Devan Schwartz | Vox Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters. 2025-10-02T22:37:25+00:00 https://www.vox.com/authors/devan-schwartz/rss https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1 Devan Schwartz Noel King <![CDATA[The chaos at the Pentagon, explained]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=463675 2025-10-02T18:37:25-04:00 2025-10-02T18:40:00-04:00 Pete Hegseth, wearing a blue suit with a striped tie, yells and clenches his fists in front of a large American flag.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks to senior military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025, in Quantico, Virginia. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth summoned around 800 top military officers to Quantico, Virginia, this week, there was widespread speculation about mass firings, new geopolitical priorities, even a declaration of war.

None of that happened. Instead, President Donald Trump showed up to deliver many of his usual boasts and grievances to a largely subdued group of service members. But Trump then pivoted to something new for the military: essentially asserting that they should be deployed to US cities, including San Francisco and Chicago.

“I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military, cause we’re going into Chicago very soon,” Trump said.

Hegseth followed this with his own meandering speech, largely focused on restoring the military’s lethality and so-called warrior ethos.

The unusual gathering, and Hegseth’s speech, can teach us a lot about the defense secretary’s leadership style — and why his selection by Trump to run the Pentagon looms as an especially consequential choice. To explore further, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Kerry Howley, a writer at New York magazine who recently wrote a feature on Hegseth. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You wrote a great piece about Pete Hegseth. What was the headline? It was a great headline.

I believe it was called “Playing Secretary.”

“Pete Hegseth is playing secretary.” That was it. You spend a lot of time talking to people who know the secretary of defense and you painted a picture of a guy who is chaotic. Is that fair?

I think that’s an accurate description, yes.

Why is a guy who is chaotic in this job in the first place?

I think Pete Hegseth is in this job because he looks to Donald Trump like the kind of guy who should be in this job. Trump encountered Hegseth in his previous life as a Fox & Friends Weekend co-host, in which Hegseth would sometimes talk about military matters.

And I think it’s pretty universally acknowledged that Trump thought that’s the way a secretary of defense should look. I know it was very surprising to people in Hegseth’s immediate orbit that he was chosen for this appointment and I can only imagine it was also surprising to Pete Hegseth.

From what you’ve seen covering him over the past couple of months, how unorthodox is he in terms of his leadership of the Department of Defense?

I would say that he has fixations that are unusual for this position. This is a guy who came from television and his preoccupation continues to be maybe crafting a visual moment, social media, the way the department looks to the broader public, the kind of branding for the Department of Defense, and he spends a lot of time crafting that image.

He is someone who has a long history of issues with impulse control. There are the very well-documented substance abuse issues. There are sexual assault allegations. There are affairs. There have been accusations of financial mismanagement at, I believe, both organizations that he led prior to his job as the secretary of defense, where he leads one of the most complicated, largest human organizations in the world.

There have been kind of constant personnel issues, high-profile resignations, leak investigations. This is a very leaky department, and what that tells you is that people are concerned, but don’t feel that they can run those concerns up the ladder in an official capacity and so are talking through the press. There’s of course Signal Gate, and there was a second Signal Gate. Hegseth didn’t do himself any favors by kind of failing to acknowledge that anything had gone wrong. And there was this kind of panicked aggression that emerged in further interviews.

It seemed to be a problem even with crisis communications. It wasn’t clear to this department how to handle the crisis itself. This was a real focus of the administration: “Where are the leaks? We must find the leakers.” And that created a situation where different political factions who are kind of jockeying within his office could try to portray people they didn’t like as the leakers. So you had Pete Hegseth publicly blaming two close friends and a third top aide of leaking, of betraying him.

And then how do things change after the fallout from Signal Gate? What happens at the Defense Department then? 

So what sources told me was that in the early days of this administration, of this tenure, Hegseth came in with ambition. He was curious, he was interested, even though he didn’t have the deep experience of his predecessors. There was kind of an openness to learn. And then after Signal Gate, the attitude was more of paranoia, fear.  

“Instead of trying to solve some of the problems that Hegseth mentioned during his confirmation…the department stopped being creative, and it started being just a mechanism for implementing executive orders.” 

His trusted circle became much smaller. You saw, kind of oddly, his wife was frequently in the office giving orders to the public relations arm of the department. His brother came on, his personal lawyer. And so instead of relying on this deep bench of people who have been there for a very long time, he’s surrounding himself with more of his kind of personal entourage.

It sounds like he may be looking for people who won’t betray him.

Yes. And the fear really, I would say it infected the ambitions that everyone had for the department. Instead of trying to solve some of the problems that Hegseth mentioned during his confirmation — things he might have been ambitious about reforming earlier, as someone described it to me — the department stopped being creative, and it started being just a mechanism for implementing executive orders. 

In other words, he was just kind of waiting for Trump to tell him what to do.

