed on the TrumpRx site were already on offer through other drug databases before the platform launched.
For example, Pfizer’s Duavee menopause treatment is listed at $30.30 on TrumpRx, but it is also available for the same price at some pharmacies via GoodRx.
Weight management drug Wegovy starts at $199 on TrumpRx. Manufacturers were already selling the same discounted rates through its NovoCare Pharmacy program before the portal’s launch.
“[TrumpRx] uses data from GoodRx, an existing price-search database for prescription drugs,” said Darius N. Lakdawalla, a senior health policy researcher at USC. “It seems to provide prices that are essentially the same as the lowest price GoodRx reports on its website.”
Compared to GoodRx, TrumpRx covers a modest subset of drugs: 43 in all.
“Uninsured consumers, who do not use or know about GoodRx and need one of the specific drugs covered by the site, might benefit from TrumpRx. That seems like a very specific set of people,” Lakdawalla said.
Where do Democrats stand?
Democrats slammed the program this week, saying it would not provide substantial discounts for patients, and called for greater transparency around the administration’s dealings with drugmakers. To date, the administration has not disclosed the terms of the pricing agreements with manufacturers such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca.
In the lead-up to the TrumpRx launch, Democratic members of Congress questioned its usefulness and urged federal health regulators to delay its debut.
“This is just another Donald Trump pet project to rebrand something that already exists, take credit for it, and do nothing to actually lower healthcare prices,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said Friday. “Democrats will continue fighting to lower healthcare costs and push Republicans to stop giving handouts to billionaires at the expense of working-class Americans.”
Three other Democratic senators — Dick Durbin, Elizabeth Warren and Peter Welch — raised another concern in a Jan. 29 letter to Thomas March Bell, inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services.
The three senators pointed to potential conflicts of interest between TrumpRx and an online dispensing company, BlinkRx.
Months before, he became a partner at 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm that holds a significant stake in BlinkRx and led the startup’s $140-million funding round in 2024. After his appointment, BlinkRx launched a service to help pharmaceutical companies build direct-to-patient sales platforms quickly.
“The timing of the BlinkRx announcement so closely following the administration’s outreach to the largest drug companies, and the involvement of President Trump’s immediate family, raises questions about potential coordination, influence and self-dealing,” according to an October 2025 statement by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Both BlinkRx and Donald Trump Jr. have denied any coordination.
What’s next?
The rollout of TrumpRx fits into a suite of White House programs designed to address rising costs, an area of vulnerability for Republicans ahead of the November midterms.
The White House issued a statement Friday urging support for the president’s healthcare initiative, dubbed “the great healthcare plan,” which it said will further reduce drug prices and lower insurance premiums.
For the roughly 8% of Americans without health insurance, TrumpRx’s website promises that more high-cost, brand-name drugs will be discounted on the platform in the future.
“It’s possible the benefits will become broader in the future,” Lakdawalla said. “I would say that the jury remains out on its long-run structure and its long-run pricing effects.”
SACRAMENTO — Only one of the candidates for California governor will appear in a splashy Super Bowl ad on Sunday, though a rival has locked in a valuable spot on Animal Planet’s lighthearted, cuddly “Puppy Bowl” before the big game.
A Silicon Valley-backed independent expenditure committee booked $1.4 million in airtime on NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service, which will feature the big game along with NBC, and on other broadcast networks on Sunday to introduce Matt Mahan, the mayor of San José who entered the governor’s race in late January.
A 30-second ad depicts Mahan, a moderate Democrat, as a “fixer of problems” in a big city “just miles from the big game” and touts his record reducing homelessness, building housing and reducing crime.
The ad was produced by a committee run independently of Mahan’s campaign and funded mostly by Silicon Valley executives, including $1 million from Michael Seibel of Y Combinator and $500,000 each from Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill and his wife, Ashley.
“This Super Bowl ad kicks off our support for Matt Mahan’s run for governor,” said committee spokesman Matt Rodriguez. “His unmatched record on tackling crime, homelessness and housing in San José while focusing on the basics that Californians care about is very different than the old playbook of toxic politics.”
The committee has so far raised more than $3.2 million, according to Rodriguez, who provided the information about the contributors.
Other financial backers include Neil Mehta and Brian Singerman, two Bay Area venture capitalists, along with Paul Wachter, an investor who has advised former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and celebrity figures such as LeBron James and Dr. Dre on their business ventures.
As an independent committee, the group is barred from coordinating with Mahan and his campaign. A spokesperson for Mahan declined to comment on the committee or its game day ad.
Steyer, an investor turned climate activist, has already spent more than $27 million on his campaign. Most of that money went to producing and airing ads in which Steyer touts his wins supporting various ballot measures and pledges to break up utility monopolies to lower costs.
His latest ad debuts during Animal Planet’s “Puppy Bowl,” a pregame show that features two teams of adoptable dogs tussling over toys in a model football stadium. In the spot, a Realtor tells a couple that in order to afford a home, they might need to go back in time to 1980, “when the average home in California cost $100,000.”
With a burst of sparks, Steyer appears inside the time-traveling DeLorean from the 1985 film “Back to the Future” and says, “You shouldn’t have to go back in time to afford a home in California.” He then pledges to stop “Wall Street speculators from buying up homes” and pricing out “regular Californians.”
To have a legitimate shot at winning a governor’s race in a state as vast as California, home to some of the nation’s most costly media markets, candidates must raise millions of dollars to air ad campaigns robust enough to introduce themselves to voters or undercut their competitors.
According to campaign finance disclosures, former Rep. Katie Porter raised $6.1 million in 2025, the most of any candidate besides Steyer. But Mahan’s entry into the race has excited the tech and business interests that have until now avoided giving.
“The race is now kicked into gear,” and some candidates who have been fundraising for months — or years — “may find themselves lapped by the Mahan machine,” said Andrew Acosta, a Democratic strategist.
Though tech funders appear to be coalescing around the Silicon Valley mayor, he is “not going to come out of the gate lighting the campaign on fire because no one knows him,” Acosta said. With three months until primary ballots start hitting mailboxes, it’s a challenge for Mahan — though one that could be solved with enough money.
