North Carolina Republicans are pushing legislation that would remove the state’s health exemption to laws banning masks in public, citing protestors’ wearing them in pro-Palestine campus rallies. If the state GOP’s “Unmasking Mobs and Criminals” bill passes, North Carolina would become the first in the country to make it illegal to avoid infectious diseases like Covid-19—which people can also get while protesting—by masking in public. The bill passed the state Senate on Wednesday in a 30-15 party-line vote. Due to Senate revisions, it will have to pass the Republican-majority state House again. But even if Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoes the law, the Republican-majority state legislature will have the power to override him.

Covid-19 continues to kill people in the United States, with at least 20,000 confirmed deaths linked to Covid infections since the start of 2024, Millions more are developing Long Covid, the risk of which increases with every subsequent infection. Immunocompromised patients are at particular risk of death: besides their underlying conditions, immunocompromising medications can reduce the efficiency of Covid vaccines and boosters. Masks, specifically N95 and KN95s, are very effective in stopping its spread, and wearing one in a crowd can allow immunocompromised people like recent transplant recipients to participate in civic life and political action. Mask-wearing is more effective in stopping transmission in crowds when more people do it. 

“These patients have active reasons to want extra layers of protection,” Dr. Cameron R. Wolfe, an infectious disease specialist with Duke University Health System in North Carolina, told Mother Jones. “If my lung transplant recipient wants to be able to keep him or herself protected in the act of a protest, they must be allowed the freedom to do that.”

Lucky Tran, a science communicator with Columbia University and health equity organizer, said that folks encouraging others to wear masks that protect against the spread of Covid-19 is good community care.

“By providing and encouraging people to wear masks at protests, activists are demonstrating community care and public health leadership, which by contrast, most governments and institutions are failing to do,” Tran said.

Most transplant recipients are advised to wear masks, guidance that predates the Covid pandemic. Research has shown that even the common cold can be dangerous or deadly for transplant recipients. Not being able to wear a mask in public could limit their participation in society—from participating in protest to going to the grocery store. The CDC also reports that getting an infection during chemotherapy for cancer can also lead to hospitalization.

At a hearing on the legislation, Democratic State Sen. Sydney Batch, a cancer survivor, said the bill goes too far: “There are people that are walking around every single day that are immunocompromised…It is meaningful to them. They could die.” 

Dr. Diana Cejas, a University of North Carolina pediatric neurologist who survived cancer and a stroke, told Mother Jones that “it has been an incredibly difficult time to be a North Carolinian who actually cares about public health and safety.” Cejas asserts that it is her “right to protect myself” against Covid by wearing a mask—and her duty to protect the medically complex, vulnerable children she works with every day. 

Cejas is also doubtful of claims from some North Carolina Republican officials that people won’t be arrested for wearing a mask in their daily lives for health concerns. 

“Some of our legislators have made the argument that this ban won’t apply to those of us who mask for medical reasons, but I think that we all know that won’t be true,” Cejas said. “We already face scrutiny and outright harassment at times for the ‘crime’ of trying to protect ourselves from illness, particularly us disabled and chronically ill people of color and those with other marginalized identities.”

North Carolina is not the only state to move to crack down on protestors wearing masks. Earlier this month, Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said that pro-Palestinian student protestors wearing masks could face felony charges under a law that was originally created to go after the Ku Klux Klan. 

Though villainized and potentially criminalized, masks continue to be an effective way to limit the spread of infections. “We would see a lot less disease if masks were accepted as a socially reasonable thing to wear in public for at-risk individuals,” Wolfe said, “or anyone worried about illness.”

A Columbia protester detained as part of the city’s crackdown against the Gaza Solidarity Encampment says that during her arrest and processing she was forced to take off her hijab—a violation of a New York Police Department policy and another instance of a high-profile problem for the department.

The account of the protester, a Columbia student who wished to remain anonymous out of concern for her security and safety, was corroborated in part by two witnesses. The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment.

The removal of hijabs during arrests has been a years-long problem for New York City law enforcement. On April 5, 2024, the city settled a class-action lawsuit for $17.5 million brought by two women who had been forced to take off their hijabs for a mugshot in 2017. The case, originally filed in 2018, led to changes in policy, when,  in 2020, the New York Police Department altered its rules, saying people could wear a “religious head covering,” as long as it did not cover their faces for photos.

According to the NYPD’s Patrol Guide, in some circumstances, an arresting officer can request that a head covering be “temporarily removed and searched.” But this is to be done in “private” and the religious head covering, the guide says, should be returned. Officers only are permitted the “safekeeping” of a religious head covering if there is a danger of violence or self-harm.

The hijabi protester, and others present, say that when the NYPD arrested an autonomous group that had taken over Hamilton Hall at the university these rules were not consistently followed.

The protester said the problems began even before she got to the station. She wears her hijab loosely, and it began to fall off as she was zip-tied and walked to a police van. She asked an officer to fix it—or to let her take off the zip-ties for a moment to adjust it herself. But the police officer refused, and then, following continual requests, relented but according to the protester adjusted and replaced the head covering inadequately, so that it continued to fall off.

“He would tell me it’s because I’m moving around so much or talking,” she recalls. (She had chanted at officers during the arrests.) But despite “exact instructions,” to place the covering upon her head, she says, “He would put it very, very lightly right behind my ear—so immediately it would fall back, like only on half my head.”

During that time, Aidan Parisi, a protester who was arrested inside the building that was occupied, said they saw the hijabi protester’s scarf falling off. “We were standing in line waiting for them to process us and I noticed her hijab had fallen,” Aidan told Mother Jones on the phone, days after the arrest. “There were numerous times I saw her where her hijab kept falling and they were refusing to fix it.”

Parisi also brought the scarf falling off to the officer’s attention. “The police officer said something along the lines of, ‘What do you mean? I keep fixing it. I keep picking it up for you, don’t lie,” Parisi recalls. “And [the hijabi protester] says: ‘Well why was it still down?’”

More importantly, the hijabi protester said, “A man should not be placing his hands on me—period.”

When she got to the jail, the issues continued. Before taking those who were apprehended to their cells, officers pat them down to search for weapons or other contraband. During this process, the protester was asked to remove her hijab to check her hair and head covering. This is consistent with the NYPD’s Patrol Guide’s policy to temporarily ask those arrested who are wearing religious head coverings to remove the item in private for a search.

After this check, the protester asked for her hijab back. The officer, she says, refused to return it. The protester objected but, eventually, she acquiesced. “Even though it made me very uncomfortable,” she said. “I [felt] like I didn’t really have a lot of fight left in me.” She assumed the cell she was entering was all female. (Rules vary, but wearing the hijab is typically observed in front of men.)

“I didn’t know that this was my right,” she said of keeping on her hijab. “[The idea that] this [hijab] is part of my identity [so I] get to keep this one—I didn’t even process that.”

Then she saw another woman enter the same area wearing her hijab. Once more, the protester began to ask the officers to return her hijab: “I was like: give me my hijab back, give me my hijab back.” Allie Wong, a graduate student who served as a “human barricade” in front of Hamilton Hall and was arrested, saw this occur in the jail.

Wong remembers the hijabi protester saying: “This is from my religion and this is my religious and constitutional rights…. And it didn’t matter. They said she had to remove it. She kept protesting and saying it’s her right.” (Despite this occurring in a female section of the jail, male officers were walking in and out, according to both Wong and the protester with whom Mother Jones spoke about the incident.)

After this interaction happened, all three protesters interviewed by Mother Jones recall that the protesters crammed into cells began chanting: “Give her back her hijab.” The protester whose hijab was removed remembers people banging on the walls, too, causing the room to shake. The protester said she did not receive the head covering back until she left the jail several hours later.

She told Mother Jones she could not help but think of a news report she read about women in Gaza who slept with their hijabs on—because they do not know when a bomb will drop and if it happens in their sleep they want to die with dignity.

“I should have put up more of a fight,” she told me. “I wish I knew more of my rights—so I could stand up for myself [but] this has been what has been normalized from the state when protesting.”

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court allowed a lower court decision requiring a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana to move forward for the 2024 elections, handing down a rare victory for minority representation that also boosts Democrats chances of retaking the House of Representatives.

The case, Landry v. Callais, took a convoluted path to the high court. In June 2022, a federal district court ruled that, under the Voting Rights Act, Louisiana must create a new majority-Black district in a state where Black voters were a third of the population but held a majority in only one of the state’s six congressional districts. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked that ruling for the 2022 election, but following the Court’s decision in Allen v. Milligan in June 2023 that Alabama had to create a second majority-Black congressional district, Louisiana was ordered to do the same. The state’s Republican-controlled legislature reluctantly held a special session in January 2024 to create a new majority-Black district that favored Democrats.  

A group of “non-African American” voters then challenged that map and in April a federal district court panel, with two Trump-appointed judges writing for the majority, struck it down, arguing that race was the predominant factor in drawing the district—even though Louisiana had been specifically ordered by another federal court to create the majority-Black district.

Civil rights groups and the state of Louisiana then appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court. It represented an unlikely instance when Black voters and a Republican-controlled Southern state were more or less on the same side, and also a rare example of the Supreme Court delivering a victory for minority representation, given the Court’s well-documented hostility to voting rights. That includes gutting the Voting Rights Act on multiple occasions and holding that partisan gerrymandering can’t be challenged in federal court.

However, the 6-3 decision on Wednesday was not without internal controversy. The three liberal justices dissented, not because they disagreed with the finding, but how the court reached it. The conservative supermajority invoked the Purcell principle—the idea that changes to voting rules should not be made too close to an election—to reinstate Louisiana’s map with two majority-Black districts. But the liberal justices thought the case should be decided without relying on Purcell, which has often been used by the conservative justices to overrule lower court rulings that struck down discriminatory voting laws and gerrymandered maps because they allegedly occurred too close to an election date.

As University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck put it, “it’s a short-term win for Black voters in Louisiana, but a long-term expansion of a controversial principle for how federal courts handle election-year voting cases going forward.”

A Columbia protester detained as part of the city’s crackdown against the Gaza Solidarity Encampment says that during her arrest and processing she was forced to take off her hijab—a violation of a New York Police Department policy and another instance of a high-profile problem for the department.

The account of the protester, a Columbia student who wished to remain anonymous out of concern for her security and safety, was corroborated in part by two witnesses. The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment.

The removal of hijabs during arrests has been a years-long problem for New York City law enforcement. On April 5, 2024, the city settled a class-action lawsuit for $17.5 million brought by two women who had been forced to take off their hijabs for a mugshot in 2017. The case, originally filed in 2018, led to changes in policy, when,  in 2020, the New York Police Department altered its rules, saying people could wear a “religious head covering,” as long as it did not cover their faces for photos.

According to the NYPD’s Patrol Guide, in some circumstances, an arresting officer can request that a head covering be “temporarily removed and searched.” But this is to be done in “private” and the religious head covering, the guide says, should be returned. Officers only are permitted the “safekeeping” of a religious head covering if there is a danger of violence or self-harm.

The hijabi protester, and others present, say that when the NYPD arrested an autonomous group that had taken over Hamilton Hall at the university these rules were not consistently followed.

The protester said the problems began even before she got to the station. She wears her hijab loosely, and it began to fall off as she was zip-tied and walked to a police van. She asked an officer to fix it—or to let her take off the zip-ties for a moment to adjust it herself. But the police officer refused, and then, following continual requests, relented but according to the protester adjusted and replaced the head covering inadequately, so that it continued to fall off.

“He would tell me it’s because I’m moving around so much or talking,” she recalls. (She had chanted at officers during the arrests.) But despite “exact instructions,” to place the covering upon her head, she says, “He would put it very, very lightly right behind my ear—so immediately it would fall back, like only on half my head.”

During that time, Aidan Parisi, a protester who was arrested inside the building that was occupied, said they saw the hijabi protester’s scarf falling off. “We were standing in line waiting for them to process us and I noticed her hijab had fallen,” Aidan told Mother Jones on the phone, days after the arrest. “There were numerous times I saw her where her hijab kept falling and they were refusing to fix it.”

Parisi also brought the scarf falling off to the officer’s attention. “The police officer said something along the lines of, ‘What do you mean? I keep fixing it. I keep picking it up for you, don’t lie,” Parisi recalls. “And [the hijabi protester] says: ‘Well why was it still down?’”

More importantly, the hijabi protester said, “A man should not be placing his hands on me—period.”

When she got to the jail, the issues continued. Before taking those who were apprehended to their cells, officers pat them down to search for weapons or other contraband. During this process, the protester was asked to remove her hijab to check her hair and head covering. This is consistent with the NYPD’s Patrol Guide’s policy to temporarily ask those arrested who are wearing religious head coverings to remove the item in private for a search.

