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We speak with the Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney about his new documentary Musk, an expansive, nearly four-hour examination of the world’s first trillionaire and how he has amassed unprecedented power in business, technology and politics. The film traces Elon Musk’s early ventures and the rise of SpaceX and Tesla, examining the role of government support in their growth. It also explores his acquisition of Twitter, now X; his alliance with President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement; and his role in the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, whose cuts devastated federal programs, including USAID.

Gibney says Musk has carefully crafted an image of a “polymath” who can solve the world’s most pressing problems, but that he is really “kind of a ruthless businessman” willing to do whatever it takes to succeed, including “a series of elaborate cons” to win government support for his companies.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we bring you Part 2 of our conversation with Alex Gibney, Academy Award-winning director. His new film is Musk.

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new Pentagon project on the future of warfare. Elon Musk will lead the task force along with former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Trump donor and weapons entrepreneur Palmer Luckey. This comes as The New York Times reports Musk has spent $366 million to help Republicans in the midterms. Now, according to NPR, SpaceX, Musk’s company, has secured over $8 billion in U.S. military contracts in this year alone. So, if he can keep the Republicans in power, $366 million is a small price to pay for that.

Can you comment on the power of Elon Musk?

ALEX GIBNEY: I mean, in a way, in the film, Musk texts to his then-girlfriend Ashley St. Clair he’s found an anomaly in the matrix. That refers to something else. But the anomaly in the matrix that Musk has found in the American political system is money. This is our great weakness. And now with an utterly transactional president and an administration that’s completely transactional, you get what you pay for. You put hundreds of millions of dollars into getting either Trump or Republicans elected, and you get paid back with enormous government contracts.

And SpaceX now, we must remember, is not only the ability to launch rockets; it’s also xAI, which is maybe the most flawed and most reckless frontier AI company that there is. But because Musk is a political contributor, he’s given a vast kind of subsidy for that flawed AI system. And indeed, you know, that system, we don’t know exactly how it’s being deployed, but it could be, as far as we know, being deployed for autonomous weapons, which is a really scary thought, since, you know, as we profile in the film, this is the — this is the AI that birthed a character online called “MechaHitler” and also, you know, introduced a product that was designed to undress young children for the amusement of pedophiles. So, this really — it’s a terrifying prospect, the idea that Elon Musk is being put in charge of the future of war. It’s a little bit like putting the Joker in charge of the Manhattan Project.

AMY GOODMAN: Actually, tell us about that incident where Grok adopted this Hitler persona. In fact, the Pentagon is using Grok.

ALEX GIBNEY: Indeed. So, I mean, you know, one of the things we all need to understand, or perhaps all of us know at this point, is that LLMs, like Grok or Claude or ChatGPT, you know, they sample a huge amount of data, and based on those samples, then they are able to feed back or to predict, you know, what you may or may not want to hear. But how they react and how they respond depends tremendously on the data that they sample. And so, you know, Musk was upset that his Grok was too woke, so suddenly he was feeding it more non-woke data, presumably stuff about Nazis, because if you feed it Nazi data, that’s what you get back in terms of a kind of a chatbot. And one day, you know, Grok, they sort of overtweaked the algorithm, and Grok was suddenly responding to everybody in a voice that was called MechaHitler.

AMY GOODMAN: So, AI, Elon Musk’s attitude toward artificial intelligence, if you can document it through time, and then what exactly xAI is doing and why it is so flawed?

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, it’s fair to say that Elon Musk was one of the first people to sort of warn the public at large about the existential threat of AI. He said it was “summoning the demon.” Now, even as he was warning that and starting a nonprofit called OpenAI, which was originally started as a nonprofit to explore AI in an ethical way, he was already pivoting at Tesla in terms of using AI in the Autopilot system of his cars, which, you know, we talked about earlier. It was flawed there, and over time, it’s become flawed even as he’s expanded his AI ambitions. And there was some thought that — early on, that Musk may have been warning about the dangers of AI because his AI companies were behind. In other words, then this would give him an opportunity to catch up.

Be that as it may, flash-forward a number of years, and suddenly, you know, Musk has a company called xAI, which he folds into SpaceX just before the IPO. And I think what’s interesting about xAI is, we know that by the number of people who rather publicly left the company, very high-ranking executives who were deeply concerned about the lack of safety at xAI, that it’s a very reckless product, far more reckless even than something like OpenAI. So, you know, it’s of enormous concern that that reckless AI program would be so fully integrated into our Department of Defense.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read to you from Time magazine, Alex. They said, “In December 2025, Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a clandestine meeting. Trump spent hours asking Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, questions about his presidency and legacy, according to an official present. … Trump … asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured” — you know, then-Venzuelan President Nicolás — “Maduro. According to the official present, the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. After Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro, the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious.”

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, yeah, I think that illustrates the flaw or the confusion that we’re all suffering now between what AI is telling us and also what human beings do with AI, either the people who are in charge of it or the people who fall under its sway. So, I think the flaw in the system there is President Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to go back, and in Part 1, you talked about reasons that Elon Musk might be investigated — in fact, investigations that were dropped into a number of his companies, in fact, criminal investigations of Elon Musk, and what’s at stake right now when we see this massive amount of money he’s poured into the midterms, like more than $360 million. Talk about what happened over the years and what he’s so afraid of.

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, we just know that there were ongoing — I’m not going to remember the exact number now, but it was double figures in terms of federal investigations into his companies. And these related to NLRB investigations. I believe there are EPA investigations relating to explosions of SpaceX rockets, a tremendous number of civil investigations into malfeasance by his companies. But there was at the heart — there was, in addition, a criminal investigation into fraud relating to Autopilot in likely — we don’t know precisely the parameters of the investigation. We know it was criminal. It was actually disclosed by Tesla, and Reuters wrote a number of pieces about it. So, he jokes with Tucker Carlson, in fact, just before the election, “Oh my god, if I don’t win, I wonder how long my prison sentence is going to be, haha haha,” which is a classic Elon trope, where everything is both deadly serious and a joke at the same time. But I think it’s fair to say that his companies were at risk, and he himself was at risk of going to prison, potentially. So, that investment in Trump’s election in 2024 was hugely motivated by self-preservation.

Now, flash-forward, and you see this pattern repeating itself with this now even larger amount of money flowing to the Republican Party prior to the midterm elections. And by the way, the stated number could be much smaller than the larger number, because it doesn’t even account for dark money groups that he may have, you know, thrown money to. But I think it’s — I think it’s fair to say that he anticipates that if the Democrats win the House and the Senate, that there are going to be a lot of investigations into Musk’s activity, including his activity at DOGE, not only in terms of the lives that were lost because of the sudden shutdown of something like USAID, but also, you know, what about that data? Did he access that data? Did he take it to SpaceX? What has he done with it, if he did? So, you know, he knows those investigations are coming, so he’s kind of desperate to make sure that Republicans win this time so he’s not held to account.

AMY GOODMAN: And desperate to colonize Mars, maybe another place to go in case he’s in trouble.

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, good luck with that. I mean, I think, you know, intellectually, he may feel that he can colonize Mars. That’s not happening. Anybody who realistically looks at the likelihood that he’s going to be able to, you know, have a million people on Mars, as he’s said is likely in the next few years, is high on their own supply.

AMY GOODMAN: What about your avatar, this very creative device you use? Because Elon Musk refused to talk to you, right?

ALEX GIBNEY: Elon Musk refused to talk to me, so we needed a workaround. And, of course, we could have just used archival clips, but I felt that, for all sorts of thematic reasons, it might be interesting and fun to go in a different direction. We assembled a massive database of everything that he had ever said — audio, video, outtakes from documentaries, all sorts of stuff. And then, one of the things that came up in that database was that he perseverated over and over and over again about this idea that we might be living in — or, we were likely living in a simulation, a simulation run by either an advanced AI or an alien civilization in the future, which had harvested all knowledge from planet Earth and was now running kind of an existential video game. So, he believes strongly that that is likely. So, given that, I thought, “OK, let’s play an Elon’s sandbox,” and we created an Elon Musk avatar to visually mouth his own words that we had collected and to substitute for an interview.