Steyer’s campaign criticized the wave of tech figures flocking to Mahan, saying business titans don’t spend their money without expecting something in return.
“This isn’t charity — it’s an investment so they get richer while everyone else gets priced out of California,” Steyer spokesman Kevin Liao said. “While San José remains the least affordable housing market in the world, Tom Steyer is ready to take on powerful special interests, make billionaires and corporations pay their fair share, and make California affordable for working people.”
With the threat of a proposed billionaire’s tax on California’s November ballot, new restrictions on AI and social media simmering in the Legislature and the impending exit of Gov. Gavin Newsom — who has been a reliable tech ally during his tenure — Silicon Valley leaders have made moves in recent weeks to boost their influence in California politics.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin and a handful of other CEOs recently loaded $35 million into a ballot measure committee and spent some of it on two separate efforts to lower housing costs.
Meta and Google have also ramped up spending on lobbying and super PACs in an effort to elect tech-friendly candidates and fight against AI regulation in statehouses both in California and around the country.
Lindsey Horvath will not run for Los Angeles mayor, becoming the latest political heavyweight to decide against a challenge to incumbent Karen Bass.
Horvath, who as an L.A. County supervisor represents 2 million people in a sprawling Westside and San Fernando Valley district, ended weeks of speculation about her political intentions, saying her work in the county “is not finished.”
“Over these past few months, you have shown me all the reasons you love Los Angeles —and why it’s worth fighting for,” Horvath said Friday in a statement. “I am grateful to the many leaders, organizations, and every single Angeleno who urged me to run for Mayor of Los Angeles.”
Horvath’s announcement, issued the night before the deadline for candidates to file, comes days after former L.A. schools superintendent Austin Beutner ended his mayoral campaign, citing the death of his 22-year-old daughter. Real estate developer Rick Caruso also removed himself from contention, saying for a second time Thursday that he would not run.
The filing period for mayoral candidates in the June 2 primary closes at noon on Saturday.
Horvath, 43, has been one of the mayor’s most outspoken critics over the past year, assailing her record on homelessness and last year’s Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. On social media, Horvath stoked speculation about her political future while calling the city’s record on homelessness “indefensible.”
Bass, in turn, has criticized county officials for pulling hundreds of millions of dollars out of a city-county agency on homelessness — a move spearheaded by Horvath — and into a new county agency. More recently, the mayor spoke out against the county’s plan to cut $200 million in homeless services.
Bass, 72, still faces several other challengers from across the political spectrum.
Reality TV star Spencer Pratt, a Republican, has received praise from an array of Trump supporters, including Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, of Florida. Pratt has focused heavily on the city’s handling of the fire, which destroyed his home.
Democratic socialist Rae Huang is running against the mayor from her political left. Huang has called for more public housing and for a reduction in the number of police officers, with the cost savings poured into other city services.
Brentwood tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, who describes himself as a lifelong Democrat, said the city is on a downward trajectory and needs stronger management. The 56-year-old nonprofit executive plans to tap his personal wealth to jump-start his campaign.
Also in the race is Asaad Alnajjar, an employee of the Bureau of Street Lighting who sits on the Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council. Alnajjar, who has already loaned his campaign $80,000, said he would do a better job than Bass at running the city.
“I’m a leader. She’s a manager. That’s the difference,” said Alnajjar, 61.
With so many candidates in the mix, Bass and her political team do not expect she will clear the 50% bar to avoid a November runoff.
Bass has been running on her record, touting a major drop in homicides and reductions in street homelessness since she took office in 2022. She has talked up her efforts to speed up the approval of affordable housing and permits for rebuilding projects in Pacific Palisades.
The mayor has positioned herself as a check on Trump’s agenda. During last summer’s immigration raids in Los Angeles, she regularly called on the president to end the crackdown and remove the California National Guard from the city.
From the beginning, a mayoral run would have been a risky move for Horvath, who is not expected to face any major challengers to her own bid for reelection.
Horvath would have had to forfeit her seat to run against Bass, while facing a tight timeline for fundraising. Her campaign had already scheduled a reelection fundraiser for next week — after the filing deadline for mayoral candidates.
In political circles, Horvath is viewed as a strong candidate in 2028 for county chief executive, an elected office created through a ballot measure that Horvath championed.
The will-she-or-won’t-she events of the past week elevated Horvath’s political profile, as she aired her criticisms of the mayor on CNN and other news shows.
Relations between Bass and Horvath have been chilly at least since the Palisades fire broke out. The two were at odds over the press conferences that were held to update the public on the disaster and on efforts to reopen the burn area to traffic.
The relationship deteriorated further after Horvath and her colleagues voted to shift hundreds of millions of dollars out of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county partnership, and into a new county agency on homelessness.
Horvath, on social media, accused Bass of putting out “misinformation” about the new county agency. Bass, in turn, warned the county’s actions could cause the city to backslide in its fight against homelessness.
Horvath has been in elected office on and off since 2009, when she joined the West Hollywood City Council. She left the council in 2011, then rejoined in 2015, staying for about seven years.
In 2022, Horvath won her supervisorial seat, defeating former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, a political veteran.
Had she entered the race, Horvath would have faced questions about an array of issues bedeviling the county, including a $4-billion legal payout over sexual abuse that was later marred by allegations of fraud.
She was also a major force behind Measure G, a 2024 ballot measure that will expand the number of county supervisors and create the county CEO position but also is on track to inadvertently repeal a criminal justice reform measure passed by voters in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The president of the United States posted a racist video Thursday night depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. On Friday, the White House dismissed criticism — but the president deleted the post. Was this episode disappointing? Yes. Surprising? Not anymore.
So, no — it is not surprising that the president would choose to post virulent anti-Black imagery during Black History Month.
But it is disappointing here in 2026 that an occupant of the Oval Office is still thinking like that.
Back in 1971, the president of the United States laughed when the governor of California referred to the African delegates at the United Nations as monkeys. Less than 10 years later, that governor became the president of the United States. And here we are, half a century later, and yet another president has amplified that racist trope.