After this check, the protester asked for her hijab back. The officer, she says, refused to return it. The protester objected but, eventually, she acquiesced. “Even though it made me very uncomfortable,” she said. “I [felt] like I didn’t really have a lot of fight left in me.” She assumed the cell she was entering was all female. (Rules vary, but wearing the hijab is typically observed in front of men.)

“I didn’t know that this was my right,” she said of keeping on her hijab. “[The idea that] this [hijab] is part of my identity [so I] get to keep this one—I didn’t even process that.”

Then she saw another woman enter the same area wearing her hijab. Once more, the protester began to ask the officers to return her hijab: “I was like: give me my hijab back, give me my hijab back.” Allie Wong, a graduate student who served as a “human barricade” in front of Hamilton Hall and was arrested, saw this occur in the jail.

Wong remembers the hijabi protester saying: “This is from my religion and this is my religious and constitutional rights…. And it didn’t matter. They said she had to remove it. She kept protesting and saying it’s her right.” (Despite this occurring in a female section of the jail, male officers were walking in and out, according to both Wong and the protester with whom Mother Jones spoke about the incident.)

After this interaction happened, all three protesters interviewed by Mother Jones recall that the protesters crammed into cells began chanting: “Give her back her hijab.” The protester whose hijab was removed remembers people banging on the walls, too, causing the room to shake. The protester said she did not receive the head covering back until she left the jail several hours later.

She told Mother Jones she could not help but think of a news report she read about women in Gaza who slept with their hijabs on—because they do not know when a bomb will drop and if it happens in their sleep they want to die with dignity.

“I should have put up more of a fight,” she told me. “I wish I knew more of my rights—so I could stand up for myself [but] this has been what has been normalized from the state when protesting.”

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court allowed a lower court decision requiring a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana to move forward for the 2024 elections, handing down a rare victory for minority representation that also boosts Democrats chances of retaking the House of Representatives.

The case, Landry v. Callais, took a convoluted path to the high court. In June 2022, a federal district court ruled that, under the Voting Rights Act, Louisiana must create a new majority-Black district in a state where Black voters were a third of the population but held a majority in only one of the state’s six congressional districts. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked that ruling for the 2022 election, but following the Court’s decision in Allen v. Milligan in June 2023 that Alabama had to create a second majority-Black congressional district, Louisiana was ordered to do the same. The state’s Republican-controlled legislature reluctantly held a special session in January 2024 to create a new majority-Black district that favored Democrats.  

A group of “non-African American” voters then challenged that map and in April a federal district court panel, with two Trump-appointed judges writing for the majority, struck it down, arguing that race was the predominant factor in drawing the district—even though Louisiana had been specifically ordered by another federal court to create the majority-Black district.

Civil rights groups and the state of Louisiana then appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court. It represented an unlikely instance when Black voters and a Republican-controlled Southern state were more or less on the same side, and also a rare example of the Supreme Court delivering a victory for minority representation, given the Court’s well-documented hostility to voting rights. That includes gutting the Voting Rights Act on multiple occasions and holding that partisan gerrymandering can’t be challenged in federal court.

However, the 6-3 decision on Wednesday was not without internal controversy. The three liberal justices dissented, not because they disagreed with the finding, but how the court reached it. The conservative supermajority invoked the Purcell principle—the idea that changes to voting rules should not be made too close to an election—to reinstate Louisiana’s map with two majority-Black districts. But the liberal justices thought the case should be decided without relying on Purcell, which has often been used by the conservative justices to overrule lower court rulings that struck down discriminatory voting laws and gerrymandered maps because they allegedly occurred too close to an election date.

As University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck put it, “it’s a short-term win for Black voters in Louisiana, but a long-term expansion of a controversial principle for how federal courts handle election-year voting cases going forward.”

Almost as predictably as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, the rich grow richer. “Wealth concentration in a few hands is the single most enduring economic pattern across all poli­ties from Mesopotamia to the present—rarely interrupted, and then only for brief intervals,” the political scientist Jeffrey Winters, who studies oligarchies (including the United States) at Northwestern Uni­versity, wrote in a 2017 paper.

Maintaining dynastic fortunes once required physical might, Winters explained. “For thousands of years, being rich involved being armed, engaging in violence and coercion, extracting resources from broad territories, while also holding positions of di­rect rule.” But nowadays, as I’ve written:

America’s elite need only muster an army of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists to achieve the same result: the perpetu­ation of a new breed of dynasties that will join forces when neces­sary, like the cells of a slime mold, to create the conditions required for the economic aristocracy to reproduce and thrive. The condi­tions are three: The wealth must multiply fast enough to maintain an ever-expanding family’s power and status. The assets must be easily transferable between generations. And policies must be put in place that enable the family and its businesses to share as little wealth as possible with the government, in life and upon death.

The next two decades will be pivotal for America’s dynasties, as aging Boomers and Silent Generation elders pass along a projected $84 trillion in assets to their heirs. At the end of 2025, meanwhile, nearly $5 trillion worth of oligarch-friendly tax provisions passed by Congress in 2017 are set to expire. A wealthy married couple can now simply hand their little princelings up to $27.2 million without triggering a gift or estate tax. Come 2026, they will only be able to give about half that amount before the taxes kick in. (“Use it or lose it,” cautions one wealth advisory firm.)

The very rich, of course, have their workarounds. But now Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. Angus King (D-ME) have introduced a bill that would deprive them of one of the most popular ones.

It is known as a Walton GRAT—yes, those Waltons. Short for “grantor-retained annuity trusts,” GRATs are heavily marketed by wealth advisors as a way families can channel jaw-dropping sums to their heirs while avoiding gift and estate taxes.

The late Republican megadonor and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson used GRATs to channel almost $8 billion to his heirs, Bloomberg has reported, saving his family an estimated $2.8 billion. Nike founder Phil Knight similarly used them to pass billions to his relations. Indeed, based on leaked IRS documents, ProPublica has reported that more than half of America’s wealthiest families now use GRATs to enrich their offspring.

Savvy tax lawyers have devised tactics that “combine to make the use of GRATs for tax avoidance overwhelm their use for legitimate purposes,” attorney Bob Lord, who serves as a tax policy adviser to the group Patriotic Millionaires, says in an email. (Lord recently wrote an essay about trillionaires for Mother Jones.) 

I won’t trouble readers with too much detail, but you should know the basics about how GRATs work:

The trust creator (“grantor”) hires a tax lawyer to set up a Walton GRAT, also called a “zeroed-out” GRAT, and loads it with stock or other assets that are expected to soar in value. In 2008, before Facebook went public, for example, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Sheryl Sandberg each set up GRATs containing millions of shares initially valued at far below the public asking price.

Over the trust’s lifetime (typically 2 to 10 years), the initial market value of the assets placed into it, plus interest at a rate predetermined by the IRS, is returned to the grantor in annual installments. The courts have ruled that repaying the grantor in full, with interest—a tactic pioneered by a lawyer representing Audrey Walton, the Walmart founder’s sister-in-law—zeroes out the value of the trust as a taxable gift to its beneficiaries, who  are typically the grantor’s children.

Now, here’s the fun part: If the value of the assets in the trust grows faster than that IRS interest rate would have predicted, there will be “remainder” assets left over when the trust’s term expires. Those remainder assets are excluded from the grantor’s taxable estate, and they go directly to the beneficiary. A tax lawyer enlisted by Forbes estimated that Moscovitz, Sandberg, and Zuckerberg channeled more than $204 million to their heirs tax-free—which sure beats that $27.2 million federal exemption.

And the numbers, as we’ve seen, can get way larger. Adelson used the popular “rolling GRAT” method, in which you put highly volatile stock into a series of overlapping 2-year GRATs. If the stock happens to be down when a given GRAT expires, no big deal—you gets the shares back and you’re only out whatever legal fees you paid to set up the trust. But catch the stock on the upswing and man, it’s a jackpot for your kiddies. You can’t really lose, according to Richard Covey, the attorney who invented Walton GRATs.

The punchline here is that GRATs came about by accident. Congress enabled them in 1990 while attempting to crack down on another kind of trust rich families were using for tax avoidance, albeit at a far more modest level. “They completely blew it,” Covey told me. “Instead of tightening up on the law, they loosened up on the law, and they didn’t know that!”

Decades later, Congress still hasn’t undone its mistake. The Obama administration proposed some GRAT restrictions in its 2014 budget, but Congress never took them up. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill at one point contained language that would have killed GRATs, but that didn’t fly, either. So now Wyden and King are having another go. Their Getting Rid of Abusive Trusts Act would do the following to make GRATs less attractive:

• It would eliminate short-term rolling GRATS by imposing a minimum trust term of 15 years.
• It would thwart Audrey Walton’s “zero-out” strategy by imposing a minimum taxable gift value on any assets initially placed in the trust. And any transfer of assets into or out of the trust during its lifetime would count as a taxable event.
• If the trust generates dividends, and a grantor, hoping to maximize the end value for their heirs, pays the income taxes due on those dividends instead of letting the trust do it, then those tax payments would be treated as additional, taxable gifts.

If all of these provisions are enacted, perhaps as part of future compromise legislation related to expiring Trump tax cuts, some people still might set up GRATs to give themselves a steady annual income. “But if I actually want those annuity payments, I’m probably not somebody who can afford to put $30 million in a GRAT,” explains a Senate Finance Committee aide who helped draft the bill. “We’re carving back on the big uses, and we think that will cause people to look elsewhere.”

And look elsewhere they will. Tax policy is a cat-and-mouse game. Whenever Congress closes a door, the dynasties and their $1,500-an-hour tax lawyers seek an open window. The problem of late, says Lord, the tax expert, is that “the cat stopped playing, and the mouse is feasting on the cheese.”

The mouse is a metaphor not just for America’s richest families, but also for the wealth defense industry that lobbies to keep the myriad tax avoidance tools in place. “If we were to hear from people, that would be from the people who are structuring and selling these things, probably more so than the people who are actually benefiting from them,” says the Finance Committee aide.

Explains a second aide: “We are also cognizant of the fact that, at least in this Congress, the Republicans just aren’t going to go for this kind of idea.” But Wyden takes the long view. In fact, the aide told me, much of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 consists of Wyden policies “that we have been working on for years and years before IRA passed.”

To Wyden’s and King’s advantage is the trend, certainly among Democrats, of “taxation” becoming less and less of a dirty word—especially when applied to people with yachts and private planes. In one recent poll, more than two-thirds of respondents in seven swing states supported tax hikes on people making $400,000 or more, and even 58 percent of Republicans said billionaires paid too little.

“The fact that Jeff Bezos qualified for the child tax credit is offensive to people,” says the second Finance Committee aide. “But it also helps that everybody understands that the 45th president of the United States is a tax cheat, and there was very high-profile reporting on how he got away with that. So, I think the ease with which the ultra-rich can just make their taxes disappear is becoming more visceral to people.”

Erstwhile GOP presidential candidate and current vice-presidential hopeful Ben Carson has joined right-wing peers like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in supporting the end—or at least the rolling back—of no-fault divorce laws across the nation.  

“For the sake of families,” the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development wrote in his book, The Perilous Fight, released Tuesday, “we should enact legislation to remove or radically reduce incidences of no-fault divorce.” 

Over the past year, I have been tracking the rise of men on the right, both elected and civilian, who think it ought to be harder to get divorced in this country. These men often cite family values, their religious beliefs, or women’s changing desires to justify rolling back the current no-fault system that exists in all 50 states.  

Since 1969, when then–California Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law—granting couples a separation without having to prove that one side had committed wrongdoing—these statutes have provided a way out of both banal and toxic relationships. Though Reagan, per his son, would later call backing no-fault divorce his “greatest regret” in life, these laws have had a positive impact on women’s lives and autonomy. A 2003 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that when states allowed one partner alone push for divorce, there was a 20 percent decline in female suicide. As I have reported previously, no-fault divorce laws are often essential to those attempting to escape domestic violence. 

While some people have been clamoring about rolling back no-fault divorce laws for decades—read Sen. Tom Cotton’s 1997 article in the Harvard Crimson for his thoughts on the matter—there has been a marked increase in disdain both online and in places of power, about states’ current divorce laws. These men—Johnson, failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Oklahoma State Sen. Dusty Deevers, Sen. J.D. Vance, right-wing activist and influencer Steven Crowder, and PragerU host Michael Knowles, to name a few—are normalizing attacks on whether and how people should be able to separate.

“The reason this matters is that no-fault divorce legally allows marriages to end much more quickly than in previous decades,” Carson wrote in the book.  

Should Carson be chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate, and should he further become second in line for the presidency come November, it’s unclear if and how he’d attempt to limit access to divorce. These kinds of laws are handled state-by-state, and an overwhelming majority of Americans think that divorce is “morally acceptable.” 

This isn’t the first time Carson has written about divorce, either.