And we purposely designed it so that he, like I am doing now, is looking right into the barrel of the lens, looking, therefore, at the audience, and speaking things that he did in fact say. And we try to, you know, in terms of what he said, try to use statements that were forceful and also directly related to the subject at hand in the narrative. I thought it was important to do that not only because of this simulation idea, but when it comes to Musk, there is a constant blurring of what is real and what is unreal, and that this avatar would really reach into that idea. And going back to AI, I think that we’re all facing now this discomfiting notion that AIs learn to sort of guess what we’re thinking or imagining, and invest in trying to please us. And so, this kind of transference that takes place with a machine is also something that I thought might be interesting to explore by housing what Elon Musk says in an avatar. And by the way, I think you know, our avatar makes Elon look pretty good. I mean, he’s buff, a lot more buff than he’s looking right now. And it just seemed a kind of playful way to get at some of these issues that relate to Elon Musk’s troubled relationship with the truth.

AMY GOODMAN: What about with drugs? There is one reference to it, but according to The New York Times, Musk engaged in extensive drug consumption when one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, taking ketamine so frequently it caused bladder problems, traveling with a daily supply of something like 20 pills. What did you find?

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, we didn’t go too deep into that, except to, you know, remind people of The Wall Street Journal's reporting, which has not been undermined by anything that Elon Musk has said or done, which indicates that not only is he using ketamine, but he's also — there’s also a toxic mix of cocaine, LSD and a number of other drugs. So, this goes to the question of whether or not, you know, he’s stable. And if he’s self-medicating, is he self-medicating in a reckless way that is making his actions extremely erratic, chaotic? Add to that, you know, his obsession and addiction, I would say, with tweeting, sometimes tweeting as much as 150 times a day, on a platform which he himself has tweaked to become a kind of rage-inducing environment, and you have a very toxic stew. I think that’s the important thing to remember here.

AMY GOODMAN: You interview Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk. You don’t talk as much about Elon Musk’s background, growing up in South Africa, and his relationship with apartheid South Africa. Can you talk about that now?

ALEX GIBNEY: I mean, it’s a fact that he grew up in apartheid South Africa. I didn’t lean too deeply on it, except to say it’s part of this overall mix. You didn’t see so much of that surface during the Barack Obama administration, but you’re certainly seeing a lot of racist tweets from Elon Musk now. So, I think whether it’s because he has a newfound affinity for MAGA and is sort of embracing its worst values, or is it a hangover from his days in apartheid South Africa, it’s hard to be certain, except that we know the direction he’s going. And it’s not only a direction, you know, an increasingly racist direction, but also he’s investing in very violent, seemingly anti-immigrant political parties overseas — Tommy Robinson in the U.K., AfD in Germany — and also authoritarian regimes overseas. So, there is a kind of political project for him, but I think it does center around this notion that he wants to be able to favor the kind of people that he likes, and also he wants governments that are increasingly transactional.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, he went to Russia early on, you point out, when it came to SpaceX, wondering why the U.S. program and the rockets cost so much money, and so much less money in Russia. But I’d like to ask you about Russia and also Ukraine and Starlink. If you can talk about its significance and how he’s used his power with Starlink against Ukraine?

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, it’s interesting, because Starlink, I think you could fairly say, also greatly advantaged Ukraine. In fact, there are a number of Ukrainian military who talk about how Musk’s Starlink was hugely helpful to them on the battlefield. And yet we also know at critical moments that he was talking directly to Putin, and also shut down Starlink or refused to turn it on in the Crimea when — in Crimea, when, you know, Ukraine was about to launch an attack, and also in the Donbas at critical moments. I think the more — the most troubling thing about this whole episode is you have an individual, untethered from any government control, who’s personally deciding when and how the war should be fought in Ukraine. He’s a one-person foreign policy when it comes to Ukraine because of his control of this technology. To me, that’s the most troubling thing.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you explain what Starlink is, and also Starlink at the White House?

ALEX GIBNEY: So, Starlink is, effectively, a satellite internet system. In other words, instead of connecting to a coaxial cable somewhere or fiber lines, you literally have a dish that connects you with a satellite up above. And I should say that for airlines and for remote rural areas or for the battlefield in Ukraine, it’s an extremely effective technology. It’s not, in an urban environment, nearly as good as fiber, but Elon Musk is pushing it as if it is. And indeed, he’s got the State Department to sort of muscle governments overseas to buy Starlink, even though it’s not necessarily that effective in urban environments.

There’s a couple of interesting things about Starlink, though, that I think we should focus on. First of all, unlike the internet, where it’s end-to-end transmission, if you’re in, say — I don’t know — Omaha, and you’re sending an email to somebody in New York, your signal goes up to a satellite, goes to SpaceX, and then, from SpaceX, goes up to a satellite near New York, and then is beamed down. That’s very interesting, because it means all that data is flowing through SpaceX. And, of course, you know, as AI becomes better and better at foiling encryption, that could become increasingly problematic.

And that’s one of the things I thought that was problematic about the fact that during the Trump administration, suddenly there was a SpaceX technician — not a government technician, but a SpaceX technician — installing Starlink in the White House system. And I posit in the film: Was that so — you know, did that mean that now Elon Musk is listening to what the White House has to say? You know, because it wasn’t necessary for that to happen for the White House to have secure communication. In fact, it made the White House communication less secure.

ALEX GIBNEY: In fact, you have Ashley St. Clair raising the same kinds of questions when she talked about Elon Musk leaving early on election night, and when she said, “Do you know? It looks like he’s going to win,” and he said, “Yes, I know,” and referred to 10,000 lasers.

ALEX GIBNEY: In space, yeah, and that was referring to Starlink. I mean, that’s when he sent her a number of text messages saying, “I found an” — you know, when she was wondering how he could know for certain that Trump was going to win, well before, you know, it was announced by anybody, he said, “Well, I found an anomaly in the matrix. And after all, I have 10,000 lasers in space,” presumably referring to Starlink. Ashley said in text at the time, “I would ask more, but I don’t want to be deposed.” And Elon Musk responded back, “Wise.”

Now, we don’t know exactly what that meant, to be honest with you. And I extremely doubt that — and it’s been debunked, that Starlink could actually change votes. But it’s clear, or it seems clear, that he had unusual advance notice of who was going to win, in ways that should be concerning to us in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: You interview Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of his many children. He’s, as you call him, a pronatalist, at least 14 children that we know of. You also interview Justine Musk, who is the mother of Vivian Wilson, who is Elon Musk’s oldest and trans daughter, who he thoroughly rejected. Can you talk about that relationship and the belief that that may have led to his political transformation and his vicious attacks on what he calls anything woke?

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, I think you could say that the personal is political, and that the transition of his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, may have taken him down that political path. But I think it’s too simple to sort of blame his political transformation on that. He’s — it became a kind of — once he had started to go right, and I think he started to go right during the pandemic, you know, his anger over his child doing something that he didn’t like becomes part of his stated political project, and he starts launching anti-trans ads, and so forth and so on.

It’s very moving in the film to hear Justine Musk, Vivian Jenna Wilson’s mother, talk about how, you know, this is a child, you know, because Musk had famously said, “My son Xavier is dead,” using the deadname for Vivian. And Justine Musk in the film talks very movingly about how, you know, that was hard for her to hear, because they themselves had gone through the death of a child, one of — their first kid died of SIDS, and that this is not the death of a child. Vivian Jenna Wilson is a dynamic young woman who’s a very, you know, interesting character. This is a child growing up. And inevitably, when children grow up, they move away from their parents, and that’s part of the growing up process. So, Musk’s — you know, he is obsessed with maintaining control over his personal relationships, and also that kind of personal obsession with control is something that you see spill out into his professional enterprises, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: As we begin to wrap up, talk about Musk’s fury when you call X “Twitter.” Right? He took — he bought Twitter and renamed it X. You show him throwing out — his people throwing out the bird, and his rage when he tweeted something that President Biden also tweeted about, but Biden got more views than Musk did, and that’s what ignited his fury.