Meaning white supremacy is still on the ballot.
That Nixon-Reagan-Trump throughline isn’t tightly wound around policy or principle, but simply that shared worldview. After all, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and Reagan offered amnesty to immigrants — highly un-Trump-like moves. No, their commonality is best revealed in the delight each man took in an old racist attack against Black people.
For Americans who are 50 and older — roughly a third of the nation — this worldview has been the architect responsible for White House policy for most of our lives. And yet, when Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, the forensic investigation focused on grocery prices and her absence from Joe Rogan’s podcast. Some — in trying to explain why Harris lost — mischaracterized her role at the border or inflated her influence on the war in Gaza.
For some reason, race did not seem to receive the same level of scrutiny.
This factor was slighted despite decades of data, such as the wave of white nationalists endorsing Harris’ opponent and the birther movement questioning President Obama’s citizenship. The trio of presidents who are on the record as enjoying depictions of Black people as monkeys — Nixon, Reagan and Trump — all used racist dog whistles in their combined 10 presidential campaigns. Their administrations have tended to be more anti-civil-rights movement than post-civil-rights movement.
Our nation’s attempts at understanding ourselves are continuously undercut by the denial that for some single-issue voters, race is their single issue. Not the price of bacon or their religious convictions. Not Gaza. Just the promise of having a safe space for prejudice. And when the president of the United States entertains racist jokes as Nixon did in the 1970s or shares racist videos as Trump continues to do, undoubtedly there is a sense among the electorate that such prejudice has a home in the White House.
Before Trump used social media to push yesteryear’s ugliness, earlier in the week Harris relaunched her 2024 social media campaign account, calling it a place where Gen Z can “meet and revisit with some of our great courageous leaders, be they elected leaders, community leaders, civic leaders, faith leaders, young leaders.” She exhorted: “Stay engaged. I’ll see you out there.”
Whether she plans to run again in 2028 is unclear. What we do know is she would not have posted an AI picture of herself as the new pope while Catholics were mourning Francis (or any other time). We know she would not have advocated for immigration officers to racially profile Black and brown Americans or disregard the 14th Amendment to detain children. We do not know how many of her policy proposals she would have been able to get across the finish line in Congress, but we do know her record of public service to the American people, in contrast with the current president who is suing the American people for $10 billion.
There is nothing wrong with revisiting Harris’ missteps on the campaign trail or debating her electability as she reemerges in the public spotlight. But now that Trump has resorted to posting monkey jokes about Black people, perhaps updated forensics will consider our well established history of racism among the factors in the 2024 election.
It is not a shock that a president of the United States thinks poorly of Black people. Not when you know that more than 25% of those who have held the office were themselves enslavers. But it is disappointing that 250 years into our nation’s story, some of us still deny the role that racism plays in shaping our politics and thus all of our lives.
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
Trump’s posting of racist imagery depicting the Obamas as apes during Black History Month represents a troubling continuation of a historical pattern, with Nixon and Reagan similarly engaging with racist depictions of Black people[1][3]. The incident reveals that white supremacy remains embedded in American politics across multiple presidential administrations, united not by policy consistency but by a shared worldview that finds amusement in racist attacks against Black Americans[1].
Race has been an under-examined factor in recent electoral outcomes, with the 2024 presidential election analysis focusing disproportionately on issues like inflation and media appearances while overlooking documented evidence of racist mobilization, including white nationalist endorsements and baseless conspiracy theories targeting the previous administration[1]. This omission is particularly significant given decades of data demonstrating racism’s influence on voting patterns[1].
For some voters, racism functions as a single-issue priority—not economic concerns or religious convictions, but rather the assurance of having a politically sanctioned space for racial prejudice[1]. When a sitting president entertains or amplifies racist content, it signals to this constituency that their prejudices have legitimacy within the highest office[1].
Different views on the topic
The White House initially characterized the incident as misrepresented outrage, framing the video as an internet meme depicting political figures as characters from “The Lion King” rather than focusing on the racist imagery, and urged critics to “report on something today that actually matters to the American public”[1][2]. This framing suggested the controversy represented distraction from substantive governance concerns[3].
The White House later attributed the post to an erroneous action by a staff member rather than deliberate presidential conduct, creating distance between the president’s stated intentions and the offensive content[3]. This explanation positioned the incident as an aberration in staff management rather than reflective of administrative values[3].
California lawmakers are expressing concern about how the future of Warner Bros. Discovery could affect Hollywood’s workforce.
In an open letter addressed to Netflix Chief Executives Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters and Paramount Skydance Corporation CEO David Ellison, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) call for the industry giants to make “concrete commitments to Californian and American workers.”
With all of these moving pieces, there’s a bipartisan fear among the nation’s lawmakers about how the acquisition could affect jobs in the U.S. entertainment industry . As stated in the letter, the industry “supports more than 680,000 jobs and contributes over $115 billion annually to the regional economy.”
Given the slowdown the industry has seen post-COVID and the growing number of international productions, Los Angeles film activity was down 13.2% from July through September 2025 when compared with the same period last year. This downward trend continues to build on the loss of 42,000 jobs in L.A. between 2022 and 2024.
Ellison and Sarandos have made arguments for why they believe their respective companies are best positioned to take over Warner Bros.
But each deal comes with major cuts. Paramount is projected to slash $6 billion in expenses over three years, and Netflix is projecting to cut $2 billion to $3 billion. Some analysts believe these cuts will have a significant effect on the workforce.
Previously, Ellison said, “We believe that what we are offering is better for Hollywood. It’s better for the customers and it’s pro-competitive.”
Sarandos is also quoted in the letter saying: “We think it’s great for consumers. We think it’s a great way to create and protect jobs in the entertainment industry.”
Earlier this week during a Senate subcommittee hearing, Sarandos said Netflix plans to increase its film and television production spending to $26 billion this year, with a majority of that happening in the U.S.
The lawmakers’ letter raises a series of questions surrounding the livelihood of creators, the use of AI and “concrete steps” about preserving jobs in L.A. Schiff and Friedman also offer the CEOs an opportunity to meet with them to discuss their answers.