Throughout Carson’s books, he references difficulties from his childhood. He details growing up in Detroit, speaking fondly of the rug he sat on in kindergarten to learn new songs. “I was an average student, and life was peaceful,” Carson wrote in his 2011 book America the Beautiful.

That changed when he turned eight years old and his parents divorced. According to Carson, “it wasn’t his job that had kept my father away from our family. He had been living a double life for years—complete with a second wife and another set of children.” 

He, his mom, and his brother moved to Massachusetts. “There were four grades in each classroom, and all eight grades were taught by only two teachers,” Carson wrote. “By the time … I moved back to Detroit, I had essentially lost a year of school while in Boston, my academic performance lagging far behind that of my new classmates.  

Carson laments seeing his mother Sonya go through this time in his 2007 book Take the Risk. “She suddenly found herself all alone in the world, devastated and disillusioned by the end of her marriage,” he wrote. In a section of his 1992 book Think Big dedicated to his mother, she described the financial difficulties that arose after the divorce. “At one point we did get food stamps, but only for a few months. I wanted to be independent and pay my own way. According to the divorce decree, Mr. Carson was supposed to support our sons, but he provided very little money.”  

Fast forward to Carson’s book released this week, in which he writes, “When there are relatively few legal or financial consequences connected with divorce, it’s natural for people to gravitate toward that option when their marriage hits a rough patch.”

“What those people often don’t consider, however,” he goes on, “is the harm—both present and future—inflicted on their children once a divorce is finalized.”

After officials repeatedly warned that they would consider stopping the flow of weapons to Israel if it pressed forward with a ground invasion into Rafah, the Biden administration announced it would nonetheless attempt to send more than $1 billion in additional weapons to Israel, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night, citing congressional officials.

The Journal reports that the latest package “includes the potential transfer of $700 million in tank ammunition, $500 million in tactical vehicles, and $60 million in mortar rounds.” Congress will have to approve the latest package.

The latest announcement comes as something of an about-face for the White House: Just last week, President Biden made headlines after he told CNN that he would stop shipping certain weapons to Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proceeds with a major ground invasion of Rafah—which Israeli forces have already seemingly begun, leading nearly 450,000 people to flee the area since May 6, according to the latest numbers from the United Nations. 

White House Spokesperson John Kirby added Thursday that Biden does not believe “smashing into Rafah” will help take out Hamas. Nonetheless, Israel is reportedly moving in. The Washington Post on Tuesday reported that Israeli tanks are coming closer to urban areas; yesterday, State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters, “We do not want to see a major operation into Rafah, and we have not seen one yet that we would take issue with.”

On Sunday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken confirmed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the US recently halted the delivery of 3,500 so-called “dumb bombs” to Israel. But Blinken made clear that the administration was still allowing most weapons exports.

Representatives for the State and Defense departments, and the White House, did not immediately respond to requests for comment and questions about how they will ensure Israel uses the latest round of weapons in compliance with international humanitarian law and President Biden’s recent comments.

Last Friday, the State Department released a delayed report examining the Israeli army’s conduct and use of US provided-weapons. The department found that “it is reasonable to assess” that Israel has deployed the weapons “in instances inconsistent with its [international humanitarian law] obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.” That report also said American officials “do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance” to Gaza—though that’s at odds with the experiences of more than 20 humanitarian organizations operating on the ground.

Netanyahu, for his part, refuses to face the reality of the humanitarian toll of the war on civilian Palestinians, arguing that a continued military operation is essential to defeat Hamas. “The humanitarian catastrophe that has been spoken of has not been realized, nor will it,” he said in a statement today. 

Workers on the ground paint a different picture. Twenty aid groups signed onto a letter today condemning world leaders’ failures to act to stem the humanitarian crisis and halt the Israeli invasion into Rafah, writing that “further advancement of the military invasion…will lead to the total collapse of lifesaving services.”

The International Rescue Committee said Tuesday that its emergency medical team was supposed to enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing on Monday but was unable. “What we are witnessing in Rafah is nothing less than a humanitarian catastrophe,” Kiryn Lanning, IRC team lead for the occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement. “The ongoing Israeli bombardment, combined with the closure of the Rafah crossing, has led to critical fuel shortages and severe movement restrictions, paralyzing all humanitarian operations.”

The U.N. Secretary-General called yesterday for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza and for the release of all hostages,” and said the Rafah crossing should be re-opened immediately to allow for “unimpeded humanitarian access throughout Gaza.” 

In the meantime, as a volunteer nurse at Rafah’s only maternity hospital told me last week, medical professionals are scrambling to care for injured patients, pregnant people, and vulnerable newborns with a shortage of basic supplies and fears for their safety.

“There is no safe place in Gaza from a healthcare perspective—and beyond,” she said.

Almost as predictably as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, the rich grow richer. “Wealth concentration in a few hands is the single most enduring economic pattern across all poli­ties from Mesopotamia to the present—rarely interrupted, and then only for brief intervals,” the political scientist Jeffrey Winters, who studies oligarchies (including the United States) at Northwestern Uni­versity, wrote in a 2017 paper.

Maintaining dynastic fortunes once required physical might, Winters explained. “For thousands of years, being rich involved being armed, engaging in violence and coercion, extracting resources from broad territories, while also holding positions of di­rect rule.” But nowadays, as I’ve written:

America’s elite need only muster an army of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists to achieve the same result: the perpetu­ation of a new breed of dynasties that will join forces when neces­sary, like the cells of a slime mold, to create the conditions required for the economic aristocracy to reproduce and thrive. The condi­tions are three: The wealth must multiply fast enough to maintain an ever-expanding family’s power and status. The assets must be easily transferable between generations. And policies must be put in place that enable the family and its businesses to share as little wealth as possible with the government, in life and upon death.

The next two decades will be pivotal for America’s dynasties, as aging Boomers and Silent Generation elders pass along a projected $84 trillion in assets to their heirs. At the end of 2025, meanwhile, nearly $5 trillion worth of oligarch-friendly tax provisions passed by Congress in 2017 are set to expire. A wealthy married couple can now simply hand their little princelings up to $27.2 million without triggering a gift or estate tax. Come 2026, they will only be able to give about half that amount before the taxes kick in. (“Use it or lose it,” cautions one wealth advisory firm.)

The very rich, of course, have their workarounds. But now Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. Angus King (D-ME) have introduced a bill that would deprive them of one of the most popular ones.

It is known as a Walton GRAT—yes, those Waltons. Short for “grantor-retained annuity trusts,” GRATs are heavily marketed by wealth advisors as a way families can channel jaw-dropping sums to their heirs while avoiding gift and estate taxes.

The late Republican megadonor and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson used GRATs to channel almost $8 billion to his heirs, Bloomberg has reported, saving his family an estimated $2.8 billion. Nike founder Phil Knight similarly used them to pass billions to his relations. Indeed, based on leaked IRS documents, ProPublica has reported that more than half of America’s wealthiest families now use GRATs to enrich their offspring.

Savvy tax lawyers have devised tactics that “combine to make the use of GRATs for tax avoidance overwhelm their use for legitimate purposes,” attorney Bob Lord, who serves as a tax policy adviser to the group Patriotic Millionaires, says in an email. (Lord recently wrote an essay about trillionaires for Mother Jones.) 

I won’t trouble readers with too much detail, but you should know the basics about how GRATs work:

The trust creator (“grantor”) hires a tax lawyer to set up a Walton GRAT, also called a “zeroed-out” GRAT, and loads it with stock or other assets that are expected to soar in value. In 2008, before Facebook went public, for example, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Sheryl Sandberg each set up GRATs containing millions of shares initially valued at far below the public asking price.

Over the trust’s lifetime (typically 2 to 10 years), the initial market value of the assets placed into it, plus interest at a rate predetermined by the IRS, is returned to the grantor in annual installments. The courts have ruled that repaying the grantor in full, with interest—a tactic pioneered by a lawyer representing Audrey Walton, the Walmart founder’s sister-in-law—zeroes out the value of the trust as a taxable gift to its beneficiaries, who  are typically the grantor’s children.

Now, here’s the fun part: If the value of the assets in the trust grows faster than that IRS interest rate would have predicted, there will be “remainder” assets left over when the trust’s term expires. Those remainder assets are excluded from the grantor’s taxable estate, and they go directly to the beneficiary. A tax lawyer enlisted by Forbes estimated that Moscovitz, Sandberg, and Zuckerberg channeled more than $204 million to their heirs tax-free—which sure beats that $27.2 million federal exemption.

And the numbers, as we’ve seen, can get way larger. Adelson used the popular “rolling GRAT” method, in which you put highly volatile stock into a series of overlapping 2-year GRATs. If the stock happens to be down when a given GRAT expires, no big deal—you gets the shares back and you’re only out whatever legal fees you paid to set up the trust. But catch the stock on the upswing and man, it’s a jackpot for your kiddies. You can’t really lose, according to Richard Covey, the attorney who invented Walton GRATs.

The punchline here is that GRATs came about by accident. Congress enabled them in 1990 while attempting to crack down on another kind of trust rich families were using for tax avoidance, albeit at a far more modest level. “They completely blew it,” Covey told me. “Instead of tightening up on the law, they loosened up on the law, and they didn’t know that!”

Decades later, Congress still hasn’t undone its mistake. The Obama administration proposed some GRAT restrictions in its 2014 budget, but Congress never took them up. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill at one point contained language that would have killed GRATs, but that didn’t fly, either. So now Wyden and King are having another go. Their Getting Rid of Abusive Trusts Act would do the following to make GRATs less attractive:

• It would eliminate short-term rolling GRATS by imposing a minimum trust term of 15 years.
• It would thwart Audrey Walton’s “zero-out” strategy by imposing a minimum taxable gift value on any assets initially placed in the trust. And any transfer of assets into or out of the trust during its lifetime would count as a taxable event.
• If the trust generates dividends, and a grantor, hoping to maximize the end value for their heirs, pays the income taxes due on those dividends instead of letting the trust do it, then those tax payments would be treated as additional, taxable gifts.

If all of these provisions are enacted, perhaps as part of future compromise legislation related to expiring Trump tax cuts, some people still might set up GRATs to give themselves a steady annual income. “But if I actually want those annuity payments, I’m probably not somebody who can afford to put $30 million in a GRAT,” explains a Senate Finance Committee aide who helped draft the bill. “We’re carving back on the big uses, and we think that will cause people to look elsewhere.”

And look elsewhere they will. Tax policy is a cat-and-mouse game. Whenever Congress closes a door, the dynasties and their $1,500-an-hour tax lawyers seek an open window. The problem of late, says Lord, the tax expert, is that “the cat stopped playing, and the mouse is feasting on the cheese.”

The mouse is a metaphor not just for America’s richest families, but also for the wealth defense industry that lobbies to keep the myriad tax avoidance tools in place. “If we were to hear from people, that would be from the people who are structuring and selling these things, probably more so than the people who are actually benefiting from them,” says the Finance Committee aide.

Explains a second aide: “We are also cognizant of the fact that, at least in this Congress, the Republicans just aren’t going to go for this kind of idea.” But Wyden takes the long view. In fact, the aide told me, much of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 consists of Wyden policies “that we have been working on for years and years before IRA passed.”

To Wyden’s and King’s advantage is the trend, certainly among Democrats, of “taxation” becoming less and less of a dirty word—especially when applied to people with yachts and private planes. In one recent poll, more than two-thirds of respondents in seven swing states supported tax hikes on people making $400,000 or more, and even 58 percent of Republicans said billionaires paid too little.

“The fact that Jeff Bezos qualified for the child tax credit is offensive to people,” says the second Finance Committee aide. “But it also helps that everybody understands that the 45th president of the United States is a tax cheat, and there was very high-profile reporting on how he got away with that. So, I think the ease with which the ultra-rich can just make their taxes disappear is becoming more visceral to people.”

Erstwhile GOP presidential candidate and current vice-presidential hopeful Ben Carson has joined right-wing peers like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in supporting the end—or at least the rolling back—of no-fault divorce laws across the nation.  

“For the sake of families,” the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development wrote in his book, The Perilous Fight, released Tuesday, “we should enact legislation to remove or radically reduce incidences of no-fault divorce.” 

Over the past year, I have been tracking the rise of men on the right, both elected and civilian, who think it ought to be harder to get divorced in this country. These men often cite family values, their religious beliefs, or women’s changing desires to justify rolling back the current no-fault system that exists in all 50 states.  

Since 1969, when then–California Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law—granting couples a separation without having to prove that one side had committed wrongdoing—these statutes have provided a way out of both banal and toxic relationships. Though Reagan, per his son, would later call backing no-fault divorce his “greatest regret” in life, these laws have had a positive impact on women’s lives and autonomy. A 2003 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that when states allowed one partner alone push for divorce, there was a 20 percent decline in female suicide. As I have reported previously, no-fault divorce laws are often essential to those attempting to escape domestic violence. 