ALEX GIBNEY: It’s so interesting, the purchase of Twitter, because I think, in some ways, he made an offer for Twitter almost as a kind of a joke. You know, his — Talulah Riley, his wife or his girlfriend at the time — I can’t remember exactly the timing — said, you know, “What they’re doing there is not free speech. You should take it over.” So he launches a bid, way overpriced, but because he was so reckless with his bid, he was forced to live up to the bid that he made. He buys it, almost destroys it by firing 80% of the workforce, but then discovers that he has this propaganda platform, and he begins to tweak it.

And one of those key moments when he starts to tweak it to become increasingly a propaganda platform is he and Biden are both tweeting over the Super Bowl, because they were both interested in the Philadelphia Eagles. But Biden is getting much more engagement online than he is. So, he immediately flies into a rage. He flies his private jet back to San Francisco, and he gets the engineers to work through the night to tweak the algorithms at Twitter, or X. And so, the next morning, everybody woke up and looked on their phones, and all they could see were Elon Musk tweets, you know, because he had overdone it, just the way he overdid it with MechaHitler.

But you can see how these social media platforms work. You know, you can tweak them to get what you want. And suddenly he realized, “Oh my gosh, this is the opportunity to remake Twitter into a — into X, which is now going to become my personal propaganda platform, that I will also, you know, put at the service of various foreign dictators.”

AMY GOODMAN: Alex Gibney, what most shocked you in this investigation you have done, in this documentary you have made about Elon Musk?

ALEX GIBNEY: Perhaps the thing that shocked me the most is an interview, an archival interview, that we included toward the end of the film. There is an interviewer who’s asking Elon Musk, when he’s talking about the sort of the fully integrated power that he now commands with Starlink and SpaceX and xAI and X, you know, why that globe-encircling power is so important to him. And Musk stumbles. I mean, you know, over a minute, a minute and a half, he literally can’t answer the question. It reminded me of when, long ago, somebody asked Ted Kennedy, “Why are you running for president?” He couldn’t answer. But here you have a man with maybe, arguably, except for Donald Trump, more power than anybody on the planet, and he can’t answer the fundamental question of why. So, that’s power not only without accountability, but without reason. And that, to me, was the most chilling thing that I discovered.

President Donald Trump has been extremely powerful since the start of his second term due in part to the compliance of the Republican-controlled Supreme Court and Congress. Democrats hope that they can rein Trump in by first taking over Congress and then appointing more Supreme Court justices — but a Supreme Court expert is arguing that, at least while Trump is in office, there is not in fact much they can do to stop him.

"Democrats controlled the House in the last two years of Mr. Trump’s first term, and he was able to stonewall most attempts at meaningful oversight," wrote The New York Times' Jeffrey Toobin on Sunday. "He refused to comply with subpoenas and fought enforcement in the courts, where he exploited the inevitable delays that come with appeals to run out the clock on his term."

Toobin added, "To cite just two examples, the House Oversight Committee sued over access to information about the census, and the case ended with President Joe Biden providing the information over two years later. The Ways and Means Committee sued to obtain Mr. Trump’s tax returns, and the Biden administration settled that case, too — nearly four years after it began."

In addition to Congress lacking the tools to force Trump to work with them, the Supreme Court has empowered Trump more than any president in American history, Toobin wrote.

"Even better for President Trump, the law is now more skewed toward the executive branch, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. United States," Toobin wrote. "Its main holding was that former presidents, including Mr. Trump, enjoy absolute criminal immunity for actions in connection with their core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts. In short, the president could not be criminally prosecuted for any 'official' actions he undertook while in office."

Toobin continued, "There is also language in Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion that suggests the president cannot even be investigated for his official actions."

Toobin even said that Congress, though empowered to defund the war in Iran, cannot automatically end it through this action.

"But even that power has important limitations," Toobin said. "Congress cannot usually block the use of previously appropriated dollars, and given the vast size of the Pentagon budget, the administration can surely use existing funds to keep paying for that war. Even more to the point, the federal budget — with any restrictions that Democrats might seek to attach — is subject to a presidential veto. Following any plausible outcome of the midterms, the chances are remote that two-thirds of the lawmakers in each house will vote to override any of President Trump’s vetoes."

Toobin said that the only way to address this is to stop Republicans from retaining control of the Supreme Court.

"When Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016 with nearly a year left in President Barack Obama’s term, Senator Mitch McConnell, then the leader of the Republican majority, refused to hold hearings or a vote on Mr. Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Democrats can — and must — return the favor if Mr. Trump tries to fill a seat on the court in his final two years in office," Toobin wrote. "Democrats should exercise that power because it’s the right thing to do, but also because they are going to have little power to do much else."

Earlier in October, however, Toobin expressed alarm that the Supreme Court seems to plan on allowing Trump to decide who gets to vote in the 2028 presidential election.

"Last month, the Supreme Court gave tentative approval to one of the administration’s attempts to ferret out improperly registered voters, including noncitizens," Toobin wrote at the time for The New York Times. "The Department of Homeland Security decided to expand a database called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, which for almost four decades has allowed federal, state and local government agencies to verify the citizenship and immigration status of noncitizens applying for public benefits using biographic and other details. Under the Trump expansion, the database added Social Security records, and the administration invited localities to use it to make bulk demands to determine eligibility for voting, not just benefits."

Elizabeth Holmes, the famously eccentric billionaire now serving an 11-year prison sentence for fraud, is fascinating less because of her crimes than because of the mystery surrounding her perception of them. Scams in health companies are a dime a dozen, and Holmes' Theranos is notable only because it targeted many of the rich and powerful. Yet Holmes stands out for another reason: She doggedly insists that she is wrongly accused.

In "You Can See Everything," a documentary co-directed by and starring Nathan Fielder as he receives unfettered access to Holmes shortly before she goes to prison, does not illuminate the mystery behind Holmes. At the end, she stands as staunchly as ever by not only her self-proclaimed innocence, but by other questionable aspects of her past — and, for that matter, her current life choices. Instead "You Can See Everything" is intriguing precisely because it never reveals anything about Holmes. It simply shows her as she is, and then gives the viewer enough distance from the subject to encourage them to reach their own conclusions.

But that is not all it does. Part-way through the film, Holmes begins her prison sentence, but the story is far from over. Her husband Billy Evans makes a long-foreshadowed heel turn, exercising controlling behavior over Holmes and causing Fielder and actress Amanda Seyfried, who plays Holmes in the mini-series "The Dropout," to accuse Evans of exploiting her. Like its analysis of Holmes' self-honesty, "You Can See Everything" never resolves the questions about the Holmes-Evans relationship. It merely observes from a distance, or with Seyfried cleverly and uncannily reprising her role as Holmes.

The most important theme of "You Can See Everything" is that objective reality is never particularly important to the people with the most power. They occupy a world in which merely believing something to be true often seems to literally make that things true. When we see Holmes display these delusional traits in the lead-up to her prison sentence, it becomes easy to see how she could create a multibillion dollar company based on a promise — that it could run comprehensive blood tests with just a few drops of blood — that she never had the ability to deliver on.

Because people like Holmes continue to exert power over our lives, "You Can See Everything" winds up being about a lot more than one particular scammer. Holmes embodies the sense of entitlement and willful delusions of that class of humanity that can create mega-corporations based on hype. We see it in AI CEOs who continue to develop a technology that they plausibly believe could destroy humanity, or at least create an uninhabitable economy. We see it also in the MAHA movement, which perhaps not surprisingly has embraced Holmes' victim narrative. As Kathryn Olivarius, a historian at Stanford University writing a book on the MAHA movement, told Politico last year that "she’s such a perfect martyr for this. It feels almost inevitable that this would happen.There’s something in her story for everyone in this movement… You can always frame it so that you know she’s somehow being victimized here.”

Before reporters at The Wall Street Journal and federal investigators exposed her, Holmes had caused massive unnecessary suffering. Theranos falsely reported miscarriages, recommended blood-thinners for a patient who ddi not need them and diagnosed patients incorrectly with deadly ailments like prostate cancer and heart attacks. While the scope of Theranos' crimes will likely never be known, Arizona found that roughly 10 percent of its blood test results had to be corrected or voided from 2013 to 2016. Holmes also squashed dissenters and whistleblowers and harmed businesses like Walgreens and Safeway that trusted her. Holmes and her business partner Sunny Balwani were later ordered to pay roughly $452 million in restitution jointly or separately, of which almost $398 million went to losses from 12 Theranos investors.