In an effort to ensure “America continues to lead the world in the creative economy,” the letter said that Congress is currently working on bipartisan legislation that would establish a federal film tax incentive. It will be modeled after state programs in California, Louisiana and Georgia.
“We view this as a tool to not just protect but encourage more domestic filming and sustainable job creation on American soil,” wrote the lawmakers.
President Trump posted a video Thursday to his social media site that contains animated images depicting former President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.
The White House took down the post Friday, and after first calling it nothing more than a meme, they dubbed it a mistake by a staffer. Sure.
But while the justifiable outrage over this overt racism spins itself into a brief media circus (because we all know something else will come along is about three minutes), let’s look a bit deeper into why this video is more than an affront to everything America stands for, or should stand for, anyway.
It’s no accident that the images of the Obamas are embedded deep inside a video about voter fraud conspiracies from the 2020 election (which are untrue, if I need to say it again). This video is an escalation in the assault that is likely to come on voting rights and voting access in the midterms.
“Absolutely, there’s a connection to the vote,” Melina Abdullah told me Friday. She’s a professor at Cal State Los Angeles and co-founder of Black Lives Matter-LA.
“This is about more than just about the Obamas,” added Brian Levin, a professor Emeritus at California State University, San Bernardino, and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. “It’s about people that are (perceived as) undermining our elections and our democracy.”
I caught Levin the day after he turned in a chapter about authoritarianism for a new book, which happens to look at how discrimination and the imposition of social hierarchies ties in with power.
Let me summarize. Vulnerable groups are smashed down as dangerous and not fit to be full citizens, so a smaller group of elites can justify power by any means to protect society from these lowly and nasty influences.
Let me make that messaging even simpler: Black and brown people are bad and shouldn’t be allowed to participate in democracy because they don’t deserve the right.
How does that play out at the ballot box?
All that talk about voter identification and election integrity is really about stopping people from voting — people who legally have the right to vote. Those who are least likely to be able to obtain proof of citizenship — which might require a passport, or birth certificate along with the money and know-how to get such documents — are often Black or brown people. They are often also poor, or poorer, and therefore have less time and money to put into obtaining documents, and also live in urban areas where they share polling places.
Is it such a stretch to imagine some kind of federal oversight at those types of polling places, turning away — or simply intimidating away — legal voters who have long made up a strong block of the Democratic base?
Let’s hope that never happens. But the current undermining of the legitimacy of Black and brown voters is, said both Levin and Abdullah, systemic and concerning.
Trump’s latest video is “part of a floodgate of bigotry and conspiracy that relates to elections and immigrants and Black people and it’s important to condemn the manner in which these puzzle pieces are put together to label African Americans and immigrants as a threat to democracy with respect to the vote,” Levin said.
The premise of the video in question is that Democrats have engaged in a complicated and decades-long scheme to steal elections. It’s presented as a documentary, and the images of the Obamas have been weirdly inserted as almost a subliminal flash near the end.
If you’ve missed the white supremacist postings that have now become commonplace on official government communications such as those from the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security, let me assure you that Levin is right and this primate video is indeed part of a “firehose” of white nationalist rhetoric coming not just from Trump but from the federal government as a whole.
The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, for example, has turned its focus toward punishing diversity, equity and inclusion. Just this week, another federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, began a probe against Nike for allegedly discriminating against white people in hiring.
“It has been not even a dog whistling, but a Xeroxing of the exact kind of terms that that I’ve been looking at on white supremacists and neo Nazi websites for decades,” Levin said.
It’s not my place or intent to warn Black people about racism, because that would be ludicrous and insulting, but I’ll warn the rest of us because in the end, authoritarianism targets everyone. This video is a clear statement that Trump’s vision of America is one in which every non-white group, every vulnerable group really, is a second class citizen.
“He’s enabling an entire group of people who want to take this country back to a time when rampant violent white supremacy was enabled in the law,” Abdullah said. “What they mean is recapturing an old school, oppressive racism that is pre-1965 pre-Voting Rights Act.”
That message, Levin said, has “a resonance with a decent part of his base,” and when fed ceaselessly into the system, can have violent outcomes.
Levin uses the example of when Trump tweeted during the protests over the killing of George Floyd, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase with a violent and racist history.
Levin said Black people have always been the primary targets of hate crimes in the United States, but after that tweet, it was some of the “worst days” for violence aimed by race.
“When a high transmitter, like a president, circulates imagery with regard to prejudice, it creates these stereotypes and conspiracy theories, which then are the groundwork for further conspiracy theories and aggression,” he added.
Abdullah said she worries that even if the voter crackdown isn’t officially sanctioned, those empowered conspiracy theorists will take action anyway.
“So the people who are so-called ‘monitoring,’ self-appointed monitors … this is who’s going to be pulling people out of voter lines, and so this is what he’s whipping up intentionally,” she said.
Keep your eye on the ball, folks, because the far-right Republicans running the show are laser-focused on it. The midterm elections have to go their way for them to remain in power.
The easiest way to ensure that outcome is to only allow voters who see things their way.
For Mikayla Tencer, being self-employed already meant juggling higher taxes, irregular income and the constant pressure of finding her own health insurance. This year, it also meant rethinking how often she could afford to see a doctor.
The 29-year-old content creator in San Francisco paid $168 a month last year for a Blue Shield health plan through Covered California. This year — without enhanced federal subsidies that expired at the end of December — that same plan would have cost $299 a month, with higher copays.
“People assume that because I’m young, I can just pick the cheapest plan and not worry about it,” Tencer said. “But I do need regular care, especially for mental health.”
Tencer is among tens of thousands of middle-class Californians facing steep increases in health insurance costs after Congress allowed enhanced federal subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans to expire Dec. 31.
Those extra subsidies were enacted in 2021 as part of temporary, pandemic-era relief, boosting financial help for people buying coverage on state-run insurance marketplaces such as Covered California. The law also expanded eligibility to people earning more than 400% of the federal poverty level, about $62,600 for a single person and $128,600 for a family of four.