Hegseth is not an ideological character. This is something that sources close to him emphasized. He used to have a more interventionist mindset. He wrote several books about how we should have been in Iraq longer. And as soon as he came into this administration, he started parroting some of these more isolationist points of view. He’s someone who’s willing to shift his ideology depending on who he might be talking to, and I think that’s particularly useful to someone who might want Hegseth to follow questionable orders. 

This isn’t somebody who’s going to have a red line, because he is not someone who has strong ideas about what the military ought to be doing. So if Hegseth’s square jaw is ultimately what got him this job, what’s keeping him in the job is his demonstrated loyalty to the strong man at the top. I think he is here because Donald Trump trusts that when Donald Trump calls on Pete Hegseth to do something questionable, he is a guy who’s going to follow orders. 

]]> Devan Schwartz Noel King <![CDATA[The problem with debating fascists — from a guy who’s debated just about everyone]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=461817 2025-09-17T14:37:43-04:00 2025-09-18T06:30:00-04:00 Mehdi Hasan, wearing a blazer and a spread-collar white shirt, gestures while speaking into a microphone.
Mehdi Hasan is seen on April 25, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Crooked Media

The death of Charlie Kirk reignited heated discussions about political speech in America, especially the value of arguing with people you disagree with. 

One company, Jubilee Media, has tapped into that sentiment and has been going viral on YouTube these last couple of years with its high-energy and high-drama — and yes, gimmicky — debate shows where one person faces off against a big group of people who disagree with them. (Kirk himself made an appearance on a Jubilee show in 2024: “Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative?”)

Jason Y. Lee says he founded the company to foster debates and build empathy in a polarized country. But critics argue that some of Jubilee’s content could be categorized more as voyeuristic clickbait than high-minded discourse. One show has women arranging themselves based on perceived attractiveness and men rearranging them; another involves blindfolded guessing games about which participant is Black or white.  

More recently, Mehdi Hasan — author and founder of his own media company, Zeteo, and former host of his own MSNBC show — appeared on Jubilee’s flagship debate show, Surrounded. His episode was called “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives,” and that too made waves. 

Hasan said he was prepared to vigorously defend his views, something he’s become known for over the years. But when he showed up, he wasn’t expecting some of the featured debaters to openly call for his deportation (Hasan is a US citizen originally from England) — or for one to proudly declare himself a fascist. The episode offered unusual insight into the promise and perils of political debate, how we practice politics in the age of algorithms, and the value — and limits — of engaging with those you fundamentally disagree with.

Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Mehdi Hasan about his appearance on Surrounded — and what it taught him about this charged political moment.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Where did you learn to debate?

Where did I learn to debate? I think around the dinner table. My family is very disputatious. The Hasans are known for having strong views. There was a lot of debate around the kitchen table, the dining table, political, social, cultural, religious.

We planned to do a show on the Jubilee debates and the argument about whether they are of value or not. And we called you because you appeared in one of these debates that went very viral, and then Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah and many people said Charlie Kirk was doing it right. He was showing up; he was debating people he disagreed with. That’s the right way to do politics. Do you agree with that?

No, I don’t believe that Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way, to quote former Vox boss, now New York Times columnist, Ezra Klein, a good friend of mine. I totally disagree with Ezra on that piece he wrote. I do have to add the standard caveat because Fox keeps clipping some of us on the left out of context.

Obviously [Kirk] shouldn’t have been killed. Obviously, we all condemn his murder. Obviously, a political assassination in response to speech you don’t like is unacceptable in America and very scary. 

But if you’re asking me about the content of what Charlie Kirk said when he was alive, it was awful, it was horrific, it was reactionary, it was bigoted. This idea that he was some kind of Socratic debater trying to get to the truth? No, he wasn’t. He was doing a “Prove Me Wrong” tour over the years where he and Ben Shapiro and others go to college campuses, find some guy with blue hair who says something provocative and then dunk all over him, and then clip it up and go viral and then have a YouTube video saying, “Charlie Kirk/Ben Shapiro destroys college student.”

All right. What about Jubilee?

So Jubilee’s a little bit different. Jubilee claims to be nonpartisan; they say that they are trying to get people from all sides to get in a room together. I mean, on paper what they’re aspiring to is at minimum neutral, if not good. What turns up on YouTube is not necessarily always the case. 

Tell me why you decided to go on Surrounded.

There were multiple reasons. One is, as I say, I like a good argument and 20 to one — those are good odds. I’ll take those odds. The idea of going into the lion’s den and debating a bunch of people who disagree with me, I thought would be fun.  

Number two, I spoke to my good friend Sam Seder from the Majority Report who had done a Jubilee, and he told me that it’s worth doing. It does actually have value — you will reach a whole new audience. And people like my daughter and my nieces and others we’re saying, “Oh yeah, Jubilee, we know Jubilee, all the kids watch Jubilee.” 