There were harsh real-world consequences for Holmes' delusions, and "You Can See Everything" to its credit never loses sight of that. Quite to the contrary, it tries almost desperately to get Holmes to accept accountability, to show sincere empathy in any meaningful way to her victims. The task is doomed to failure, though — even Fielder seems painfully aware of that — and this movie tells the story of the entertaining way it is unable to get a scammer to see straight.

Full disclosure: When I discuss "The Handmaid's Tale," I'm describing the 2017-2025 TV series and not the 1985 novel. While I immensely respect Margaret Atwood both as an artist and as a political/social critic, I confess that reading "The Handmaid's Tale" remains on my bucket list.

Yet none of this means I can't effectively describe how "The Handmaid's Tale" is relevant to the present: While I can't determine if the TV series is better than book, I join millions who only saw the former in saying it makes recognize just how disturbingly it foresaw President Donald Trump's America.

First, there is the misogyny, one that does not spare even women who back Trump. Thanks to Trump's policies, women have lost the constitutional right to an abortion, found it harder to seek protections from harassment and abuse at the workplace and making it harder for low-income families to receive reproductive and cancer-related health care. The premise of "The Handmaid's Tale also strikes a chord for another, more scientifically inescapable reason. Even though Trump supporters urge increased procreation to address falling fertility rates, they refuse to accept that the president's opposition to environmental regulations is precisely why sperm counts are dropping in the first place. From pesticides to plastic pollution, corporations dump chemicals known as "endocrine disruptors" into our ecosystem, so much so that every human being alive has at least a handful of microplastics and pesticide chemicals in their bodies.

Is it that much of a stretch to see the leaps from this political movement and set of environmental circumstances, and the plight of the women in Gilead?

Show creator and executive producer Bruce Miller has openly acknowledged that the TV show leans into themes about humans being irresponsible with our scientific knowledge.

"The background noise of the book is all the things we’re talking about now," Miller told Variety in 2020. "They’re functions of climate change. We’re seeing diseases that are a condition of climate change and lack of sustainability. COVID is an example of that. In the book, it’s a plague of sexually transmitted diseases. The shifting foundation of the environment is very much underneath what’s happening in Gilead."

Of course, in "The Handmaid's Tale," the same misogynists who brutalized and controlled women in order to address their fertility crisis at least understood that plastic and pesticide pollution, climate change and other unsustainable environmental practices are dangerous. In the Trump world, the misogynists refuse to stop the use of chemicals destroying our species' collective sperm count.

"Gilead is a counterpoint to what else is going on," Miller said. "One of the things we try to show is that Gilead often has noble goals even though they have absolutely horrendous ways of trying to reach them. They’d like to clean up the environment. They believe that from a religious point of view, the earth is a gift from God. A lot of the show is about how Gilead has made progress in sustainability. Almost all the cars are hybrid in Gilead. That means for us that road noise in the sound mix is much lower because those cars are quieter. … Every year we try to add a few more birds to the mix of bird sounds on the show. Bird populations that had been suppressed would be starting to come back in Gilead. You want the birds to sound like what it would if the earth was a little more sustainable."

He concluded, "What we’re showing in Gilead is a fascist totalitarian reaction to a real problem."

In short, we may be headed toward a future like "The Handmaid's Tale," but worse.

President Donald Trump is struggling in the polls right now due to the economy — but not, as it turns out, due only to inflation.

"Inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, had fallen to about 3 percent when Mr. Trump returned to office, from a peak of 9 percent in 2022," New York Times' chief economics correspondent Ben Casselman wrote on Sunday. "Most economists expected it to drop further."

Casselman added, "Instead, progress stalled in 2025, partly because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs, which drove up prices of many imported goods. Then, just as the tariff effect was beginning to fade, Mr. Trump led the United States into war with Iran, which pushed energy prices and inflation back up. Consumer prices were up 3.7 percent in September from a year earlier."

Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told Casselman that “voters had the sense that President Biden’s policies were leading to higher prices, and voters have the sense that President Trump’s policies are leading to higher prices now. In both cases, I think voters made the right judgment.”

"Gas prices are just the most visible piece of a broader affordability challenge," Casselman wrote. "Record prices for diesel fuel are threatening to ripple through to food and other goods. The artificial intelligence boom has led to a surge in demand for computer chips and related equipment, which has raised costs for smartphones, tablets and other consumer electronics. And some economists say they believe companies are still waiting to pass along some of the cost of tariffs to customers."

Trump's trade war with Canada is particularly responsible for recent price increases, as America's longtime ally is retaliating against Trump's rhetoric and practices by slapping tariffs on a wide range of commonly-consumed goods. He has also exacerbated inflation by invading Iran, which has retaliated by closing down the Strait of Hormuz and thereby driving up oil prices.

“What Navarro said kind of demonstrates that he doesn't understand markets,” Dr. Robert J. Shapiro, a former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, told AlterNe in March. “If there is a risk premium, it's only for oil futures — not for the price of oil today, not for the spot price — and then only when the risk is imminent. And so the price of oil rose by $10 in the runup to the launch of the war on Iran, which shows that it's not baked in.” Laughing, Shapiro added “these are commodities that are bought, sold and traded every day. They have a daily price, and the price reflects the supply and demand that day — and indeed in the morning, midday, afternoon or evening. So the notion that it was already built in is also clearly refuted by the fact that the price rose."

Conservative pundit and Dispatch Editor-in-Chief Jonah Goldberg says he’s figured out one of President Donald Trump’s most fatal flaws: he’s an entertainer, not a president.

“What I mean is that if you start to see your job as telling fans what they want to hear, you risk becoming an entertainer rather than a thinker, and eventually you become a caricature,” said Goldberg in the Fulcrum.

It’s the Trump trap that’s also managed to nab the careers of once-respectable conservative pundits, said Goldberg.

“In journalism — or what passes for it — you can see the same arc most acutely in talk radio and TV hosts, who define their roles as telling the audience what it wants to hear rather than what it needs to hear,” said Goldberg. “In the early Trump era, many prominent pundits were fairly conventional conservatives. When the audience veered towards populism and MAGA, the hosts followed [them],” in pursuit of an audience.

But that’s just entertainers. The situation gets worse when an entertainer takes that route to politics.

“Politicians often are captured by their true-believing base,” said Goldberg. “It’s most commonly seen among ‘conviction’ politicians, who make a name for themselves on a single issue or idea. Congressman and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s deep populist support was enough to earn him the Democratic nomination three times (1896, 1900 and 1908), but his support wasn’t wide enough to ever win.”

The same held true for segregationist candidates like George Wallace, socialists like Norman Thomas, and Patrick Buchanan. Sarah Palin, Bernie Sanders, Kari Lake and Ron Paul represent more recent cautionary tales, he said.

The trap is sweetened by ego, he warned, and some egos are bigger than others by far: “Politicians see huge crowds or read favorable media coverage and assume their people are the people.”

Lake, for example, thought she didn’t need John McCain Republicans to win her 2022 bid for an Arizona U.S. Senate seat. Nor did she think she needed support from the Democrats and independents who voted for McCain, because she mistook “intensity of support for quantity of support.”

But MAGA are loud. They are not plentiful.

“Jesse Watters, a reliable water-carrier for President Trump, is Fox News’ most popular prime-time host, averaging about 2.7 million viewers per night,” said Goldberg, but that means on any given night, roughly 346 million Americans aren’t watching. “But if you’re Trump, you might think Watters is representative of the American people.

Watters’ audience matters because GOP primary voters and small donors are more likely to watch his show, but he said primary voters are a small fraction of the greater electorate.

Still, politicians like Trump are orienting themselves to “small, intense slices of the electorate,” said Goldberg. And the polarizing dynamic is further intensified by social media.

“Politicians and activists mistake the ‘vibes’ of X and TikTok for the real world. They become intensely ‘online’ and responsive to the feedback they’re fed by social media algorithms,” Goldberg said.

President Donald Trump's White House is once again embroiled in chaos after the abrupt departure of his new press secretary, and now, his one-time biographer has predicted the "inevitable" next firing from the administration.