Mikayla Tencer records a TikTok video featuring eyeliners. Her blog showcases Bay Area attractions and local businesses.
(Paul Kuroda/For The Times)
With the expiration of the enhanced subsidies, people above that income threshold no longer receive federal assistance, and many who still qualify are seeing sharply higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs. On top of the loss of the extra federal benefits, the average Covered California premium this year rose by 10.3% because of fast-rising medical costs.
To lower her monthly bill, Tencer switched to the cheapest Covered California option, bringing her premium down to about $161 a month. But the savings came with new costs. Primary care and mental health visits now carry $60 copays, up from $35.
When she showed up for a psychiatric appointment to manage her ADHD and generalized anxiety disorder, she said, she learned her doctor was out of network.
“That visit would have been $35 before,” she said. “Now it’s $180 out of pocket.”
Because of the higher costs, Tencer said she has cut therapy from weekly to biweekly sessions.
“The subsidies made it possible for me to be self-employed in the first place,” Tencer said. “Without them, I’m seriously thinking about applying for full-time jobs, even though the market is terrible.”
For another self-employed Californian, the increase was even more dramatic.
Krista, a 42-year-old photographer and videographer in Santa Cruz County, relies on costly monthly intravenous treatments for a rare blood disorder. She asked that her full name not be used but shared her insurance and medical documents with The Times.
Last year, she paid about $285 a month for a Covered California plan. In late December, she received a notice showing her premium would rise to more than $1,200 a month. The rise was due to her loss of federal subsidies, as well as a 23% increase in the premium charged by Blue Shield.
“It terrified me. I thought, how am I ever going to retire?” she asked. “What’s the point?”
Krista ultimately enrolled in a plan costing about $522 a month, still nearly double what she had been paying, with a $5,000 deductible. She said she cannot downgrade to a cheaper plan because her clinic bills her treatment to insurance at roughly $30,000 a month, according to medical statements.
To cut costs and preserve the ability to save for retirement and eventually afford a place of her own, Krista decided to move into an RV on private land. The decision came the same week she received notices showing a rent increase and a steep jump in her health insurance premiums.
Mikayla Tencer, a marketing influencer, with her elder dog, “Lucky” at Alamo Square Park.
(Paul Kuroda/For The Times)
Krista said she had been planning for more than a year to find a long-term living situation that would enable her to live independently, rather than continue paying more for an apartment.
“Nobody asks to be sick,” Krista said. “No one should have their life ruined because they get diagnosed with a disease or break a leg.”
Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, said that about 160,000 Californians lost their subsidies when the enhanced federal assistance expired because their incomes were higher than 400% of the federal poverty level.
Although overall enrollment in Covered California this year has held steady, Altman said, she worries that more people will drop coverage as bills with the higher premiums arrive in the mail.
Those fears are already playing out.
Jayme Wernicke, a 34-year-old receptionist and single mother in Chico who earns about $49,000 a year, said she was transferred from Medi-Cal to a Covered California Anthem Blue Cross plan at the end of 2023. Her premium rose from about $30 a month to $60, then jumped to roughly $230 after the subsidies expired.
“For them to raise my health insurance almost 400% is just insane to me,” Wernicke said.
Her employer, a small family-owned business, does not offer health insurance. Her plan does not include dental or vision care and, she said, barely covers medical costs.
“At a certain point, it just feels completely counterintuitive,” she said. “Either way, I’m losing.”
Wernicke dropped her own coverage and plans to pay for care with cash, calculating that the state tax penalty is less than the cost of premiums. Her daughter remains insured.
Two other Californian residents told The Times that they also decided to go without coverage because they could no longer afford it. They declined to provide their full names, citing concerns about financial and professional consequences.
Under California law, residents without coverage face an annual penalty of at least $900 per adult and $450 per child.
One, a 29-year-old self-employed publicist in Los Angeles requires medication for epilepsy. Last year, she paid about $535 a month for a silver plan through Covered California. This year, the same plan would have cost $823.
After earning about $55,000 last year, she calculated that paying for care out of pocket would cost far less. Her epilepsy medication costs about $175 every three months without insurance, and her annual doctor visits total roughly $250.
“All of that combined is still far less than paying hundreds of dollars every month,” she said.
Another, April, a 58-year-old small-business owner in San Francisco, canceled her insurance in December after her quoted premium rose to $1,151 a month for a bronze plan and $1,723 for a silver plan, just for herself. Last year, April said she paid $566 for both her and her daughter. This year, her daughter’s premium alone jumped from $155 to $424.
The bronze plan also carried a $3,500 deductible for lab work and specialist visits, meaning she would have had to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket before coverage kicked in, on top of the higher monthly premium.
“The subsidies were absolutely what allowed me to sustain my business,” April said. “They were helping me sustain my financial world and have affordable care.”
She rushed to complete medical tests before dropping coverage and hopes to go a year uninsured.
“The scariest part is not having catastrophic coverage,” she said. “If something happens, it can be millions of dollars.”
Tencer, the content creator in San Francisco, believes that in order to make the nation healthier, affordable healthcare should be universal.
“Our government should be providing it.” she said. “People can’t go to the doctor for routine checkups, they can’t get things checked out early, and they can’t access the resources they need.”
WASHINGTON — President Trump shared a short video clip on social media late Thursday depicting former President Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes, drawing immediate public backlash that the White House characterized as “fake outrage.”
The image, which Trump posted on his official Truth Social account around midnight, was included toward the end of a one-minute video clip that promoted a conspiracy theory about voting irregularities in the 2020 presidential election. In it, the Obamas are portrayed as apes as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background.
The White House said the clip was taken from “an internet meme video,” in which Trump is depicted as a lion and several high-profile Democrats — including former President Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff and California Gov. Gavin Newsom — are rendered as giraffes, turtles, antelopes and other animals. The clip, which was shared by a social media account in October, is captioned: “President Trump: King of the Jungle.”
Only the image of the Obamas is included in the clip shared by Trump.
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement Friday.