And it’s amazing since I did Jubilee how many younger people are now coming up to me in the street versus older people because they recognize me from that circle debate show. So it was a chance to reach a new audience. That was number two. 

And number three, it looked like a lot of right-wingers have been dominating that space. Prior to me going on Jubilee, all the top-rated people who had done Jubilee on YouTube with the most views were Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, Michael Knowles. That was the lean of YouTube and Jubilee. And I thought, well, actually, maybe people like me and Sam Seder can try and give a different point of view.

And what happened?

What happened was the craziest two hours of my professional life as a journalist. I was not expecting — and maybe I should have been — the kind of people I sat across. I’d watched a lot of Jubilees. I’d watched Sam Seder’s show. I knew there were a couple of people who came and said white supremacist things and far-right things and dumb things. But I didn’t expect one after another person to be telling me to my face that I should leave the country, that I’m not a real American. “I’m a proud fascist,” one person told me very early on in the debate. 

What? Normally, people wanna deny the f-word. We spent the last week with Republicans up in arms that anyone would call them fascists, and how that’s what led to the death of Charlie Kirk. And yet here I was sitting in a warehouse with a bunch of young, mainly white people saying proudly, yes, we are fascists, we are racist.

How do we debate fascists? Should a person debate fascists?

No. And that’s why I said at the time, if you watch that clip, about halfway through the conversation, I said, “What are we doing here? I don’t debate fascists.” And all of the right-wingers watching in the circle, they got very upset because Jubilee then moved this guy out. And so many of them spent the next two hours, every time they came up to the chair to debate me, they would say, “Oh, you’re banning people you don’t agree with.” 

And I was like, “That’s not what it is. I don’t debate fascists because fascists don’t believe in democracy. They don’t believe in debate. They don’t believe in my equal worth as a human being. So why would I debate such people?” 

Fascism at its core is an anti-democratic, authoritarian, and yes, very violent ideology. So, no, I don’t believe there is value to debating fascists. And if I’d known that people would be sitting down dismissing the Holocaust or saying, “I’m a fascist,” or saying the country was built for white people or whatever it is, I would not have gone on that show, or I would’ve said, “Get other people.” 

Look, I come from a proud anti-fascist tradition on the left where you don’t platform fascists, you don’t indulge them, you don’t meet them halfway. You defeat fascism by defeating the ideology, by offering something better and by being truthful. 

You know, a person who appreciated your appearance on Surrounded might say, these fascist-y types are out there. They’re influencing young people in a real way. At least you showed up and gave them a run for their money.

That is the silver lining. I guess you could argue if — and this is gonna make me sound very egomaniacal and immodest, so I apologize in advance — I guess people could say, if you’re gonna debate fascists, might as well be someone who’s good at debating. And that’s what I’m known for doing. So it’s better me than someone else who goes on and gets their ass handed to them.

So in that sense, I get it, but the counterargument I get as well, a lot of my critics were saying to me: “Just by going on, you legitimize them just by going on. You amplified them just by going on. You gave them credibility and respectability. They were able to clip up their clips and put it online and say, ‘Look, look, look, we own this mainstream journalist. We told them to get the F out of our country.’ ” 

Do you think you changed anyone’s mind by appearing on Surrounded?

Certainly not in that room. No. And that wasn’t the goal.

What is the goal in debating if not to change minds?

So my goal is not to change my opponent’s mind. Very rarely can you change your opponent’s mind. My goal is to change the people watching. When you’re debating on stage, as I have done, or whether you’re debating on YouTube and 10 or 11 or 12 million people now have watched that Surrounded show, you are hoping that in that 11 or 12 million people, there are a handful of people who are truly open-minded, truly independent people. 

Most people are partisans, whether they want to admit so or not, but you hope that you found some independent folks to go, “Hmm, that’s a good point that I hadn’t heard before, that’s a good statistic that I wasn’t aware of, that’s a good way of framing the issue.” And, look, people have reached out to me over the years. I’ve spent the last year and a half doing nonstop debates. I’ve done a lot of debating about Gaza, another very polarizing issue, and people have reached out to me, and I have had messages from people saying, “I have switched my positions on this issue.”

]]> Devan Schwartz Sean Rameswaram <![CDATA[Why the Trump-Modi split is such a disaster]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=460343 2025-09-04T17:50:22-04:00 2025-09-05T07:45:00-04:00 Modi, at left, shakes hands with Trump, at right. They are looking at each other and standing in front of a yellow curtain, a teleprompter, and both the US and Indian flags.
President Donald Trump shakes hands with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a joint press conference on February 13, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

When it comes to bromances, President Donald Trump typically runs hot and cold. Remember Elon Musk? Vladimir Putin? First they’re besties, then they’re trading barbs. The latest example? Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

During Trump’s first term, Modi joined a Texas-sized rally in Houston to celebrate the strong ties between the US and India. Then Modi brought Trump to an Indian rally in the world’s largest cricket stadium. A lot of hand-holding ensued.