Within the span of a work week, right-wing commentator Katie Zacharia made her debut as White House press secretary in a disastrously bad briefing, was caught out for false claims about being a lawyer and was pushed out of the office after just five days. The whole affair exposed a new storm of chaos underway within the White House, with subsequent reports suggesting that Trump hired Zacharia without input from Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and might now be looking to replace Wiles herself.

Michael Wolff is a longtime author and reporter, best known for his extensive coverage of Trump's political career, including a handful of books about his hectic first term. In the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, he and co-host Joanna Coles discussed the continued fallout from Zacharia's firing, with Wolff arguing that what happened to her ultimately was not her own fault.

"Poor Katie Zechariah. It's not really her fault. It's Donald Trump's fault," Wolff said. "He picked her out of nowhere without preparation. Was she a lawyer? Was she an attorney? What is the difference between lawyer and attorney? What are those bar exams in China like? So, no one has clearly asked those questions, because Trump said, 'Oh, yeah, look, I like the way she looks.'"

Wolff further explained that the president's decision to go around Wiles in hiring Zacharia was another sign that "Trump wants Trump in charge," and "resents" the suggestion that anyone else but him is running the shop in the White House. Looked at from that angle, he also suggested that the whole ordeal makes it clear that there is a better-than-good, almost "inevitable" chance that Wiles will be the next person from the Trump administration.

"I would say it's a pretty good chance, maybe a fair chance... and maybe inevitable that Susie Wiles goes," Wolff said.

Wolff later dismissed Coles' suggestion that Wiles might throw her support behind Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a 2028 presidential contender, potentially making her the first "chief of staff to two different presidents." He also added during this exchange that a surprising member of Wiles' family has emerged as a major force in the Trump White House.

"She's brought her daughter into her orbit," Wolff explained. "And her daughter has become a kind of a, you know, a power within the White House, within the Trump circle. Someone you don't want to cross is Susie Wiles' daughter."

Recent reports have suggested that Katie Wiles maintains close relationships within Russia by way of her political lobbying firm, Continental Strategy.

President Donald Trump made the rather alarming admission about suffering from some "very severe problems" with his health, and now, a psychologist has weighed in with evidence for what some of those problems could be.

Trump's comments came during a Rose Garden event at the White House on Thursday, while he was discussing his lifelong abstention from things like alcohol and smoking, claiming that it had spared him from the health problems that his friends have begun to struggle with in their old age.

"But if you don't drink, or if you don't take drugs, or if you don't smoke, there's no problem," Trump said. "I have other problems. I have some very severe problems. But those are not one of them. I don't want to add them to the list."

The comment sparked considerable alarm, given the mounting public concern about Trump's declining health and fitness for office. While the White House has publicly disclosed some health conditions that the president struggles with, it has also frequently shut down rumors about his health and insisted that he is in good condition for his age.

Dr. John Paul Garrison is a clinical and forensic psychologist with a specialty in body language, who also makes a series of YouTube videos in which he uses his professional insights to examine the behavior of public figures. Many of his recent videos have concerned Trump, with Garrison suggesting that the president is suffering a severe decline, possibly accelerated by a stroke.

Based on Trump's "severe problems" comment, Garrison examined some of his recent public appearances for evidence of what these issues might be, but also noted that the admission itself seemed to be the result of his recent issues with impulsivity. Shortly after making the comments, Trump already appeared to be "backpedaling," suggesting that he knew that he had said something he should not have. This loss of impulse control, Garrison has noted in the past, is consistent with certain forms of cognitive decline.

"As I've said on many videos recently, he is impulsive," Garrison explained. "He makes statements without thinking. And this is one of the rare times he's really talking about himself and providing information that people don't already have. So, immediately upon reflecting on it, when he took just a second to think about what he just said, now he's starting to backpedal."

While backpedaling, Trump also started to compliment members of the media, something he has very rarely done, preferring to attack them as "fake news." In that instance, while he was feeling vulnerable, Garrison suggested that this change in approach suggested that there was some truth to what he admitted.

"Another thing that I want you to pay attention to is how wide open his arms are when he said that. That does suggest, right now, as he's talking about this, he is very open," Garrison added. "He is very vulnerable as he's talking about this. And as I said, this was an impulsive decision to state this."

Moving on to footage from another event where Trump received an honor from firefighters, Garrison highlighted more of his "unusual behaviors," including his continuing struggles with involuntary spasms. Several times throughout this event, the president seemed to suffer from minor and "more significant" spasms, including one where he seemed to jerk backwards. Garrison also spotted a potential tell from Trump signaling when he suffers a spasm.

"Now, this behavior may just be a coincidence, but I have noticed it a number of times before there is a significant spasm," Garrison said. "Sometimes he does look out and look at cameras, or there may be somebody he's looking at off camera. But this look right here, I've seen a number of times before he has a noticeable spasm."

Nothing that any Democrat or enemy of Donald Trump has ever said about his MAGA supporters has ever shown more genuine "contempt" for them than the president himself shows, according to one prominent New York Times columnist, and there is a very important reason why they let him get away with it.

In one of his most recent "Takes" videos shared to YouTube, liberal Times columnist Jamelle Bouie highlighted a "striking" recent remark Trump made during one of his ongoing midterm political rallies. In the exchange, while remarking on the "love" he felt from the gathered crowd in Clarksville, Tennessee, Trump claimed, "I could say the stupidest things, and you clap."

Bouie suggested that this comment was directly tied to the same mindset that led Trump to infamously claim during his first presidential campaign that he could "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and not lose any voters. This sort of thinking, he argued, exposed the deep well of contempt he has for his most devoted followers, showing how little he thinks of their morals and intelligence.

These sorts of comments are also, Bouie added, far worse than anything that Democrats have ever said about Republican and MAGA voters. He singled out three specific examples of remarks from former President Barack Obama, former First Lady Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden that got them in considerable hot water, despite the fact that the context around the comments made them far more respectful than the things Trump has said about his own backers.

Obama, during his first presidential campaign in 2008, was attacked as "elitist" for claiming that rural voters clung to "guns and religion," despite the fact that he was saying so with sympathy, explaining that they were taking comfort in concrete things as the world changed around them. Clinton, during her 2016 campaign, was attacked for calling Trump supporters "a basket of deplorables," even though, in her full remarks, she made a clear distinction between reasonable Trump supporters and those who backed him out of shared bigotries. Biden, finally, was criticized for supposedly calling Trump supporters "garbage," though he was doing so in reference to backers like comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage."

"You could play this game all day long," Bouie said. "Nothing Democrats have said about Trump or his supporters really matches what Trump himself has said about them. Why it doesn't register like that is, in part, the double standard that exists: Republicans are effectively allowed to talk trash about large swaths of the public, and Democrats have to defer endlessly out of a sense that they don't really represent 'Real America,' no matter how many real Americans call themselves Democrats."

He added: "And part of this is just the way that the political media does treat Republicans is almost as a force of nature, something that you can't expect to be better. But either way, it's striking. It's striking the level of contempt that Donald Trump has for his voters. It's striking, the level of contempt that Republican politicians show for their voters, where they will tell them all kinds of insane falsehoods and expect them to be lapped up with no obstacle."

Bouie further argued, however, that it "takes two to tango" in this odd dynamic, and suggested that the real reason Republicans are able to get away with treating their supporters poorly is that those supporters are aware of the dynamic, and let it play out that way.

"The fact these voters eat up this contempt, don't seem bothered by it, is instructive as well because it's telling you that they're not really voting for Trump or supporting Trump for respect or for recognition," he concluded. "Because they understand that even if he doesn't respect them, they share hatreds, and those shared hatreds are what absolutely matter the most."

President Donald Trump's latest pro-Russia betrayal has left several Republicans fed up, per a report from The Hill, with lawmakers calling the move "unconscionable" and "beyond irresponsible," and suggesting that one of Trump's late allies would be "appalled" by it.

In his latest move supporting Russia and Vladimir Putin, Trump on Friday signed an executive order that would exempt Russia from sanctions imposed by a recent "legislative package," which were meant to increase the economic pressure on the country and push it to end the war in Ukraine. In response, several Republican lawmakers broke with the president and attacked the decision to let Russia off the hook as baffling and morally indefensible.