The post, however, quickly drew fierce criticism from Democrats, some Republicans and civil rights organizations. The imagery was condemned for echoing long-standing racist tropes that have historically been used to demean Black Americans.
“Trump posting this video — especially during Black History Month — is a stark reminder of how Trump and his followers truly view people,” the NAACP wrote on X. “And we’ll remember that in November.”
Newsom, a Democrat, said it was “disgusting behavior by the president” to amplify such an image.
“Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” Newsom wrote on X.
Sen. Tim Scott, a Black South Carolina Republican who is the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said the image was “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
Everybody is talking about how the Trump administration is combining carrots and sticks in novel ways in its attempt to control Venezuela’s present and imminent future. But the stances that other governments around the world have taken after the bizarre reality that the US Navy choppers left behind is also worthy of a closer look.
Some governments have questioned Delcy Rodríguez’s legitimacy, or reaffirmed their support of the opposition victory in the 2024 election, while chavismo’s longtime allies and pragmatic regional partners have engaged with or recognized the interim government.
A pattern emerges: cautious engagement that aims to prevent a state of chaos that would make our country a more problematic place than it already is.
Neighbors Colombia and Brazil might favor the institutional continuity that Rodríguez offers, since the mayhem caused by a prolonged conflict would likely result in further migratory crises. China’s position appears to be financially driven, as the interest payments from Venezuela’s debt relied on oil shipments, which could be interrupted because of the increasing US involvement in the oil industry. In addition, it’s worth pointing out that Russia’s support is not as solid as previously considered, given statements by its ambassador that suggest broader divisions within of the chavista coalition.
Other governments framed their position along with their longstanding rejection of Maduro’s legitimacy and the electoral fraud of 2024. Most of their current leaders come from conservative parties and positioning themselves as actively anti-chavismo might perform well with their domestic constituencies. In addition, their response reinforced alignment with Washington, at a time in which US foreign policy became particularly focused on the region.
A third group opted for a delicate balancing act. While many support a democratic transition, they avoid endorsing Maduro’s removal, out of concern for future military interventions by the US, in particular because of Trump’s rhetoric on Greenland. These countries also emphasize elections and negotiated solutions. A notable addition of this group is Turkey, a longtime Maduro ally now seeking to preserve working relations with Washington amid shifting regional dynamics, particularly in Syria.
Colombia
Beyond “respecting” her swearing in, as stated by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rosa Villavicencio, President Petro’s administration has engaged in talks with Delcy Rodríguez and even suggested that there could be a meeting in Bogotá (although her government denied any imminent trips). On January 27th, Petro also demanded the return of Maduro and Flores, alleging that they were “kidnapped” and that they needed to face trial in Venezuela.
Brazil
Brasilia was quick to recognize Delcy Rodríguez as interim president. President Lula Da Silva condemned the military operation referring to it as an “unacceptable crossing of a line” and a “grave affront of sovereignty”. On January 9th, Rodríguez thanked Da Silva for his “support and solidarity.”
Nicaragua
In a statement during the UN’s Security Council meeting, that country’s representative condemned American military actions, recognized Delcy Rodríguez as interim president and called for the release of Maduro and Cilia Flores. The Rodríguez government also accepted the credentials of the new Nicaraguan ambassador Valezka López.
Cuba
In addition to confirming the deaths of 32 Cuban military officers during Maduro’s extraction, the Díaz Canel government remained supportive. In a speech condemning the attacks, the Cuban president said he was willing to give his “blood” for Venezuela. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez was seen in Caracas with Rodríguez in a memorial ceremony for the Cuban officers killed on January 3rd.
Russia
On January 6th, the Russian Foreign Ministry celebrated the appointment of Delcy Rodríguez and referred to it as a measure to safeguard stability amidst “neocolonial threats”. Moscow also called for the release of Maduro and Flores. Later, on January 25th, the Russian Ambassador in Venezuela, Sergey Melik-Bagdasarov, claimed that Maduro was betrayed by Venezuelan security officers.
China
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said her country “respected” the arrangement that led to Rodríguez’s swearing in. The Chinese ambassador Lan Hu in Caracas met with Rodríguez and stated that his country remains committed to Venezuela. Rodríguez thanked him for his support.
Mexico
On January 5th, President Claudia Sheinbaum condemned Maduro’s extraction, citing the country’s long standing rejection of foreign intervention. Mexico promoted a joint statement with Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Spain and Chile rejecting the military operation.
Spain
After “emphatically condemning” the US incursion, the Pedro Sánchez government saluted Delcy Rodríguez as its counterpart. Foreign minister José Manuel Albares said that, while they didn’t recognize the official results of the 2024 election, they were open to working with her administration. They also have been in contact with the opposition with the hopes of facilitating dialogue.
India
On January 4th, the Indian government expressed its concern over the situation in Venezuela and the “wellbeing of the people in Venezuela”. They called for peaceful and negotiated solutions. On January 30th, President Modi spoke with Rodriguez, referring to her as acting president and stating that both leaders would seek further cooperation between their countries.
Qatar
On January 10th, Delcy Rodriguez thanked the Kingdom of Qatar for facilitating the release of the first “proof of life” of Maduro. In addition, Qatari authorities said they were open to facilitate a dialogue for a peaceful resolution. The Rodríguez government also received the new Qatari ambassador, Salman Nabit Mubarak Abdullah.
Argentina
In an interview with Andrés Oppenheimer, President Javier Milei celebrated Maduro’s extraction and referred to it as a “liberation”. His government stated they trusted Trump’s transition plan towards democracy and peace.
Bolivia
In a statement on January 3rd, the Rodrigo Paz government released a statement showing support for “the Venezuelan people” in what he considered the beginning of a path of “recovery of his democracy” and considered “inescapable” that there is a “real democratic transition”. Shortly after Maduro’s removal, La Paz announced entry restrictions for individuals linked to chavismo.
Costa Rica
On January 5th, President Rodrigo Chaves emphasized that his country never recognized Maduro as a legitimate leader and expressed hopes that the political transition leads to democracy.