While some people have been clamoring about rolling back no-fault divorce laws for decades—read Sen. Tom Cotton’s 1997 article in the Harvard Crimson for his thoughts on the matter—there has been a marked increase in disdain both online and in places of power, about states’ current divorce laws. These men—Johnson, failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Oklahoma State Sen. Dusty Deevers, Sen. J.D. Vance, right-wing activist and influencer Steven Crowder, and PragerU host Michael Knowles, to name a few—are normalizing attacks on whether and how people should be able to separate.

“The reason this matters is that no-fault divorce legally allows marriages to end much more quickly than in previous decades,” Carson wrote in the book.  

Should Carson be chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate, and should he further become second in line for the presidency come November, it’s unclear if and how he’d attempt to limit access to divorce. These kinds of laws are handled state-by-state, and an overwhelming majority of Americans think that divorce is “morally acceptable.” 

This isn’t the first time Carson has written about divorce, either.

Throughout Carson’s books, he references difficulties from his childhood. He details growing up in Detroit, speaking fondly of the rug he sat on in kindergarten to learn new songs. “I was an average student, and life was peaceful,” Carson wrote in his 2011 book America the Beautiful.

That changed when he turned eight years old and his parents divorced. According to Carson, “it wasn’t his job that had kept my father away from our family. He had been living a double life for years—complete with a second wife and another set of children.” 

He, his mom, and his brother moved to Massachusetts. “There were four grades in each classroom, and all eight grades were taught by only two teachers,” Carson wrote. “By the time … I moved back to Detroit, I had essentially lost a year of school while in Boston, my academic performance lagging far behind that of my new classmates.  

Carson laments seeing his mother Sonya go through this time in his 2007 book Take the Risk. “She suddenly found herself all alone in the world, devastated and disillusioned by the end of her marriage,” he wrote. In a section of his 1992 book Think Big dedicated to his mother, she described the financial difficulties that arose after the divorce. “At one point we did get food stamps, but only for a few months. I wanted to be independent and pay my own way. According to the divorce decree, Mr. Carson was supposed to support our sons, but he provided very little money.”  

Fast forward to Carson’s book released this week, in which he writes, “When there are relatively few legal or financial consequences connected with divorce, it’s natural for people to gravitate toward that option when their marriage hits a rough patch.”

“What those people often don’t consider, however,” he goes on, “is the harm—both present and future—inflicted on their children once a divorce is finalized.”

After officials repeatedly warned that they would consider stopping the flow of weapons to Israel if it pressed forward with a ground invasion into Rafah, the Biden administration announced it would nonetheless attempt to send more than $1 billion in additional weapons to Israel, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night, citing congressional officials.

The Journal reports that the latest package “includes the potential transfer of $700 million in tank ammunition, $500 million in tactical vehicles, and $60 million in mortar rounds.” Congress will have to approve the latest package.

The latest announcement comes as something of an about-face for the White House: Just last week, President Biden made headlines after he told CNN that he would stop shipping certain weapons to Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proceeds with a major ground invasion of Rafah—which Israeli forces have already seemingly begun, leading nearly 450,000 people to flee the area since May 6, according to the latest numbers from the United Nations. 

White House Spokesperson John Kirby added Thursday that Biden does not believe “smashing into Rafah” will help take out Hamas. Nonetheless, Israel is reportedly moving in. The Washington Post on Tuesday reported that Israeli tanks are coming closer to urban areas; yesterday, State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters, “We do not want to see a major operation into Rafah, and we have not seen one yet that we would take issue with.”

On Sunday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken confirmed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the US recently halted the delivery of 3,500 so-called “dumb bombs” to Israel. But Blinken made clear that the administration was still allowing most weapons exports.

Representatives for the State and Defense departments, and the White House, did not immediately respond to requests for comment and questions about how they will ensure Israel uses the latest round of weapons in compliance with international humanitarian law and President Biden’s recent comments.

Last Friday, the State Department released a delayed report examining the Israeli army’s conduct and use of US provided-weapons. The department found that “it is reasonable to assess” that Israel has deployed the weapons “in instances inconsistent with its [international humanitarian law] obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.” That report also said American officials “do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance” to Gaza—though that’s at odds with the experiences of more than 20 humanitarian organizations operating on the ground.

Netanyahu, for his part, refuses to face the reality of the humanitarian toll of the war on civilian Palestinians, arguing that a continued military operation is essential to defeat Hamas. “The humanitarian catastrophe that has been spoken of has not been realized, nor will it,” he said in a statement today. 

Workers on the ground paint a different picture. Twenty aid groups signed onto a letter today condemning world leaders’ failures to act to stem the humanitarian crisis and halt the Israeli invasion into Rafah, writing that “further advancement of the military invasion…will lead to the total collapse of lifesaving services.”

The International Rescue Committee said Tuesday that its emergency medical team was supposed to enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing on Monday but was unable. “What we are witnessing in Rafah is nothing less than a humanitarian catastrophe,” Kiryn Lanning, IRC team lead for the occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement. “The ongoing Israeli bombardment, combined with the closure of the Rafah crossing, has led to critical fuel shortages and severe movement restrictions, paralyzing all humanitarian operations.”

The U.N. Secretary-General called yesterday for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza and for the release of all hostages,” and said the Rafah crossing should be re-opened immediately to allow for “unimpeded humanitarian access throughout Gaza.” 

In the meantime, as a volunteer nurse at Rafah’s only maternity hospital told me last week, medical professionals are scrambling to care for injured patients, pregnant people, and vulnerable newborns with a shortage of basic supplies and fears for their safety.

“There is no safe place in Gaza from a healthcare perspective—and beyond,” she said.

Growing up, Myles Markham always felt like an outsider. Markham was multiracial in small, mostly white Florida towns. And they were queer. “I was swimming in water that told me that who I was, what I was, needed to change if I wanted to be safe,” they say. “I really believed, ‘I am a problem. I need to be fixed.’” 

As a teen, a friend got them interested in evangelical Christianity, which seemed to offer the promise of ­transformation. They joined a church youth group and began studying the Bible. Soon after, Markham found an online forum for a ministry that supports “those affected by unwanted homosexuality.” Markham didn’t identify as transgender at the time, but to their mentors in the conversion therapy program, Markham says, sexuality was inextricable from gender identity. “A woman being attracted to women—she was confused about her gender identity, confused about what it means to be a godly woman,” they explain. “And so what they end up doing, therapeutically, is attempting to police and reform your gender presentation.”

Markham’s experience is far from unique. As professional and legal objections to conversion therapy grew in the 2000s, such “change efforts” were migrated from the clinical realm into religious settings. The vast majority of people who have gone through conversion therapy received it from a religious leader, according to the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. The practice remains shrouded in secrecy, says Simon Kent Fung, a conversion therapy survivor and creator of an award-winning podcast on the subject, Dear Alana. “In religious settings, homosexuality is not just a pathology, but a spiritual brokenness,” he explains. “Conversion therapy today is psychologically manipulative.”

Markham’s time in the ministry’s forums made their emotional state even more fragile. They started experiencing panic attacks almost every day. They would be reading or riding the bus and then be overcome by waves of nausea, a racing heartbeat, and the sense of paralysis. “Something was happening to me internally, where I was [feeling] I was about to die,” they remember. At night, they had terrors of demons suffocating or drowning them.

Related

First They Tried to “Cure” Gayness. Now They’re Fixated on “Healing” Trans People.

The worse Markham’s anxiety got, the more they became convinced that only God could save them. They enrolled at a small Christian college and found an outside church that offered group therapy. Other members of the group were there to overcome a variety of issues: eating disorders, alcoholism, or depression. “I was there talking about ‘gay,’” Markham recalls bitterly. The counselor, in training to become a licensed practitioner, told Markham to “write out every single same-sex ­attraction or ­gender confusion–related thought, dream, action, behavior that had ever materialized in my life per my memory, and describe the way that it hurt me, it hurt God, and hurt other people.” When they sought help from college administrators, they required Markham to attend biweekly sessions with a women’s chaplain who counseled them on “biblical womanhood” and made them read a book called God’s Little Princess.

At the end of their senior year, Markham received a class assignment to create a plan to convert an “unreached group” to Christianity. They chose LGBTQ people. Conducting interviews with queer students and community members, Markham says, was the first time in their life they developed relationships with out, self-­affirming queer and trans people. 

 




“I fell in love with everybody who consented to doing these interviews with me,” they remember, cracking a smile.




“I just found myself experiencing a sense of comfort, ease, and possibility in the company of other queer people that I did not expect to feel.”

 

Myles Markham in Los AngelesChloe Aftel

When Markham tried to share their feelings, their classmates immediately ostracized them. Markham was banned from participating in school groups, forbidden from leading church services, and pressured to find new housing.

The hostility only deepened their resolve to live an openly queer life. After graduating, Markham took a job living and working at the Equality House, the rainbow-painted protest house across the street from the notoriously anti-LGBTQ Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. They started organizing to pass discrimination protections and prevent youth suicides and met with countless LGBTQ community members. Everything immediately changed. “The night terrors were the first thing that ended,” they say. The panic attacks faded too, eventually. “I was finally in an environment that just allowed me to be who I was.”

They also found a supportive therapist. “It wasn’t just the tools I developed in therapy that [resulted in] this constitutional shift,” they say. “It was once I was comfortable being who I am and being able to share that with other people, and not having to hide, ignore it, or try to diminish it.”

Now, some 10 years later, Markham feels as though the torments of the past are finally put to rest. “I went from a place of constant, albeit quiet, torment into one of vitality,” Markham remembers. “I was able to wake up grateful for my life. I wanted to be alive, and that was something that took me most of my life at that point to be able to say with sincerity.”

The conversion therapists met last November at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. Behind the closed doors and drawn blinds of a Hampton Inn conference room, a middle-aged woman wearing white stockings and a Virgin Mary blue dress issued a call to arms to the 20-some people in attendance. “In our current culture, in which children are being indoctrinated with transgender belief from the moment they’re out of the womb, if we are confronted with a gender-confused child, you must help,” declared Michelle Cretella, a board member of the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity. “We must do something.”

Cretella was delivering a keynote speech at the first in-person conference in four years of the Alliance, which describes itself as a “professional and scientific organization” with “Judeo-Christian values.” Its purpose: to defend and promote the practice of conversion therapy by licensed counselors.

Not that they’d call what they do “conversion therapy.” That term lacks a precise definition, but it is used colloquially to describe attempts to shift a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. In the 1960s, some psychologists tried to make gay men straight by pairing aversive stimuli, like electric shocks or chemically induced nausea, with images of gay porn—techniques that ran the risk of causing serious psychological damage even as they failed to change participants’ sexual orientation, researchers eventually concluded. Today, “conversion therapy” generally takes the form of verbal counseling. Participants are typically conservative Christians who engage voluntarily—motivated by internalized stigma, family pressure, and the belief that their feelings are incompatible with their faith. Others are children, brought into therapy by their parents.

The American Psychological Association (APA) has concluded that conversion therapy lacks “sufficient bases in scientific principles” and that people who have undergone it are “significantly more likely to experience suicidality and depression.” Similarly, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), part of the Department of Health and Human Services, published a report concluding that “none of the existing research supports the premise that mental or behavioral health interventions can alter gender identity or sexual orientation. Interventions aimed at a fixed outcome, such as gender conformity or heterosexual orientation…are coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment.”

Related

Learning to Love My Trans Self After Conversion Therapy

Accordingly, the Alliance and the ideas it promotes have been relegated to the scientific and political fringes. In the 2010s, as acceptance of gay rights grew rapidly, 18 states and dozens of local governments passed laws forbidding mental health professionals from attempting conversion therapy on minors.

Yet by 2020, a new front had opened in the war against LGBTQ people. Republican state legislatures started passing laws targeting transgender and nonbinary children at school—restricting their access to bathrooms, barring them from participating in sports, and stopping educators from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity. The most intense attacks have banned doctors from providing the treatments for gender dysphoria backed by all major US medical associations. Nearly 114,000 trans youth live in states where access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy has been wiped out.

Last year, I received leaked emails illustrating how these laws are crafted and pushed by a network of anti-trans activists and powerful Christian-right organizations. The Alliance is deeply enmeshed in this constellation of actors. Although small, with an annual budget of under $200,000, it provides both unsubstantiated arguments suggesting LGBTQ identities are changeable and a network of licensed counselors to lend their credibility to these efforts. Among the collaborators were David Pickup, the Alliance’s president-elect; Laura Haynes, an Alliance advocate; and Cretella, the former executive director of an anti-trans pediatrics group who described gender-affirming medical care at the Las Vegas conference as “evil” and part of a “New World Order.” (“I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” she assured attendees. “I’m just someone who has been in the battle of the culture of life versus the culture of death long enough to see the big picture.”) All three have testified before state legislatures against gender-affirming care. When a US senator introduced a pair of bills to restrict trans youth health care in 2021, his press release quoted Cretella calling gender-affirming treatments “eugenics.”