“I am hereby waiving the application of such sanctions, restrictions, and duties provided for in the Graham Act,” Trump said in the order. “I have submitted to the Congress a certification that the issuance of such a waiver at this time is in the national interests of the United States.”

The bill, which Trump signed into law last month, was meant to impose tariffs on the top five nations importing energy from Russia, as well as any other nations helping Russia avoid economic sanctions, and passed in the Senate with considerable bipartisan support. The bill was named in honor of Sen. Lindsey Graham shortly after his death, as he had been one of its major backers and announced breakthrough support for it from the White House just before he passed away suddenly in July.

"What part of enforcing a law passed 86-11 by the Senate does the President and his advisors not understand?" North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, a noted critic of Trump, posted on his official X account. "It’s unconscionable that this administration is capitulating to a Russian dictator who illegally invaded Ukraine and butchers innocent civilians every single day."

Another Trump nemesis in the Senate, GOP Texas Sen. John Cornyn, added in his own social media post Saturday that "Lindsey [Graham] would be appalled."

"The President is prolonging the war, not ending it," Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon posted in response to the executive order news on Friday.

Trump's decision got surprising support, however, from Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who has frequently attacked many of the president's other moves and lost his reelection primary this year to a Trump-backed challenger. Massie was notably one of the few Republicans who voted against the bill in the first place

"Glad to see Trump has used the executive authority granted to him by Congress to waive almost all of the provisions of this stupid law that pertain to Russia," Massie wrote in a post to social media.

Massie also notably spoke in support of Trump's recent deal to import diesel fuel from Russia.

Months after President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of convicted GOP lawmaker George Santos, Santos is angling for Trump’s PR position, reports The Hill.

Santos pitched himself on Friday to fill the vacancy abruptly abandoned by White House press secretary Katie Zacharia, despite Santos pleading guilty to two felony counts of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in 2024.

“Hey I’m not technically open for a job because I have one already…. butttttttt… I’d jump to serve POTUS as press secretary in a heartbeat. Just saying,” the former Republican lawmaker wrote on the social platform X.

His pitch on X drew a myriad of responses. Many critics on X warned Santos that he would probably break Zacharia’s record for shortest Trump administration employment since former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci. Others, including many Democratic operatives and liberal allies, beckoned him to officially pursue the plan, and they hoped he got it.

Continuing his pattern of pardoning allies, Trump commuted the prison term of Santos in 2025. At the time he was less than three months into a seven-year sentence for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. In commuting his sentence, Trump also saved Santos from having to pay $370,000 in court-ordered restitution to victims of his fraud.

Trump’s commutation followed a series of high-profile acts of clemency. Most notorious among these was his blanket pardon of more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, for which “the president — himself a 34-count convicted fraudster — was impeached for a historic second time,” wrote Common Dreams author Brett Wilkins.

“… [A]t least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Trump argued at the time, which prompted critics like Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) to call it “naked corruption.”

“Trump says it plainly: Crimes don’t count if you ‘vote Republican.’ Just like his pardons of those who violently attacked police,” Beyer wrote on social media at the time.

Zacharia, a right-wing commentator and one-time advisor linked to Truth Social, was out after a disastrous, widely mocked first and only press briefing in which she took few questions and struggled with public speaking basics. Falsely claiming to be a lawyer was another point against her.

The Hill reports Santos slammed Fox News host Sean Hannity after the anchor grilled Zacharia about her legal background during a Thursday interview, accusing Hannity of thinking “you are untouchable and like to sit high on your horse and judged people.”

Santos also asked people who watched Hannity’s show to “unfollow” his X account.

With the latest "No Kings" day of nationwide protests against President Donald Trump upon us, a new piece from MS NOW argued that their continued absence from such events is proving that many anti-Trump Republicans are all talk and no action.

In a new piece published Saturday morning, MS NOW senior editor and columnist Anthony L. Fisher argued that while the No Kings movement has provided a meaningful outlet for busy everyday Americans to take part in demonstrations against Trump, he still could not help but feel "underwhelmed" by the continued absence of "a certain subset of Americans" from the events. This cohort of voters, "right-of-center voters that are more loyal to the Constitution than to Trump," seems to exist according to recent polling, but is continually failing to rise to the occasion, as they seem to "lack the courage to stand up and be counted in public."

"A Fox News poll conducted between Oct. 9-12 found that among self-identified MAGA Republicans, Trump’s approval rating is 95 percent — a figure that would make most dictators blush," Fisher explained. "Meanwhile, among Republicans who don’t self-identify with the cult of Trump, the president is underwater: 47 percent approve, while 52 percent disapprove. Among independents, 22 percent approve and 78 percent disapprove."

He added: "Hey, non-MAGA Republicans and independents who live in objective reality, now’s a good time to show your faces in public!"

Fisher noted that these everyday citizens do not face the same stakes as elected Republicans who have been too afraid to stand up to Trump publicly, given that they could end up targeted directly by Trump's MAGA wrath and lose their office. While not a commendable reason, it is still a reason, something that anti-Trump everyday Republicans lack. He added that he was "confident" that "few, if any," of these supposed voters would manage to attend this weekend's No Kings events.

"Whether because of apathy or fear of catching cooties from anything associated with Democrats or the left, the result is the same: they’ll be sitting on the sidelines as Trump gobbles up more American yardage for himself," Fisher argued. "It’s possible that the polls predicting a 'blue wave' election are correct. But a midterm 'wipeout' isn’t enough for America to recover. Impeachments, investigations and public shaming ought to be the order of the day if Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress, but even that won’t do. For America to achieve some semblance of a shared national identity, there must be a near-universal call for a return to decency and respect for plurality. But that can only happen when roughly half the country demands the end of an unprecedented American personality cult that they’ve voted for in three consecutive elections."

He added: "I’m glad No Kings is drawing people to the streets and encouraging people to vote. It’s just not nearly enough. Not until the non-left — composed of non-MAGA Republicans, conservatives, libertarians and anti-woke centrists — confronts its own complicity and forges its own No Kings movement."

After getting cornered in public, Alabama’s first Republican lawmaker finally spoke out over a fellow Republican’s indictment for attempted sex trafficking.

It has been roughly two weeks since Alabama State Rep. Brett Easterbrook was arrested in an undercover sting and accused of offering $500 to someone he believed was a minor. But since that time, Alabama political leaders have offered little public reaction, and no prominent Republican has called on him to resign.

Easterbrook, a Fruitdale Republican representing House District 65 since 2018, was caught up in an October operation involving undercover police officers, who nabbed 17 arrests. However, it took a pressure campaign arising from U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures to push the state’s first prominent Republican to make a stand.

Figures accused Republicans of staying quiet because state Rep. Brett Easterbrook is one of their own.

“Unless this guy’s defense is that it literally wasn’t him, he should resign immediately,” Figures wrote in a Friday Facebook post. “Taxpayers shouldn’t be paying your salary if you’re out here trying to … abuse kids. … This ‘I’ll be quiet when he’s one of us’ attitude is truly pathetic. That’s the exact same reason all the Epstein files still haven’t been released.”

Figures then took a shot at Republican state Rep. Rhett Marques: “What do you think, Rhett Marques? Wanna debate this?”

“You can hear crickets right now on this, my current opponent included,” Figures then added to his challenge.

A short time later, AL.com reported Marques responded to Figures.

“He absolutely should resign, and should have already resigned,” Marques said. “There is no place in the Alabama Legislature for conduct so deplorable, and I have no hesitation saying that about a member of my own party.”

Marques then criticized Democrats about transgender healthcare for minors, and he called Figures “a hypocrite and a liar.” He also tried to spin Figures’ Epstein argument back on him, claiming: “When [Figures] worked for Joe Biden’s DOJ, they didn’t release the Epstein files. They released violent criminals from prison.”

Figures served as deputy chief of staff and counselor to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

But Figures was quick on the uptake, accusing Marques of calling for Easterbrook’s resignation only after being publicly challenged and shamed.