Dominican Republic
President Luis Abinader posted on X that his government was closely monitoring the events in Venezuela, and emphasized respect for the true results of the 2024 election. Foreign Minister Roberto Álvarez said they did not recognize Rodriguez’s government, but emphasized the need to re-establish consular relationships. Venezuela’s chancellor Yvan Gil announced that these relationships would be reactivated in the coming days after cutting ties in the aftermath of the 2024 electoral fraud.
Peru
Peruvian Interim President Jose Jerí had a phone call with Edmundo González, who the country recognizes as president elect. In a statement, his office said that he supported a political transition and hoped that the results of the 2024 election were respected.
Ecuador
Ecuador’s Foreign Affairs Office announced that it was restricting access to Venezuelans linked to the Maduro government. In addition, President Daniel Noboa celebrated the removal of Maduro by posting in his personal X account, “the time will come for all narco-chavista criminals. Its structure will end up falling all over the continent”. He also called for María Corina Machado and Edmundo González to take power. Noboa attended Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in December 2025.
Panama
President José Raul Mulino of Panama, who also attended the Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo, stated that his country does not intend to recognize Rodríguez as interim President.
Chile
President Gabriel Boric condemned the January 3rd attacks and called for a peaceful solution to the Venezuelan crisis. In a meeting at the UN Security Council, Chile’s representative stated that her country did not recognize the Maduro regime and also called for a peaceful and gradual transition process. President-elect José Antonio Kast, set to take office in March, celebrated Maduro’s capture in early January and called for regional cooperation to re-establish democracy and to “coordinate the safe and expeditious return of Venezuelans to their country.”
Paraguay
President Santiago Peña of Paraguay lamented the military incursion in the region, but stated that he didn’t see “any other alternative”. He called for a democratic resolution of the crisis and emphasized that Maduro’s removal was positive for the region. Peña also attended Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony.
Canada
Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney emphasized that his country has not recognized Maduro since the 2018 presidential vote, and voiced his support for a transition. However, he called for restraint and adherence among all actors involved.
Italy
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stated that she is monitoring the situation in Venezuela. In an X post, she celebrated the announcement of the release of political prisoners and hoped that Rodríguez would usher in a “new era of constructive relationships between Caracas and Rome”. The Rodriguez government also accepted the credentials of the new Italian ambassador, Giovanni Umberto De Vito and, with approval of the National Assembly, named Maria Elena Uzzo as the new ambassador to Italy.
United Kingdom
Prime Minister Keir Starmer released a statement on January 3rd celebrating Maduro’s removal and saying that his government will “shed no tears about the end of his regime”. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper reaffirmed support for a transition in a speech before the House of Commons, urging Rodríguez to take steps towards democratization.
Uruguay
Foreign Minister Mario Lubetkin stated on January 9th that his country does not recognize Delcy Rodríguez, arguing it had not extend such recognition to Maduro.
European Union
Annita Hipper, foreign affairs spokesperson for the European Commission, said the EU did not intend to recognize Rodríguez as interim president. In a press briefing, she emphasized that both Rodríguez and Maduro lacked electoral legitimacy. However, the European Commission has indicated it will maintain “limited contact” with Venezuelan officials.
Germany
While initially condemning Maduro, calling for a political solution and respect for international law, the Merz government stated it was still conducting a legal assessment of US actions. A spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs questioned Rodriguez’s legitimacy.
France
After political backlash caused by Macron’s initial reaction celebrating Maduro’s extraction and calling for Edmundo González to be sworn in, a French government spokesperson said the president remained neutral about the method used to remove Maduro, and continued calling for González to be sworn in.
Turkey
After Maduro’s removal, President Erdogan has remained moderately silent. In the direct aftermath of the extraction, his government called for restraint of all parties involved for the sake of regional safety in a statement. On January 5th, Erdogan stated that he brought up his criticisms of the military operation to Trump during a phone call.
NEW YORK — The Trump administration on Thursday launched TrumpRx, a website it says will help patients buy prescription drugs directly at a discounted rate at a time when healthcare and the cost of living are growing concerns for Americans.
“You’re going to save a fortune,” President Trump said at the site’s unveiling. “And this is also so good for overall healthcare.”
The government-hosted website is not a platform for buying medications. Instead, it’s set up as a facilitator, pointing Americans to drugmakers’ direct-to-consumer websites, where they can make purchases. It also provides coupons to use at pharmacies. The site launches with over 40 medications, including weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy.
The site is part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to show it’s tackling the challenges of high costs. Affordability has emerged as a political vulnerability for Trump and his Republican allies going into November’s midterm elections, as Americans remain worried about the cost of housing, groceries, utilities and other staples of middle-class identity.
Trump stressed that the lower prices were made possible by his pressuring of pharmaceutical companies on prices, saying he demanded that they charge the same costs in the U.S. as in other nations. He said prescription drug costs will increase in foreign countries as a result.
“We’re tired of subsidizing the world,” Trump said at the evening event on the White House campus that lasted roughly 20 minutes.
The administration is touting substantial discounts, though it’s unclear just how much impact the changes will have for family budgets. The site includes the disclaimer that prices “may be even lower” for people with insurance, as it lists the “out-of-pocket price.” Also, some consumers might be able to use available generics that cost less than brand-name medications.
Still, Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, hyped the website as being transformative. He said the lower prices for Ozempic and Wegovy would cause the country to collectively lose 100 million pounds this year. He suggested that lower prices for the fertility drug Gonal-F would trigger pregnancies nationwide.
“We’re going to have a lot of Trump babies with these costs,” Oz said.
The president first teased TrumpRx in September while announcing the first of his more than 15 deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices to match the lowest price offered in other developed nations. He said in December the website would provide “massive discounts to all consumers” — though it’s unclear whether the prices available on drugmakers’ websites will routinely be any lower than what many consumers could get through their insurance coverage.
The website’s Thursday release came after it faced multiple delays, for reasons the administration hasn’t publicly shared. Last fall, Oz told Trump the site would share prices for consumers before the end of the year. An expected launch in late January was also pushed back.