What I couldn’t see from those leaked emails was how the Alliance is resurrecting conversion therapy from the ash heap of history. Its signature fight, to overturn laws prohibiting conversion therapy for minors, is being fueled by the rise of anti-trans politics, which maintains that trans teenagers are simply troubled and need help to embrace the sex they were assigned at birth. In a handful of states, they’ve started winning: Conversion therapy bans have been blocked in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Indiana. Nebraska now requires minors interested in transitioning to undergo therapy that doesn’t “merely affirm” their gender identities.

The Alliance has “suddenly become a more prominent force in the anti-LGBTQ movement again,” says Emerson Hodges, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which documents extremism of various sorts. Backers of anti-trans laws have adopted “the conversion therapy premise,” he says, “that being LGBTQ means you experienced some terrible trauma, or some sort of aberrant disorder, and therefore, it’s an illness—which means we can cure it.”

I wanted to get a deeper insight into those who not only see transness as a problem, but also see conversion therapy as a solution. How have they shifted their approach, given the wealth of professional literature undermining their practices? What is their “treatment” like for trans youth? And who are these people?

So when I saw that the Alliance was holding a one-day conference, it seemed like an opportunity to find some answers. I requested media credentials; receiving no response, I bought a regular $203.98 ticket using my Mother Jones contact information. The day before the conference, I received a packet of materials from Alliance board member Keith Vennum, a psychiatrist who specializes in “helping men develop their heterosexual potential,” according to his profile on Focus on the Family’s Christian Counselors Network. They included an article by a gender care specialist who turned against youth medical transition, reading suggestions from Cretella on how to “heal” “transgender belief” in children, and an essay by Fresno psychiatrist Avak Howsepian arguing that supporting “diversity and inclusion” means supporting pedophilia. I packed my bag and flew to Las Vegas.

When I first arrived at the Hampton Inn, a woman smiled and welcomed me to a quiet meeting room where mostly white men in businesswear chatted in small groups like old friends. I signed in and sat next to a large camera pointed at a lectern. The day’s presentations would be available for purchase online and count toward continuing education credits for licensed counselors.

Not that the education on offer would be seen as credible by most therapists. Since the group’s beginnings in 1992, the Alliance has rejected the now-dominant understanding of LGBTQ identities as normal, healthy expressions of human diversity. Its trio of founders includes psychiatrist Charles Socarides, who helped lead the unsuccessful campaign to keep homosexuality classified as a mental illness in the DSM, the bible of psychiatric diagnoses; psychiatrist Benjamin Kaufman, who’d pushed for nonconsensual, nonconfidential HIV testing in Sacramento, California, during the height of the AIDS epidemic; and psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, who ran a clinic in Los Angeles that specialized in “curing” gayness. They started the Alliance, then named the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), to fight what they called the “scientific censorship” imposed by the “pro-gay lobby.” “As clinicians, we have witnessed the intense suffering caused by homosexuality, which we see as a ‘failure to function according to design,’” one of NARTH’s early policy statements said. “Homosexuality…works against society’s essential male/female design and the all-­important family unit.”

Within a few years, NARTH was claiming hundreds of members. In conferences and publications, it used its members’ status as licensed clinicians to project an ethos of scientific expertise, helping to prop up the “ex-gay” movement of religious groups like Exodus International, which urged LGBTQ Christians to “pray away the gay” in support groups and counseling. Nicolosi, in particular, brought anti-gay pseudoscience to the public, publishing books like A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. He proclaimed that same-sex attraction came from childhood trauma, distant fathers, and overbearing mothers, and called his work “reparative therapy.”

The veneer of scientific rigor was peeling by 2009, when the APA published a landmark report finding no compelling evidence supporting the idea that sexual orientation could be altered with psychological interventions. Robert Spitzer, a leading psychiatrist, apologized for a major study he’d authored that had claimed to show NARTH’s and Exodus’ methods were effective, admitting that he didn’t really know whether anyone in his study had changed their sexual orientation. Then, NARTH board member George Rekers was caught in the Miami airport returning from a vacation to Europe with a gay sex worker he’d hired on Rentboy.com. (He resigned from NARTH and insisted that he had “not engaged in any homosexual behavior whatsoever.”)

Public awareness was growing about the damage conversion therapy could inflict. In a lawsuit against a New Jersey clinic called Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality, former clients alleged that they’d been made to strip naked, touch themselves in front of a counselor, or reenact sexual abuse scenes as part of their treatment. (A jury would eventually hold the clinic and its NARTH-affiliated founder liable for consumer fraud and “unconscionable commercial practice.”) In 2012, California passed the country’s first ban on conversion therapy for minors. Exodus President Alan Chambers acknowledged that its methods had hurt people and that “the majority of people that I have met, and I would say the majority meaning 99.9 percent of them, have not experienced a change in their orientation.” Exodus folded soon after.

Yet NARTH persisted. In 2014, it rebranded as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity. The group soon began to shed loaded terminology for more neutral euphemisms about its work. “The board has come to believe that terms such as reorientation therapy, conversion therapy, and even sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) are no longer scientifically or politically tenable,” Christopher Rosik, a clinical psychologist in Fresno, California, wrote in an Alliance statement in 2016. These descriptors sounded too coercive and categorical, he wrote, and “imply that sexual orientation is an actual entity.” Instead, the board endorsed a new phrase: “Sexual Attraction Fluidity Exploration in Therapy”—a.k.a. the inelegant backronym SAFE-T.

Getting the new name to stick has been a losing battle. During a presentation at the Las Vegas conference, Rosik—a small, intense, bespectacled man who speaks at a rapid clip—shared that he couldn’t get the term SAFE-T published in an APA journal. Mainstream psychologists tend to use a technically accurate term for conversion therapy, “sexual orientation change efforts,” which Rosik has appropriated into “self-initiated sexual orientation change efforts,” to underscore that the individuals he studies are choosing to participate.

During Rosik’s talk, Joseph Nicolosi Jr., the son of the Alliance’s now-deceased co-founder, was seated in the front row in a sharp black suit. At his side was his wife, with whom he occasionally held hands. “We shouldn’t even use the word ‘orientation,’” he argued when Rosik finished. Sexual orientation couldn’t be measured or disproved, he continued, but sexual attractions or feelings could. “They talk about pseudoscience. That term—orientation—is a pseudoscience.”

“I agree,” Laura Haynes, the Alliance advocate, broke in from the back. “We should not reify it.”

“Could the same thing be said of the term ‘gay’?” someone else wondered.

“Possibly,” Nicolosi Jr. said. “At what point is a person gay? Do they have one homosexual thought a year? Fifty? One thousand?”

Earlier in the day, Nicolosi Jr. had told colleagues that he’d registered his own term, Reintegrative Therapy®, with the US Patent and Trademark Office. His website contains a 12-point chart on how Reintegrative Therapy® differs from conversion therapy. The chart makes clear that changing sexual orientation is not the objective; rather, the goal is to “resolve trauma.” “Spontaneous” changes in sexuality are a “byproduct,” the website says. In 2021, Nicolosi Jr. sued a pair of Canadian academics for defamation over a paper that listed “reintegrative therapy” as one of several pseudoscientific practices that fell under the conversion therapy umbrella. (The suit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. He is appealing. Neither Nicolosi Jr. nor anyone else from the Alliance responded to my requests for comment on how this article characterizes their work.)

Yet Nicolosi Jr.’s website is full of testimonials about clients’ sexual attractions changing. And it repeatedly cites a study that purports to show Reintegrative Therapy® decreasing clients’ same-sex attractions and improving their overall­ ­wellbeing.­ The study’s publisher? The Alliance’s Journal of Human Sexuality.

Another euphemism in Alliance circles is “change allowing therapy”—a phrase whose gentle ambiguity suggests openness to personal growth. In a similar vein, Michael Gasparro, one of the youngest Alliance board members, told attendees about a technique he and Nicolosi Jr. called “mindfulness,” which they became interested in “because of its ubiquitousness in the mental health field as a term that is generally just accepted carte blanche,” Gasparro explained.

They then showed us a “mindfulness” video in which a young adult client, played by an actor, sits nervously across from Nicolosi Jr. in a room filled with books. Nicolosi Jr. asks him to describe his ideal sexually attractive man. The client responds that the man would be strong, confident, informal. “I would definitely say a guy who’s like, um, on the taller side,” he says.

Then, Nicolosi Jr. asks the client what he would change about himself: Shorter or taller? Stronger or weaker arms? More or less confident? He urges the client to compare himself to the imagined man, and the client says he feels inadequate. “How do you feel about the fact that you feel that inferiority, weakness?” Nicolosi Jr. asks.

“Sadness,” the client says.

“Feel your sadness as you continue looking at that guy,” Nicolosi Jr. urges. “And as you hold them together right now, zero to 10, how strong is your sexual attraction toward him?”

It was Nicolosi Jr.’s dad who championed the idea that queerness comes from childhood trauma, one of the same narratives weaponized today to explain why kids come out as trans. The APA has slammed both ideas as unfounded.

Yet these kinds of claims are familiar to trans survivors of conversion therapy interviewed by Mother Jones. “The idea was that you don’t find boys and men to be safe, and so in order to protect yourself, you want to become a boy or a man,” recalls Myles Markham, who participated in group conversion therapy in high school and college, when they were struggling with their feelings around sexuality and gender. Yet to Markham, those explanations “never resonated,” they say: “I’m not a person who has experienced acute or direct misogynistic violence. I grew up with emotionally intelligent and gentle masculine figures.”

Other survivors say their therapists tried to attribute their transness to negative childhood experiences. “For me, it was daddy issues,” says Arielle Rebekah, a diversity, equity, and inclusion trainer in Chicago, recounting how counselors at a residential boarding school for troubled teens tried to force them to abandon their trans identity. “They basically tried to pin it on, ‘You’ve never had a positive male role model.’” Lillian Lennon, a 25-year-old organizer in Alaska, says her parents sent her to a similar residential program after she told them she was trans at age 14. According to an affidavit she filed in a custody lawsuit involving another LGBTQ student, the therapist Lennon was paired with at the school said her transness was a form of “lashing out” and “seeking attention” in the face of turmoil at home, such as financial problems and her parents separating.

None of this therapy “worked.” Today, Lennon, Rebekah, and Markham have all transitioned and have become activists or consultants supporting other LGBTQ people. Yet they all still deal with nightmares, panic, and other mental health struggles they attribute to the conversion efforts. “A lot of thoughts [were] placed into my head about how disturbing and gross and creepy people like me were,” Lennon says. “I internalized a lot of these projections.” Today, she deals with depression and loneliness. “I’ve never shaken the consequences of my time there,” she says.

Still, multiple counselors I met at the Alliance conference endorsed the concept that queerness and transness are the result of trauma or bad parenting. After the morning’s sessions, David Pickup, a towering man who identifies as a “reintegrative” therapist, approached the table where I was sitting with a group of clinicians. Pickup mainly practices in Texas and says he only works with clients who truly want to change their sexuality or gender identity. He has publicly attributed his own same-sex attractions and discomfort with his gender in part to sexual abuse. Pulling aside a chair from a neighboring table and folding his lanky frame into it, he patiently explained his belief that being trans is the same as being gay, except with “more severe” trauma, from earlier in life, and worse family environments. “I have yet to see one case where there’s not been trauma underneath every single homoerotic or transgender issue.” His theory on trans youth: “Basically, what happens is those kids don’t attach to their same-sex parent, and so they don’t attach to themselves in their own biological sex.”

At her session, “Healing Gender Incongruence in a Hostile Environment,” Cretella also urged attendees to focus on parenting and underlying trauma when working with trans teenagers. She described trans identity as a “maladaptive defense mechanism” in response to events like divorce and sexual abuse.

Her evidence: a 2018 Pediatrics study that examined medical records from youth enrolled in Kaiser Permanente health plans in California and Georgia. The researchers identified 1,082 minors between the ages of 10 and 17 whose records indicated that they were trans. Some 70 percent had mental health problems like depression, anxiety, and attention disorders that predated the first sign of gender dysphoria in their medical record. “They are not suicidal because of us,” Cretella said, giggling before hitting a somber note, “but because they are traumatized beforehand.”

Cretella’s interpretation of the research—that poor mental health led people to identify as trans—relies on a “fundamental” error, according to Michael Goodman, an Emory University professor and one of the study’s authors. Researchers, himself included, didn’t know when their subjects first identified as trans, only when they talked to their doctors about it. “It takes years, usually, before the child or adolescent, or an adult, presents to the health care provider with gender dysphoria issues,” Goodman told me. “It might as well be the other way around: The gender dysphoria leads to all of those mental health problems, which is a far more reasonable interpretation.”