“Rhett Marques had no intention of calling on his colleague to resign until he saw that I did it,” Figures said.

Months after Congress passed a law demanding President Donald Trump release the entirety of the Jeffrey Epstein files, public sources are still waiting for pertinent names and details of Epstein's possible accomplices to be revealed. The administration's reticence -- coupled with Trump's open friendship with Epstein for the last few decades -- is driving members of even Trump's dedicated MAGA movement to turn on him.

Regardless, Trump may be facing an Epstein explosion in a few months, particularly before the 2028 presidential election as Democrats with renewed access begin to chip away at hidden nuggets within the files.

Even though former White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia failed at reading teleprompters, describing her resume and impressing President Donald Trump for more than five days, she did manage to perform a miracle on Saturday morning. She united a diverse panel of conservatives and liberals on exactly what kind of hire she was.

“For years, MAGA has fought against DEI, arguing that merit should trump everything and that only the most qualified should ultimately get the job. So, it is interesting that the president gave one of the hardest jobs in government to someone whose qualifications are in serious question,” said “Table for Five” host Abby Phillip.

Zacharia — who went down in flames and embarrassment last week after only a handful of days as press secretary — was a cable news pundit. She briefly worked at DHS and advised MAGA media. But she also claimed to be a lawyer, despite never passing a bar exam.

“It's a tough job, which is why you ought to know what you're doing,” said panelist and podcaster Cari Champion. “And you have to be able to put your words together. And you should be able to speak to an audience. And you should be able to have a subject and a predicate with a sentence. You have to be able to talk with a sense of conviction, if not confidence, to make me feel as if I understand you. So, if you ask the question, ‘Is this a DEI hire?’ I would say that is, by definition, someone who got the job, who isn't necessarily worthy of it, nor has the actual qualifications. And based on what they look like, that's why they got the job. That's a DEI hire.”

“That is my take, and that is a very honest take, and I am being kind,” Champion continued. “When I watched this woman get in front of the press corps and talk, I was uncomfortable for her. I literally felt bad for her because I was like, well, what's going on here? And then you have these. … There are all these leaked text messages from the administration saying that they were concerned about whether or not she was the person for the job.”

Even Trump allegedly said Zacharia had no talent, but installed her anyway.

The former secretary was ready with a host of reasons for bombing her inaugural day presentation, but conservative panelist and NewsNation correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera accepted no excuses.

“They should have really grilled her, prepped her,” said conservative commentator Geraldo Rivera. “She's not a lawyer, so someone must have cued up the fact that, ‘hey, you know, you're going to be asked if you're a lawyer. Are you a lawyer?’ [Then] say ‘I'm not a lawyer. I'm a law school graduate.’”

“None of it's an excuse,” said former New York congressman and panelist John Avalon. “Maybe you could argue it's cruel for them to put her in that position, but she's obviously unqualified to do that job. And she took one question about Ukraine that she didn't even have the answer to. … So, this is someone who's not qualified for this position. The problem is that's part of a pattern. Pete Hegseth isn't qualified to be secretary of defense. Kash Patel is not qualified to be FBI director. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not qualified to run HHS. So, this is a pattern. The problem is you can look the job, but on this job, you actually have to know enough to be able to speak off the cuff clearly. And she cannot.”

National Review senior writer and panelist Noah Rothman tried to be slightly more generous to Zacharia, arguing that her being an attorney did not matter so much, since the job “is to give the best narrative on behalf of the administration — not lie, but spin, at times to present the narrative that is factually true, but nevertheless reflects as well as possible on their policies.”

“But you've got to be able to go back and check your facts,” Rothman added, less generously.

- YouTube youtu.be

With her brief White House tenure in the rearview, a psychologist and body language expert explained the one specific moment it became clear that President Donald Trump would fire former press secretary Katie Zacharia.

Zacharia, a right-wing commentator and one-time advisor linked to Truth Social, lasted only five days as the White House Press Secretary before being pushed out of the office by Trump, who had reportedly pushed her for the role in the first place. This came after a disastrous, widely mocked first and only press briefing in which she took few questions and seemed to struggle with the basics of public speaking, as well as a scandal over her falsely claiming she was a lawyer.

Dr. John Paul Garrison is a clinical and forensic psychologist with a specialty in reading body language, who also produces numerous videos using his professional expertise to analyse the behaviors of major public figures. In one of his latest videos from Friday, he dug into the situation surrounding Zacharia and pinpointed the "exact moment" he believes that her fate was sealed.

Garrison showed the widely circulated clip of Zacharia, standing behind Trump, being pressed by reporters about which state she passed the bar exam in, to which she claimed that she did so after moving to China. This claim immediately fell apart upon closer scrutiny, as non-citizens are not allowed to take China's certification exam for lawyers, and doing so would still not have made her a lawyer in the U.S.

During the exchange, Trump appeared to do a double-take while staring back at Zacharia while she made her claim about China, and this, Garrison argued, was the moment that her fate was sealed.

"That double take right there was the moment," Garrison said. "President Trump doesn't like surprises, and he doesn't like being embarrassed. And when she just said that, when they asked when she passed the bar, when she said it was when she went to China, that was it."

Garrison also examined Zacharia's behavior during an interview with Sean Hannity that came shortly before her White House departure, claiming that she used a "huge smile" to hide her real feelings.

"It's a very effective tool to hide how you actually feel because doing this and keeping the corners of your mouth up, not that hard to do," Garrison explained. "Now, obviously, there's no wrinkles next to her eyes, which is exactly how you'd see when somebody is actually feeling good or feeling happy. But you can see that her strategy, in order to give a specific impression for impression management, is to just maintain a smile whenever you're uncomfortable."

He later concluded: "The first day for every White House press secretary doesn't have to go incredibly well, but the disaster that we saw with Katie Zachariah made it very clear that this was not going to last long. Once the question started coming up about whether or not she was actually an attorney, because she had apparently used that word through tweets and so on and so forth, it seemed like it was really only a matter of time."

The Washington Post reports nationalist, MAGA-style parties are notching election victories and leading in the polls across Europe, but the “recipe for their success” appears to be steering clear of Trump and his MAGA allies.

“I can’t remember them being mentioned once,” said Leaders of Alternative for Germany politician Leif-Erik Holm, who finished first in a regional election in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, of his own campaign, which ended two weeks after the Saxony-Anhalt vote.

The Post reports leaders of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, “scaled back their public interactions with MAGA figures, acknowledged differences of interest with the U.S. and focused their message on domestic issues.” And in France, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, who is polling ahead of next year’s election, has similarly ejected Trump and his buddies from her campaign after calling the Iran war a strategic mistake.

In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is now set to lead a state government with policies that could have come straight from the MAGA playbook, with the party having campaigned on deporting migrants and cutting funding to museums with “anti-patriotic goals.” Yet the Times reports Trump and the U.S. were “largely absent during the campaign.”

“A lot of people say Trump is arrogant, dangerous, not well-qualified. You see an intensification in his second term of things people didn’t like in the first term,” said Richard Wike, Pew’s director of global attitudes research. “That may create incentives for all sorts of political leaders not to embrace him.”

But backing Europe’s antiestablishment right was an official goal of the Trump administration. The Post reports the State Department even promised grants to organizations promoting what it described as “European sovereignty and other conservative values.”

“Late last year, an updated U.S. national-security strategy said the U.S. supported ‘patriotic European parties’ and would cultivate ‘resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,’” reports the Post.

But this year Trump has put his popularity and the popularity of his nation in a hole, and the Post reports an increasing number of countries view China “more favorably” than the U.S., and Xi Jinping “as a more credible leader in managing world affairs,” according to a Pew Research Center report. Similar surveys reveal many right-wing Europeans share unfavorable views of Trump.

For this, Trump can probably thank his war with Iran, which is continuing to obliterate his national and international standing — and threatens to destabilize the global and US economy with high energy prices.

“It looks like they launched this campaign without much of a concept. It’s a bit of a disaster,” said AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, speaking of Trump’s war on Iran.

Additionally, Trump’s positions on a range of issues, including tariffs, the ownership of Greenland and the war in Ukraine, keep clashing with European interests — even the nationalist ones, reports the Times. Trump’s unbreakable link to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán may have helped the leader lose his re-election bid, to Trump’s ire.