The president has spent the past several months seeking to spotlight his efforts to lower drug prices for Americans. He’s done that through deals with major pharmaceutical companies, including some of the biggest drugmakers like Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Merck, which have agreed to lower prices of their Medicaid drugs to so-called “most favored nations” pricing. As part of the deals, many of the companies’ new drugs are also to be launched at discounted rates for consumer markets through TrumpRx.
Many of the details of Trump’s deals with manufacturers remain unclear, and drug prices for patients in the U.S. can depend on many factors, including the competition a treatment faces and insurance coverage. Most people have coverage through work, the individual insurance market or government programs like Medicaid and Medicare, which shield them from much of the cost.
Trump’s administration also has negotiated lower prices for several prescription drugs for Medicare enrollees, through a direct negotiation program created by a 2022 law.
It was a war fueled by colonialism, launched with the intent of humiliating a weaker country, fought in the name of revenge and waged by a racist president.
So leave it to President Trump to spike the proverbial football over the U.S. victory 178 years ago in the Mexican-American War.
Abraham Lincoln first earned national attention by calling out President James K. Polk’s lies about the lead-up to the conflict, which lasted from April 1846 to February 1848, on the floor of Congress. Ulysses S. Grant called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged.” Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay “Resistance to Civil Government” was written partly in response to the Mexican-American War, which he decried as “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.”
Other American paragons of virtue who were publicly opposed at the time: William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass. Yet on Feb. 2, the anniversary of what Mexico calls the American Intervention, Trump declared that a war in which the United States conquered more than half of its southern neighbor for no reason other than it wanted to was a testament to “the unmatched power of the American spirit” and guided by “divine providence.”
And in case anyone was still wondering why Trump would feel fit to commemorate events that happened almost 200 years ago, he argued the job wasn’t done.
“I have spared no effort,” he blared, “in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction.”
No president since the Civil War has ever publicly bragged about the Mexican-American War in official proclamations. To do so would be rude, politically perilous, insulting to our biggest trade partner and just plain weird.
So of course Trump did it.
As I’ve repeatedly pointed out in my columnas, history is one of Trumpworld’s most important battlefronts. Like the pharaohs and emperors of antiquity, the president weaponizes the past to justify his present actions and future plans, omitting and embellishing events of yesteryear to fit a bellicose agenda. This is the guy, after all, who renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America with one of his first executive orders in his second term and has punished news agencies that refuse to comply.
Trump has shown a special obsession with the Mexican-American War and its architect, Polk. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the president saw his predecessor as a “real-estate guy,” which is like calling Josef Stalin an aficionado of big coats and bushy mustaches.
A former Tennessee governor and speaker of the House, Polk won the presidency in 1844 by promising to expand the United States by any means necessary. He annexed Texas despite the objections of the Mexican government, tried to buy Cuba from Spain and signed a treaty with Britain that secured for the U.S. what’s now Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming.
But the grand prize for Polk was the modern-day American Southwest, which he and his allies viewed as untapped land wasted on mixed-race Mexicans and necessary for the U.S. to fulfill its Manifest Destiny.
President Trump speaks as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador listens during an event in the White House Rose Garden on July 8, 2020.
(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)
He tried at first to buy the territory from Mexico; when the country refused, Polk sent troops to the Rio Grande and dared the Mexicans to attack. When they did, Polk went before Congress to seek a declaration of war, claiming Mexico had long inflicted “grievous wrongs” on Americans up to and including ripoffs and deaths and thus needed to be dealt with.
“We are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism,” the president said, “to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.”
No wonder Trump’s recent proclamation called the Mexican-American War “legendary.”
Polk brushed aside the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and secured land rights and American citizenship for Mexicans who decided to stay in their new country. Many of those Mexicans saw their property squatted on or seized by the courts of their new nation. Indigenous people saw their numbers plummet and their way of life obliterated. White settlers and corporations quickly swooped in to tap into the vast natural riches of these new territories, relegating the original inhabitants to being strangers in their own land.
No wonder Trump replaced a portrait of Thomas Jefferson in the Oval Office with one of Polk shortly after the start of his second term.
Trump has made expansionism a hallmark of his second presidential term, including trying to wrest Greenland from Denmark and constantly referring to Canada as the “51st state.” Critics accuse him of trying to usher in a new era of imperialism. But all he’s doing is continuing the Mexican-American War, which never really ended.
Americans have been skeptical of brown-skinned people since the days of the Alamo, always fearful Latinos are one step away from insurrection and thus must always be subjugated. My ethnic group has suffered lynchings, legal segregation and stereotypes that continue to the present day. This is the mindset and legacy Trump relies on for his deportation deluge, the playbook he uses to persecute undocumented people with demonizing language and wholesale lies.
Relations between the United States and Mexico will always be fraught — our relationship is just too complicated. But when another American president marked the hundredth anniversary of the Mexican-American War, his approach was far different.
In 1947, Harry S. Truman became the first U.S. commander in chief to visit Mexico City. At a state dinner at the National Palace, he acknowledged that “it would be foolish to pretend that fundamental differences in political philosophies do not exist” and euphemistically referred to the Mexican-American War as a “terrible quarrel between our own states.”
People visit the monument to the Niños Héroes (the Boy Heroes) at Chapultepec Park in Mexico City on Aug. 14, 2019.
(Rodrigo Arangua / AFP/Getty Images)
But Truman spent the rest of the speech preaching allyship in a new world where Mexico and the United States should see each other not as enemies but friends.
“Though the road be long and wearisome that leads to a good neighborhood as wide as the world, we shall travel it together,” Truman told the appreciative audience. “Our two countries will not fail each other.”
The following day, the president visited a shrine to the Niños Héroes — the Boy Heroes, six teenage military cadets who died in one of the last battles of the Mexican-American War and thus hold an exalted place in the Mexican psyche. Truman, to the surprise of his hosts, placed a wreath on the monument.
“Throughout the day,” the New York Times reported, “people shouted his name, with the inevitable ‘viva,’ wherever United States citizens appeared on the streets or in cafes.”
Today, “Viva” sure isn’t going to be a word Mexicans use if they utter Trump’s name.