Yet Alliance affiliates have been using Goodman’s research to lobby against conversion therapy bans and gender-affirming care. In 2019, Laura Haynes distributed his paper to colleagues working on anti-trans legislation. “It may be the first research that found onset dates of psychiatric disorders and first-evidence date of gender non­conforming identity,” she emphasized.

“Laura, thank you! I’m testifying soon for a case in Colorado and this data will be very useful,” replied psychiatrist Miriam Grossman, a senior fellow at the anti-trans group Do No Harm. A group co-founded by Pickup called the National Task Force for Therapy Equality drafted letters to legislators citing Goodman’s study to claim that “gender dysphoria may have pathological causes.” And when Pickup testified in support of an early gender-affirming care ban in South Dakota, he said there was a “rapidly growing body of literature suggesting that psychological issues play a crucial role in many young people’s trans identification.”

This isn’t the only example of scientific spin from Alliance figures. Last year, in what he called an “adversarial collaboration” with queer researchers, Rosik got a study published in the peer-reviewed APA journal Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. The paper looked at attempts to “reduce, change and/or eliminate” same-sex attractions, behavior, or orientation, either on one’s own or with a counselor, and found that 326 people currently undergoing conversion therapy had greater depression than those who’d stopped or never tried it. Yet Rosik and his co-authors concluded that the differences “may be of uncertain practical significance and interpretive meaning.”

It didn’t take long for others to point out the contradiction. “Basically, what they were saying is that even though there’s [evidence] of harm, the harm isn’t grave enough to be concerned about,” explains David Rivera, a psychology professor at Queens College in New York who co-authored a rebuttal to the Rosik paper. Soon, with the authors’ agreement, the journal retracted the study, saying it wanted to provide “greater accuracy and interpretive clarity to sensitive findings that might be misused.”

Rosik is used to fighting criticism: He edits the Alliance’s Journal of Human Sexuality. The very first issue, in 2009, was devoted to rebutting the APA report on the lack of evidence behind sexual orientation change efforts. Since then, its articles, interviews, and book reviews have defended “SAFE-T” and attacked the anti–conversion therapy consensus. At the conference, Rosik asserted that mainstream research institutions are “ideologically captured.”

Indeed, many of the Alliance speakers seemed to take it as a given that the medical and scientific communities were in thrall to LGBTQ activists. In a question that seemed intended to ridicule, Pickup asked during one of Cretella’s talks if the doctors who provide gender-affirming care to trans youth are personally “suffering from a disorder of some kind.” Appreciative laughter scattered throughout the room.

“Yes,” she replied, becoming serious. “Many of the physicians who are in leadership positions are themselves on the LGBTQ spectrum.” Then she referred to the disorder in which a caregiver imposes an ailment on a child to gain attention for themselves: “I would hypothesize that we were dealing with Munchausen by proxy in many cases.”

Outrageous claims like these are a common weapon among anti-trans activists and their right-wing political allies, who often describe trans health doctors as butchers mutilating kids. In 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton classified gender-affirming care for minors as a form of child abuse and equated parents who sought such care for their children with those suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Using this theory, Texas’ Department of Family and Protective Services opened at least nine investigations into parents before an ACLU lawsuit put a halt to them.

Similarly extreme language also comes from the small cohort of paid expert witnesses often called upon to support gender-affirming care bans—like endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, who compared such care to Nazi experimentation and the Tuskegee syphilis study when testifying for anti-trans legislation in South Dakota. (In a court case about Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care in Florida, a federal judge concluded that Laidlaw was “far off from the accepted view” on transgender issues, in part because Laidlaw had said he wouldn’t use patients’ correct pronouns.)

To Cretella, the solution to gender dysphoria is obvious: Transition people’s minds, not their bodies. She described this project in religious terms. “In a Judeo-Christian worldview,” she explained during her talk, “one of the functions of the brain is to accurately perceive” the physical reality created by God.

“If my thinking is contrary to physical reality, that’s the abnormality that must be understood,” she continued. “We try to ­understand the abnormal thinking and come to help the person attain flourishing, by analyzing and shaping thinking to embrace the physical reality.”

In other words, if a person’s sense of self doesn’t match their physical body, their sense of self requires fixing.

During the break after Cretella’s presentation, I overheard two women chatting on their way into the restroom. “Talk about a wealth of knowledge,” one remarked.

“True science will always back up true religion,” the other replied. “God’s truth and science, if it’s true, will always match up. That’s what I tell my students.”

If the Las Vegas conference made one thing clear, it’s that conversion therapy is alive and well, even in places where it’s been banned. One counselor told me he makes it a habit not to document his treatment plans in writing to avoid getting in trouble and simply treats “family dynamics” in states with conversion therapy bans.

In a 2015 survey of more than 27,000 trans adults, nearly 1 in 7 said that a professional, such as a therapist, doctor, or religious adviser, had tried to make them not transgender; about half of respondents said they were minors at the time. By applying this rate to population estimates, the Williams Institute at UCLA projects that more than 135,000 trans adults nationwide have experienced some form of conversion therapy.

Despite the data, lawmakers frequently don’t believe that conversion therapy is still happening in their community, says Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, the LGBTQ suicide prevention group. “We’re constantly running up against this misconception that this is an artifact of the past,” she says. So, five years ago, the Trevor Project began scouring psychologists’ websites and books, records of public testimony, and known conversion therapy referral services, looking for counselors who said they could alter someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

As the research stretched on, Pick noticed webpages being revised to reflect changing times. “We saw many folks who seemed to leave the industry entirely,” she says. “But others changed their website, changed their keywords, [from] talking about creating ex-gays to talking about ex-trans.” Last December, Pick’s team published their report documenting active conversion therapists. They found more than 600 were licensed health care professionals and an additional 716 were clergy, lay ministers, or other unlicensed religious counselors.

According to Pick, some conversion therapists have embraced a new label for what they do: “gender exploratory therapy.” It’s a term that Cretella used to describe the approach she recommended, and unlike the other euphemisms thrown around at the conference, this has gained traction. In 2021, a group of therapists, who ranged from conflicted about medical interventions for kids with gender dysphoria to skeptical of the very concept of transgender identity, formed the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association (GETA) to promote an approach they characterize as neither conversion nor affirmation.

Some current and former leaders of the group, which claims a membership of 300 mental health providers, have been involved in influential organizations lobbying against gender-affirming care across the world, such as the Ireland-based Genspect and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a nonprofit registered in Idaho. They’ve notched some big wins: In November 2023, the UK Council for Psychotherapy—the nation’s top professional association—declared that it was fine for counselors to take GETA’s “exploratory” approach to gender. This April, a long-awaited review of gender-related care for youth in England’s National Health Service endorsed exploratory therapy, according to Alex Keuroghlian, an associate psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School. And in the United States, in cases in which families of trans children have sued states for banning gender-affirming care, the state often calls expert witnesses who endorse “exploratory” psychotherapy as their preferred alternative treatment.

After all, the idea of “exploring” one’s gender identity sounds benign. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which issues guidelines on gender-­affirming treatment, recommends that clinicians working with teens “facilitate the exploration and expression of gender openly and respectfully so that no one particular identity is favored.” Yet, as with mindfulness, “that term has now been hijacked by folks on the other side,” says Judith Glassgold, a clinical psychologist who chaired the APA task force that in 2009 documented the lack of science behind conversion therapy.

GETA’s guidelines instruct therapists to dig deep into “the entire landscape of the young person’s life and subjective experience,” probing all possible reasons they might identify as transgender. The catch, says Glassgold, is that “exploration” means “trying to find negative reasons why someone’s diverse.” Last year, SAMHSA issued a report saying that “approaches that discourage youth from identifying as transgender or gender-diverse, and/or from expressing their gender identity” are sometimes “misleadingly referred to as ‘exploratory therapy.’” These approaches are “harmful and never appropriate,” the report concluded.

GETA rebranded as Therapy First late last year, saying exploratory therapy was really no different from standard psychotherapy. The group’s membership statement still disavows conversion therapy. But its co-founder Stella O’Malley told me she believes bans on conversion therapy should apply only to sexual orientation. And in Las Vegas, Cretella drew a direct connection between the old work of the Alliance and the new work of gender-exploratory therapists. “It truly is very similar to how the Alliance has always approached unwanted SSA [same-sex attraction],” she told the assembled therapists. “You approach it as ‘change therapy’—or, even less triggering, ‘exploratory therapy.’”

At lunch, I headed over to a discussion convened by Robert Vazzo, a red-faced man with a buzz cut. While picking at his rice pilaf, he recalled working with a trans-feminine 14-year-old. Vazzo referred to them as a “young man” who “complained of being trans.” He complimented their biceps and tried to get them to be “more assertive” with their mother. The goal, he explained, was to get the teen to connect with some inner masculinity. “The bulk of our work is trying to get people to value who they really are,” Vazzo told me. “Who they really are,” in this view, is cisgender.

In 2017, Vazzo filed a lawsuit against the city of Tampa, Florida, after it imposed a fine on licensed counselors who attempt conversion therapy on minors. Vazzo says he was represented pro bono by the Christian-right law firm Liberty Counsel, which also represented Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to grant marriage licenses for gay couples in 2015. Liberty Counsel argued that the city was infringing on Vazzo’s right to free speech, because his treatment consists of talk therapy. In late 2019, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump agreed with Vazzo and overturned the Tampa ordinance, concluding that the state, not the city, should determine health care regulations and discipline.

Between 2012 and 2023, the Alliance and connected groups filed a combined 11 federal lawsuits challenging conversion therapy bans in eight states. Vazzo’s was the first to succeed. The next year, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals shut down a similar ordinance in Boca Raton, Florida, which had been challenged by former Alliance President Julie Hamilton and another therapist. The court concluded that it violated the First Amendment. The decision blocked youth conversion therapy bans in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.

So far, the 11th Circuit is the only federal appeals court to agree with the idea that conversion therapy is protected by the First Amendment, says Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Minter notes that federal courts have previously considered clinicians’ words in mental and medical health care settings to be a form of professional conduct and fair game for state regulation.

At the time of the conference, the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear a similar case brought by Brian Tingley, who sued Washington state with the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerful conservative Christian legal organization behind many recent anti-trans bills and attacks on abortion, in order to practice conversion therapy. The Supreme Court declined to take the case, but a similar lawsuit, also filed by ADF, is making its way through the Colorado court system.

In his dissent to the court’s decision not to take the Tingley case, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, described bans on conversion therapy for minors as “viewpoint-based and content-based discrimination in its purest form.” Thomas even foreshadowed a future ruling overturning conversion therapy bans: “Although the Court declines to take this particular case, I have no doubt that the issue it presents will come before the Court again. When it does, the Court should do what it should have done here…consider what the First Amendment requires.”

Meanwhile, the fight over conversion therapy bans is continuing in state legislatures. In 2023, Indiana passed a law halting enforcement of local bans. This year, legislators in two more states, Iowa and West Virginia, introduced similar bills.

The West Virginia bill went further than the one in Indiana—attempting to stop mental health professionals from providing anything except conversion therapy to trans minors. The bill, which suggested trans people have “delusion[s],” would have prohibited providers “from attempting to induce or exacerbate gender dysphoria in a minor…with no intent of cure or cure-pursuing recovery.”

That measure failed. But in Nebraska, a similar—though less explicit—bill has already become law. The “Let Them Grow Act,” passed last year, mandates that trans kids receive therapy before they get any medical treatments for gender dysphoria. On its face, the law appears to preserve some access to treatments; its language emphasizes the need to protect kids. “What we got was a version that ends up sounding more compassionate,” says Abbi Swatsworth, the executive director of OutNebraska, an organization that coordinated community opposition to the bill. “But in actuality, it is much worse.”

After it passed, Nebraska’s health department was tasked with issuing guidelines on implementing it. The state’s chief medical officer, Timothy Tesmer, an ear, nose, and throat doctor, assembled a team of “experts”—but didn’t include anyone who specialized in transgender medical care, local practitioners and advocacy groups say.

The rules crafted by Tesmer’s department require that trans kids receive 40 hours of therapy that “do not merely affirm the patient’s beliefs” before the kids can move forward with medical interventions like puberty blockers. The therapy recommendations are “not in the standard of care, they’re not in any of the pediatrics or psychiatry literature,” says Alex Dworak, a pediatrician who works with trans youth in Nebraska. Florence Ashley, a bioethicist at the University of Toronto who focuses on trans issues, points to the regulations’ instruction not to “merely affirm” a client. “What does that mean, in the actual therapy room?” Ashley asks. “Does that mean they can’t use your name and pronouns? Because then that’s very much privileging a specific outcome.”