Sports broadcaster and President Donald Trump supporter Stephen A. Smith thinks highly of the president and often defends him in interviews, but even Smith’s fond account of a recent dinner with Trump laid out the bubble of ignorance of ignorance surrounding Trump.

Mediaite reports Smith “spilled the tea on his dinner with President Donald Trump,” telling CNN’s Laura Coates about thing he found most shocking about a meal he shared with Trump and entertainers Kid Rock and Bill Maher.

Speaking Friday night on Laura Coates Live, Smith said Trump knows Republicans will likely lose the House and possibly the Senate in the midterms, but he also recounted that Trump was convinced he could reverse the damage by putting his face out on the campaign trail, rallying voters.

“He was saying ‘I’m going to campaign. I’m going to go all over this country and help whoever I have to help and do whatever I have to do because the people love me,’” Smith recounted. “I said ‘sir, the polls show you to be in the 30 percentile in terms of popularity.”

But Trump disavowed the legion of polls saying as much, according to Smith.

“He said ‘did you know that 99 percent of Republicans actually approve of me? So the people out there that are conservatives, that are Republicans, they love me, I love them. They will vote the way that I want them to vote.’ That’s how he feels. That’s the level of confidence that he has,” Smith said.

Trump’s faith is not buttressed by information crawling out of nearly every poll, however, including those on Fox. One particularly hurtful Fox News poll released this week asked registered voters what worries them most heading into the midterms. And the winning topic was not affordability or the economy, but government corruption, with a whopping 88 percent of voters saying they were “extremely or very concerned” about it. It even beat high gas and grocery prices and healthcare.

Worse, that same survey had Trump’s approval sinking to 36 percent, the lowest Fox has ever recorded for him. And in other polls, it’s dipped into the 20s.

In his interview, Smith also appeared astounded that Trump had more than four hours to dedicate to a dinner, considering the heavy load of problems facing the administration and the nation.

“It was shocking. I didn’t I certainly didn’t expect that amount of time. I knew that we were expecting to have dinner. I knew that we were going to have an opportunity to talk. I give him all the credit in the world because he didn’t run from any questions … But he also took us for a tour of the White House, took us to the West Wing, took us to the Rose Garden, took us to the colonnade where you got pictures of every single president, but Joe Biden,” said Smith.

The clean energy industry has learned the hard way that having the law on your side doesn’t always mean you win.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

Since taking office for his second term, President Donald Trump has attempted to delay or cancel dozens of wind and solar projects. These projects all underwent extensive reviews to secure federal approval, but the Department of the Interior and other agencies have frozen their permits for vague “national security” reasons, or with no explanation at all. These attacks have all but tanked the offshore wind industry and have led many developers to take payouts from the administration rather than fight for permits.

This attack is one big reason why solar and wind companies have been supportive of efforts in Congress to negotiate a bipartisan “permitting reform” bill. A group of senators reached a compromise earlier this month on a bill they call the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act. Lawmakers won’t vote on it until after the midterm elections, but the renewable energy sector has hailed it as a win. The bill would speed up environmental reviews for all kinds of energy projects, from transmission wires to oil pipelines, and it also contains a number of provisions that are designed to deter current and future presidents from blocking clean energy. Trump reportedly told aides just before the compromise became public that he would ease up on wind projects in order to reach a deal.

Cracks are already emerging in the deal. While the renewable energy industry has remained steadfast in its support of the bill, a number of experts and key climate advocates are arguing that the “project certainty” provisions would do little to prevent Trump or another president from blocking solar farms and offshore wind turbines. The Trump administration itself threatened the compromise bill this week when it announced that it would review three permits for wind farms off the Atlantic Coast, including one that is already up and running.

“The administration’s action against [the wind projects] just further demonstrates the lengths they will go to to obstruct clean energy progress, especially offshore wind,” said Elizabeth Klein, who led the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees offshore wind permits, under former president Joe Biden.

The project certainty portion of the Senate bill has two key parts. First, it declares that the federal government “shall not take any new action that would revoke, rescind, withdraw, terminate, suspend, amend, or alter” a project that has already received a permit. This is just a forceful restatement of the status quo, since permits that are issued aren’t supposed to be canceled for no reason. But the bill goes further by offering companies two main remedies if the government does take such prohibited actions.

One is the reinstatement of the permit — which is somewhat redundant. Judges have already shot down the Trump administration’s past attempts to stop wind projects, but the administration is still seeking to revoke those permits. If the bill passes, all the courts would be able to do is order it in stronger terms to restore them.

The other remedy is a cash payout. The courts would be able to order the government to refund a project developer between 25 and 50 percent of the costs of their project, which for a big offshore wind farm could reach well into the billions. The money would come from the Judgment Fund, a bank account the federal government uses to pay out legal settlements. This fund typically disburses around $2 billion in settlements per year, and successful claims under the permitting bill could lead to a big spike in payouts.

The other key part of project certainty in the bill is an anti-discrimination clause that would ban “disparate treatment” of any particular energy source, whether it’s solar panels or coal plants. If a wind developer found evidence that the government denied them permits as part of an anti-wind pattern, they could present that evidence to a judge. If persuaded, the judge would then order the government to restore the permit and pay the developer the entire construction cost of the wind farm — albeit only if the developer finished building it.

Supporters of the bill argue that the promise of financial relief would help lure investors back to the renewable energy industry, which has been in turmoil under Trump. This is most important for offshore wind. Big companies like Ørsted and Equinor spent billions of dollars to build wind farms in the Atlantic under the Biden administration, but their costs ballooned after the pandemic snarled their supply chains and Trump tried to destroy their existing projects. These companies now view the United States as uninvestable, but Northeastern states still need a lot more offshore wind in order to meet their climate goals.

The cash payout provision is supposed to help make the U.S. seem like a less risky place to invest. The American Clean Power Association, a trade group representing wind and solar developers, said in its analysis of the bill that “greater certainty lowers financing risk before construction and reduces the chance that years of development and investment will be stranded by a later policy reversal.”

While the promise of reimbursement from the federal government would be good news for investors, it’s not clear that it would actually lead to more clean energy getting built. Opponents of the permitting reform bill point out that Trump has already been paying to stop renewable power plants from being built, albeit on a smaller scale. The president has worked out several deals to buy back offshore wind leases from energy developers in exchange for those developers committing to build a fossil fuel project elsewhere. These arrangements are being challenged in court, but in the meantime they function as repayments for leases that Trump intended to block.

The project certainty “provisions are unlikely to deter the Trump Administration from continuing to mess with clean energy permits, since this administration has shown an eagerness to use the public’s money to advance its own policy goals,” said Matthew Littleton, a former attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice who worked on environmental law issues.

Littleton also points out that the anti-discrimination provision may not work as intended. The baseline for calculating “disparate treatment” is the average pace of project approvals over the most recent five years. By the time Trump leaves office, he will have spent four years permitting oil and gas projects while delaying almost all major solar and wind efforts. This baseline would prevent wind developers from making a discrimination claim — while also preventing a future president from walking back support for new oil and gas.

As if to highlight these risks, the White House has said in court filings over the past week that it is seeking to rescind permits for three offshore wind projects on the Atlantic Coast. One of these projects, the 700-megawatt Revolution Wind, is already complete and delivering power to Rhode Island, while the other two are still in the early stages. In each filing, the government has said only that it seeks to “reevaluate … compliance” with federal law.

Over the past year, Democratic negotiators in the Senate have said that this sort of behavior would jeopardize any bipartisan deal. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, one of the authors of the bill, said in the spring that he would not endorse a compromise bill unless the administration stopped blocking wind farms. This week he appeared to change tack, and described the move against Revolution Wind as another reason to pass the bill. “Frankly, we need to get permitting certainty in law, and this proves it,” he said in a statement.

The bill would in fact offer financial protection to a company like Ørsted, ensuring that a president could not wreck billions of dollars worth of investment with no justification at all. The question is whether it could end the government’s prejudicial assault against offshore wind. The answer could determine how millions of people in the Northeast keep their lights on and heat their homes, and right now, it’s up in the air.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.