Camie Nitzel, the founder of Kindred Psychology in Lincoln, is wondering the same thing. “If the artwork in my office reflects gender-­diverse faces, is that overly affirming?” she asked Tesmer in a letter opposing the regulations. Nitzel, who has been working with trans Nebraskans for 29 years, uses the clinical approach recommended by the APA. Under the Nebraska regulations, therapists “are going to be forced to choose between practicing ethically and practicing legally,” she warns. Already, some other providers have begun to refuse to see trans youth because of the risk. “We’re now getting referrals from providers who have worked with trans youth before, but they’re sending their clients here because they don’t feel comfortable,” Nitzel says. “Providers are faced with the decision about the safety of continuing to do work.”

Meanwhile, the trans community in Nebraska is just plain scared. Andrew Farias, a lobbyist in Lincoln, is so worried about the possibility of future restrictions on adult trans health care that he temporarily stopped testosterone just to see if he could bear it. “I want to make sure that I’m prepared in terms of my own safety and mental health,” he says. “I wanted to test myself and see: Could I do this?…Or do I have to move?”

I left the last session of the conference with my head spinning. In the world of the Alliance, down was up, harm was help, expert conclusions were lies—or were they? As I made my way out of the hotel lobby, where the therapists were gathering to walk together to a nearby diner, I had the feeling of exiting an alternate reality.

No one had distilled that feeling better than the Alliance’s incoming leader, David Pickup. “There is such a thing as a man born in a woman’s body,” he’d declared in a speech, delivering the line with sarcastic bravado. “There is such a thing as homosexual marriage.” Then he parodied what was happening in the Hampton Inn: “The small conferences that are held by these fringe groups across the country are all right-wing, unscientific, no-research-given, closeted Christians who try to prod and force people to do therapy.” The audience laughed with uncertainty. Had their comrade gone soft on them?

No one need worry; Pickup cut to his point: “The Alliance tells you the truth. And none of those statements I just said—even though the world tends to now believe in that—has anything to do with truth,” he assured them. In Pickup’s view, “the transgender movement is actually crumbling. In part, that’s due to the Alliance.” Then he asked the audience to take out their phones and laptops to donate. “Good things are coming,” he promised. “I think the truth will one day win out, more than ever.”

There is an urgency behind Pickup’s words. His truth must win out because the opposite would be devastating. To concede that trans people are real, let alone happy, would strip away the Alliance’s last best hope of a comeback. 

Read more about Myles Markham’s story of surviving conversion therapy—and finding self-love—here.

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

West Virginia voters had an unenviable choice of congressional candidates in the GOP primary Tuesday: a guy who stormed the Capitol on January 6, or an incumbent who, after having to evacuate the Capitol during the riot, went back to vote against certifying the election. Voters chose the incumbent.

Rep. Carol Miller trounced “J6 prisoner” Derrick Evans by almost 30 points, in the race to represent West Virginia’s first district. She will likely win the general election in November. The campaign has been viewed as something of a litmus test of how voters view the January 6 insurrection three years later.

Evans had just been elected to the state legislature when he livestreamed himself breaching the US Capitol along with the angry mob. He announced his candidacy for Congress soon after leaving prison, where he had served a 90-day sentence after pleading guilty to a felony for obstructing law enforcement during civil disorder. He made his January 6 conviction a centerpiece of his energetic campaign. He was endorsed by the House Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), and former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn appeared with him in Charleston last week, saying, “I want people of high moral character, people who are incorruptible, who are willing to lead our country forward against this tyrannical overreaching political establishment that we have.”

Miller mostly ignored Evans throughout his long campaign. She refused to debate him this weekend, leaving Evans to talk to an empty chair. And when USA Today recently asked Miller what she thought about whether he should be on the ballot given his felony conviction, she replied, “I don’t think about him at all.”

Carol Miller (WV) refused to show up to the debate tonight. With her voting record, I don’t blame her. pic.twitter.com/Mdv9vwRBM1

— Derrick Evans (@DerrickEvans4WV) May 12, 2024

But in the past month, as his campaign gained traction, she clearly started to think about him a little more. In early April, for the first time, campaign finance records show she spent $40,000 on polling. During the last quarter, her fundraising shot up by $370,000, fueled by lots of donations not from West Virginia voters but from inside the Beltway lobbyists happy to ante up for a member of the powerful House Ways and Means committee.

On April 11, Miller’s campaign spent $313,580 on an ad buy, the first she’d done since kicking off her reelection campaign. Until then, her largest expenditures had been donations to the National Republican Campaign Committee and $36,000 for an event last year during the LIV golf tournament at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.

Despite having abundant material with which to attack Evans—whose felony conviction prevents him from voting until he’s completed three years of probation—Miller’s ads targeted Evans for having once been a Democrat. It looked like pretty weak sauce in a state where the current governor, Jim Justice, who just won the GOP primary to fill the seat of retiring Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin, also used to be a Democrat.

But the ads reflected the fine line Miller had to walk in trying to campaign against a January 6 rioter and MAGA die-hard in a state where, as Evans’ campaign consultant Noel Fritsch, told me recently, “Eighty percent of the voting electorate thinks that whatever happened on January 6 was warranted and 70 percent think the Feds did it.” (Polls back him up on some of this.)

Democracy advocates had argued that Evans should not even have been allowed on the ballot to begin with because the Constitution bars former elected officials who participated in an insurrection from holding federal office. An Evans victory would have put Congress in the very awkward position of having to decide whether to enforce the Constitution or respect the will of West Virginia voters. As I wrote recently:

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a Reconstruction-era provision, prohibits anyone who took an oath to uphold the Constitution, such as state legislators like Evans, from serving in federal office if they “engaged in insurrection.” Donald Sherman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), says the state should not have allowed Evans on the ballot at all, but no one filed a legal challenge. “I think he didn’t look like a contender a year ago when he announced,” Sherman said. “He might have flown under the radar for some folks.”

Now, only Congress can decide whether Evans could join their ranks, thanks to the March US Supreme Court decision in Trump v. Anderson, which held that Colorado could not take Trump off the ballot because of his involvement in January 6. The court said that the states cannot enforce Section 3 against federal candidates; only Congress can. “There are not that many people with a stronger case for disqualification under Section 3 than Mr. Evans,” Sherman said. “I think ultimately if he prevails it will come down to whether Congress will enforce the provision of the Constitution against an insurrectionist.”

Most political observers thought it would have been highly unlikely that Congress would have tried to prevent Evans from taking his seat if he’d won. Miller’s victory leaves that hypothetical untested. She issued a bland statement after the race was called Tuesday night that reflected her anodyne campaign and her intention to continue ignoring her opponent, whom she didn’t mention.

“It has been the honor of my life to represent West Virginia in Congress, and I am grateful to have won the Republican primary in West Virginia’s First Congressional District tonight. Over the past few years, I have ensured that the Mountain Valley Pipeline will be completed, worked on legislation that will lower taxes for West Virginians, and held the Biden Administration accountable,” Miller said. “While the Republican House Majority has accomplished great work, we still have more to deliver for the American people. I’m thankful to represent my wild and wonderful state in Washington, and I will continue to work to make West Virginia the best place to live, work, and raise a family.”

Evans waited until Wednesday morning to publicly concede the race. “The sun came up, God is still good, & I’m blessed with a beautiful & healthy family,” he tweeted. “Congrats to Carol on the win. I hope you realize 38k people in your district do not feel represented by you, & you start to vote more conservative. To the swamp. We are still coming for you.”

May 15: This story has been updated to include Evans’ concession.

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

House Democrats have launched an investigation into a meeting between oil company executives and Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home and club last month, following reports that the former president offered to dismantle Biden’s environmental rules and requested $1 billion in contributions to his presidential campaign.

Democrats on the House oversight committee late on Monday evening sent letters to nine oil executives requesting information on their companies’ participation in the meeting.

“Media reports raise significant potential ethical, campaign finance, and legal issues that would flow from the effective sale of American energy and regulatory policy to commercial interests in return for large campaign contributions,” the Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee, wrote in the letters.

Donald Trump’s criminal trial for engineering a hush money scheme—to save his 2016 campaign from a slew of stories about his infidelities—entered its dramatic final stages on Tuesday, as his former fixer, Michael Cohen, completed his testimony for the prosecution. Then, just as Trump’s attorneys seemed poised to attack, the former president’s defense team was surprisingly ginger when finally given a chance to strike back. Tuesday began, as Monday ended, with prosecutors walking the normally voluble and combative Cohen through his story, calmly explaining how Trump okayed every step of the scheme to pay off adult film star Stormy Daniels for keeping quiet about a sexual encounter she testified to having with Trump. As the prosecution’s case wound down, tension was high in the courtroom. Trump’s lawyers were expected to come out swinging at Cohen, attacking Cohen’s credibility and long history of lying (much of it for Trump’s benefit, he has said).

Trump attorney Todd Blanche started with a sneering jab at Cohen, asking him if they had ever met—and when Cohen said they hadn’t, asking if Cohen had indeed once described Blanche as “a crying little shit” on TikTok. Cohen agreed it was the type of thing he would say, and that was as hostile as the afternoon got. Blanche seemed to wobble through a series of questions designed to make Cohen confirm that he had previously lied, and did, indeed, harbor a deep dislike for his former employer. Among other odd bits of testimony that Blanche elicited from Cohen were confirmations that:

• Cohen would like to see Trump go to jail.
• Cohen has referred to Trump as a “boorish cartoon misogynist” and “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain.”
• Cohen is selling merchandise on his website, including t-shirts that show Trump in a orange prison jumpsuit, and others that say “Convict 45.”

The cross-examination will continue on Thursday, but so far has been a far cry from the Trump team’s attack on Cohen during last fall’s civil fraud trial—where Cohen also testified, and where Trump’s lawyers didn’t hold back, repeatedly trying to provoke Cohen and even taunting him about whether he lied to his wife. In that case, Trump’s attorneys repeatedly engaged in shouting matches with Cohen, who quickly became flustered. On Tuesday, however, Cohen remained calm throughout his testimony, answering slowly and methodically as Blanche probed.

Even Trump, who at the fraud trial was a noisy presence while his ex-fixer testified, sat quietly, eyes mostly closed, as Cohen—whom several judges have had to issue gag orders to keep Trump from attacking outside court—spoke. 

The trial will likely finish up next week. Cohen is the linchpin of the prosecution’s case against Trump, and prosecutors said on Tuesday that he would be their final witness. Trump’s attorneys told Judge Juan Merchan that they have very limited plans for calling witnesses, but are still undecided on having Trump take the stand in his own defense.

Despite the subdued cross-examination, on Tuesday morning, Cohen repeatedly delivered for prosecutors, with testimony that flowed smoothly from the previous day. Cohen testified on Monday how he orchestrated payoffs to adult film star Stormy Daniels and others who, in the closing weeks before the 2016 election, threatened to go public with embarrassing stories about Trump. In Daniels’ case, it was a story of a sexual encounter at a golf tournament which, on the stand, she refused to call either a relationship or romantic. Despite reaching an agreement to pay Daniels $130,000, and Trump insisting that the deal get done, Cohen couldn’t get Trump to pay out the money in the final days before the election, and opted to supply it himself. On Tuesday, he detailed his efforts to get repaid, testifying that, while in the White House, Trump personally signed off on payments to reimburse Cohen in the guise of legal fees. Cohen barely did any legal work, he said.  

Cohen also testified that when word leaked out about the coverup in 2018, Trump urged him to stay loyal and keep his mouth shut.

“‘Don’t worry. I’m the President of the United States. There’s nothing here. Everything’s going to be OK. Stay tough,'” Cohen said Trump told him the last time they spoke. “You’re going to be okay.'”

But, Cohen said, he wasn’t okay when he became a target of then–FBI Director Robert Mueller’s investigation. At that point, Cohen said, turning to jurors and appearing emotional, he had a conversation with his family, who questioned why he was clinging to his allegiance to his old boss, who had done so little for him since taking office.

“Why are you holding onto this loyalty? What are you doing? We’re supposed to be your first loyalty,” Cohen said his family asked him. 

Prosecutors also guided Cohen through some of his lowest moments—his plan to use his once-close relationship with Trump to sell access to him after he was elected, his repeated and flagrant lying on the former president’s behalf, and his conviction for making the payments to Daniels and another woman, for which he served a year in prison. Discussing those low points was part of a strategy by prosecutors to get ahead of attacks by Trump’s legal team—which, at least initially, did not come. 

Ultimately, the case may come down to which version of Cohen jurors believe: the temperamental, toadying, vengeful serial liar, who Trump’s attorneys tried to draw out with their barbed attacks, or a formerly temperamental, toadying, vengeful serial liar, who now professes remorse for his subservience to Trump. Cohen, for his part, seemed very willing to confess his sins under direct examination from prosecutors. Over the course of his day-and-a-half of testimony, Cohen described how he sought Trump’s attention, buying properties in his buildings and then offering his services as a hyperbolic attack dog who would rage against anyone threatening Trump’s success—long before he ran for president. Cohen also talked, at length, about how he constantly returned to Trump to detail his exploits in what he acknowledged were desperate attempts to win approval and affection. 

By the time Blanche got his turn to attack Cohen and his credibility, Cohen seemed to have confessed to almost everything Blanche tried to ask about. One of the biggest revelations from the initial cross-examination may be that, despite Trump’s repeated efforts to portray the case against him as a conspiracy closely controlled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Cohen testified that he has never personally met Bragg. 

Before the day’s testimony began, excitement for the expected drama was running high outside the court. There were no signs of any protesters—either for Trump or against him—but a crowd of over one hundred curious members of the public began lining up as early as 4 a.m. to secure a coveted seat in the courtroom, or a nearby overflow courtroom where the trial is being shown live. Many of the hopefuls appeared older or retired, and seemed most excited to see liberal commentators passing by on their way into the courthouse. But most of those in line were disappointed, with only about 20 tickets handed out for admission to the courtrooms; several dozen journalists were left without a ticket as well. One man, who seemed to be a Trump supporter, was berated for cutting the line and refusing to give up his ticket. 

As it became clear that only a few would be able to attend, at least one person towards the back of the queue paid a woman at the front $350 in cash to get in—she had earlier rejected an offer of $80. Given the anti-climactic tone of the afternoon’s testimony, the buyer may regret his largesse. 

West Virginia voters had an unenviable choice of congressional candidates in the GOP primary Tuesday: a guy who stormed the Capitol on January 6, or an incumbent who, after having to evacuate the Capitol during the riot, went back to vote against certifying the election. Voters chose the incumbent.

Rep. Carol Miller trounced “J6 prisoner” Derrick Evans by almost 30 points, in the race to represent West Virginia’s first district. She will likely win the general election in November. The campaign has been viewed as something of a litmus test of how voters view the January 6 insurrection three years later.

Evans had just been elected to the state legislature when he livestreamed himself breaching the US Capitol along with the angry mob. He announced his candidacy for Congress soon after leaving prison, where he had served a 90-day sentence after pleading guilty to a felony for obstructing law enforcement during civil disorder. He made his January 6 conviction a centerpiece of his energetic campaign. He was endorsed by the House Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), and former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn appeared with him in Charleston last week, saying, “I want people of high moral character, people who are incorruptible, who are willing to lead our country forward against this tyrannical overreaching political establishment that we have.”

Miller mostly ignored Evans throughout his long campaign. She refused to debate him this weekend, leaving Evans to talk to an empty chair. And when USA Today recently asked Miller what she thought about whether he should be on the ballot given his felony conviction, she replied, “I don’t think about him at all.”

Carol Miller (WV) refused to show up to the debate tonight. With her voting record, I don’t blame her. pic.twitter.com/Mdv9vwRBM1

— Derrick Evans (@DerrickEvans4WV) May 12, 2024

But in the past month, as his campaign gained traction, she clearly started to think about him a little more. In early April, for the first time, campaign finance records show she spent $40,000 on polling. During the last quarter, her fundraising shot up by $370,000, fueled by lots of donations not from West Virginia voters but from inside the Beltway lobbyists happy to ante up for a member of the powerful House Ways and Means committee.

On April 11, Miller’s campaign spent $313,580 on an ad buy, the first she’d done since kicking off her reelection campaign. Until then, her largest expenditures had been donations to the National Republican Campaign Committee and $36,000 for an event last year during the LIV golf tournament at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.

Despite having abundant material with which to attack Evans—whose felony conviction prevents him from voting until he’s completed three years of probation—Miller’s ads targeted Evans for having once been a Democrat. It looked like pretty weak sauce in a state where the current governor, Jim Justice, who just won the GOP primary to fill the seat of retiring Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin, also used to be a Democrat.

But the ads reflected the fine line Miller had to walk in trying to campaign against a January 6 rioter and MAGA die-hard in a state where, as Evans’ campaign consultant Noel Fritsch, told me recently, “Eighty percent of the voting electorate thinks that whatever happened on January 6 was warranted and 70 percent think the Feds did it.” (Polls back him up on some of this.)

Democracy advocates had argued that Evans should not even have been allowed on the ballot to begin with because the Constitution bars former elected officials who participated in an insurrection from holding federal office. An Evans victory would have put Congress in the very awkward position of having to decide whether to enforce the Constitution or respect the will of West Virginia voters. As I wrote recently:

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a Reconstruction-era provision, prohibits anyone who took an oath to uphold the Constitution, such as state legislators like Evans, from serving in federal office if they “engaged in insurrection.” Donald Sherman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), says the state should not have allowed Evans on the ballot at all, but no one filed a legal challenge. “I think he didn’t look like a contender a year ago when he announced,” Sherman said. “He might have flown under the radar for some folks.”

Now, only Congress can decide whether Evans could join their ranks, thanks to the March US Supreme Court decision in Trump v. Anderson, which held that Colorado could not take Trump off the ballot because of his involvement in January 6. The court said that the states cannot enforce Section 3 against federal candidates; only Congress can. “There are not that many people with a stronger case for disqualification under Section 3 than Mr. Evans,” Sherman said. “I think ultimately if he prevails it will come down to whether Congress will enforce the provision of the Constitution against an insurrectionist.”

Most political observers thought it would have been highly unlikely that Congress would have tried to prevent Evans from taking his seat if he’d won. Miller’s victory leaves that hypothetical untested. She issued a bland statement after the race was called Tuesday night that reflected her anodyne campaign and her intention to continue ignoring her opponent, whom she didn’t mention.

“It has been the honor of my life to represent West Virginia in Congress, and I am grateful to have won the Republican primary in West Virginia’s First Congressional District tonight. Over the past few years, I have ensured that the Mountain Valley Pipeline will be completed, worked on legislation that will lower taxes for West Virginians, and held the Biden Administration accountable,” Miller said. “While the Republican House Majority has accomplished great work, we still have more to deliver for the American people. I’m thankful to represent my wild and wonderful state in Washington, and I will continue to work to make West Virginia the best place to live, work, and raise a family.”

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

House Democrats have launched an investigation into a meeting between oil company executives and Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home and club last month, following reports that the former president offered to dismantle Biden’s environmental rules and requested $1 billion in contributions to his presidential campaign.

Democrats on the House oversight committee late on Monday evening sent letters to nine oil executives requesting information on their companies’ participation in the meeting.

“Media reports raise significant potential ethical, campaign finance, and legal issues that would flow from the effective sale of American energy and regulatory policy to commercial interests in return for large campaign contributions,” the Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee, wrote in the letters.

Donald Trump’s criminal trial for engineering a hush money scheme—to save his 2016 campaign from a slew of stories about his infidelities—entered its dramatic final stages on Tuesday, as his former fixer, Michael Cohen, completed his testimony for the prosecution. Then, just as Trump’s attorneys seemed poised to attack, the former president’s defense team was surprisingly ginger when finally given a chance to strike back. Tuesday began, as Monday ended, with prosecutors walking the normally voluble and combative Cohen through his story, calmly explaining how Trump okayed every step of the scheme to pay off adult film star Stormy Daniels for keeping quiet about a sexual encounter she testified to having with Trump. As the prosecution’s case wound down, tension was high in the courtroom. Trump’s lawyers were expected to come out swinging at Cohen, attacking Cohen’s credibility and long history of lying (much of it for Trump’s benefit, he has said).

Trump attorney Todd Blanche started with a sneering jab at Cohen, asking him if they had ever met—and when Cohen said they hadn’t, asking if Cohen had indeed once described Blanche as “a crying little shit” on TikTok. Cohen agreed it was the type of thing he would say, and that was as hostile as the afternoon got. Blanche seemed to wobble through a series of questions designed to make Cohen confirm that he had previously lied, and did, indeed, harbor a deep dislike for his former employer. Among other odd bits of testimony that Blanche elicited from Cohen were confirmations that:

• Cohen would like to see Trump go to jail.
• Cohen has referred to Trump as a “boorish cartoon misogynist” and “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain.”
• Cohen is selling merchandise on his website, including t-shirts that show Trump in a orange prison jumpsuit, and others that say “Convict 45.”

The cross-examination will continue on Thursday, but so far has been a far cry from the Trump team’s attack on Cohen during last fall’s civil fraud trial—where Cohen also testified, and where Trump’s lawyers didn’t hold back, repeatedly trying to provoke Cohen and even taunting him about whether he lied to his wife. In that case, Trump’s attorneys repeatedly engaged in shouting matches with Cohen, who quickly became flustered. On Tuesday, however, Cohen remained calm throughout his testimony, answering slowly and methodically as Blanche probed.

Even Trump, who at the fraud trial was a noisy presence while his ex-fixer testified, sat quietly, eyes mostly closed, as Cohen—whom several judges have had to issue gag orders to keep Trump from attacking outside court—spoke. 

The trial will likely finish up next week. Cohen is the linchpin of the prosecution’s case against Trump, and prosecutors said on Tuesday that he would be their final witness. Trump’s attorneys told Judge Juan Merchan that they have very limited plans for calling witnesses, but are still undecided on having Trump take the stand in his own defense.

Despite the subdued cross-examination, on Tuesday morning, Cohen repeatedly delivered for prosecutors, with testimony that flowed smoothly from the previous day. Cohen testified on Monday how he orchestrated payoffs to adult film star Stormy Daniels and others who, in the closing weeks before the 2016 election, threatened to go public with embarrassing stories about Trump. In Daniels’ case, it was a story of a sexual encounter at a golf tournament which, on the stand, she refused to call either a relationship or romantic. Despite reaching an agreement to pay Daniels $130,000, and Trump insisting that the deal get done, Cohen couldn’t get Trump to pay out the money in the final days before the election, and opted to supply it himself. On Tuesday, he detailed his efforts to get repaid, testifying that, while in the White House, Trump personally signed off on payments to reimburse Cohen in the guise of legal fees. Cohen barely did any legal work, he said.  

Cohen also testified that when word leaked out about the coverup in 2018, Trump urged him to stay loyal and keep his mouth shut.

“‘Don’t worry. I’m the President of the United States. There’s nothing here. Everything’s going to be OK. Stay tough,'” Cohen said Trump told him the last time they spoke. “You’re going to be okay.'”

But, Cohen said, he wasn’t okay when he became a target of then–FBI Director Robert Mueller’s investigation. At that point, Cohen said, turning to jurors and appearing emotional, he had a conversation with his family, who questioned why he was clinging to his allegiance to his old boss, who had done so little for him since taking office.

“Why are you holding onto this loyalty? What are you doing? We’re supposed to be your first loyalty,” Cohen said his family asked him. 

Prosecutors also guided Cohen through some of his lowest moments—his plan to use his once-close relationship with Trump to sell access to him after he was elected, his repeated and flagrant lying on the former president’s behalf, and his conviction for making the payments to Daniels and another woman, for which he served a year in prison. Discussing those low points was part of a strategy by prosecutors to get ahead of attacks by Trump’s legal team—which, at least initially, did not come. 

Ultimately, the case may come down to which version of Cohen jurors believe: the temperamental, toadying, vengeful serial liar, who Trump’s attorneys tried to draw out with their barbed attacks, or a formerly temperamental, toadying, vengeful serial liar, who now professes remorse for his subservience to Trump. Cohen, for his part, seemed very willing to confess his sins under direct examination from prosecutors. Over the course of his day-and-a-half of testimony, Cohen described how he sought Trump’s attention, buying properties in his buildings and then offering his services as a hyperbolic attack dog who would rage against anyone threatening Trump’s success—long before he ran for president. Cohen also talked, at length, about how he constantly returned to Trump to detail his exploits in what he acknowledged were desperate attempts to win approval and affection. 

By the time Blanche got his turn to attack Cohen and his credibility, Cohen seemed to have confessed to almost everything Blanche tried to ask about. One of the biggest revelations from the initial cross-examination may be that, despite Trump’s repeated efforts to portray the case against him as a conspiracy closely controlled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Cohen testified that he has never personally met Bragg. 

Before the day’s testimony began, excitement for the expected drama was running high outside the court. There were no signs of any protesters—either for Trump or against him—but a crowd of over one hundred curious members of the public began lining up as early as 4 a.m. to secure a coveted seat in the courtroom, or a nearby overflow courtroom where the trial is being shown live. Many of the hopefuls appeared older or retired, and seemed most excited to see liberal commentators passing by on their way into the courthouse. But most of those in line were disappointed, with only about 20 tickets handed out for admission to the courtrooms; several dozen journalists were left without a ticket as well. One man, who seemed to be a Trump supporter, was berated for cutting the line and refusing to give up his ticket. 

As it became clear that only a few would be able to attend, at least one person towards the back of the queue paid a woman at the front $350 in cash to get in—she had earlier rejected an offer of $80. Given the anti-climactic tone of the afternoon’s testimony, the buyer may regret his largesse.