Flash-forward to Trump 2.0, and all is not well in the Trump-Modi bromance. That’s perhaps a microcosm of frayed ties between the United States and India, which is the world’s largest democracy. Plus, Indian immigrants make up the majority of H1-B visa holders in the United States.

So what went wrong?

Punishing US tariffs against India certainly plays a big role (Trump has blamed Modi for enacting “strenuous and obnoxious” trade barriers). Last month, the Trump administration imposed a 25 percent tariff on Indian goods; it added another 25 percent as punishment for India’s purchase of discounted crude oil from Russia, which invaded Ukraine in 2022. “Vladimir, Stop!” Trump posted this year to Truth Social, castigating another former bromantic partner. 

Then you throw in some geopolitical intrigue for good measure. Trump is currently courting India’s rival, Pakistan; after a war nearly broke out in May over a terrorist attack in the disputed Kashmir region, Trump claimed that he brokered a ceasefire (Modi disputes this). India’s rival Pakistan then flattered Trump by nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. In kind, Trump invited Pakistan’s top military official to the White House.

For more on the past, present, and future of Trump and Modi’s broken bromance, Today, Explained co-host Sean Ramewaram spoke with Sadanand Dhume, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

View Link

We’re here to talk to you about a breakup.

Yes, a tragic breakup.

Before we get into a tragic breakup, could you tell us why it matters that the United States and India have a strong, functional relationship?

Maintaining a good relationship with India has been a central part of American strategy in the Indo-Pacific for at least 25 years. And the reasons for that are obvious: India is the most populous nation in the world. It is currently the world’s fifth largest economy.

It’s predicted to be the third largest economy at market exchange rates. By 2028, it will have the world’s second largest military. And India has a large and disputed boundary with China. 

The biggest democracy in the world.

Correct. And so for all those reasons, the US has worked hard, particularly over the last 25 years, to have India lean towards the US rather than lean towards China. And I think the US strategy has been quite successful. But now it’s all up in the air.

Before we talk about how it all ended up in the air, let’s talk about how good it used to be between the two leaders who are now breaking up.

Trump and Modi had quite a bromance in the first Trump administration. Many people saw them as having striking commonalities. Both are populists. Both were disliked by and dislike traditional elites and traditional mainstream media. Both had a habit of appealing directly to the masses in an unmediated way. And so, in some ways, they were similar characters and Modi really went out of his way to woo Trump. He and Trump held this rally together in Texas called the “Howdy, Modi!” rally.

Is that where they held hands? 

They’ve held hands in more than one place. But yeah, that’s the one where Modi grabbed Trump by the hand and took him on a tour of the stadium. And then Modi invited Trump to Ahmedabad, which is in Gujarat, which is Modi’s home state, and there in this giant cricket stadium. They had another rally called “Namaste Trump” to welcome Trump to India. I believe there was something like 100,000 people at that rally. 

And then before the 2020 election, Modi all but endorsed Trump, which is very unusual for a foreign leader, certainly for an Indian leader, to do. And obviously Trump lost. But the Biden folks were very gracious about it, and they kind of ignored it and pretended it didn’t happen. And then when Trump was reelected, Modi was one of the first foreign leaders to visit. He visited the White House in February, and he said that MAGA plus MIGA, which is Make India Great Again, equals MEGA. And so, you know, the bromance seemed to be going really well. And now suddenly it’s not.

Tell us how that happened. What caused the breakup, if it is indeed that?

A couple of things happened. The first is that in February, when Modi visited, there was an announcement that the US and India were working towards a trade deal, and that they wanted to more than double trade to $500 billion. And so the Indians thought that they had a bit of an inside track in getting a trade deal. That obviously has not happened. 

The second thing, and I think this is the more important thing that went wrong, was that there was a brief military conflict between India and Pakistan in May. At the end of the four days, before Modi could say anything or announce anything to his own people or to his own country, Trump put out a truth on Truth Social post announcing a ceasefire and taking credit for it. So that was an embarrassment for Modi. India insists that it was their decision decided between them and Pakistan. The Pakistanis, who can’t believe their good fortune, have stepped up by nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

And so as a result of all of this, Trump appears to be quite miffed with India and quite pleased with Pakistan. The Indians are miffed with Trump, and now it’s all become much more complicated because Trump has not only applied 25 percent regular reciprocal sanctions, but he’s also slapped on an additional 25 percent in retaliation supposedly for the fact that India buys lots of oil from Russia. And it really is going to hurt the Indian economy. That’s how the bromance has melted down.

I have to ask, hearing your timeline…is India in a trade war with the United States right now because essentially they impeded Trump’s efforts to get a Nobel Peace Prize?

That is at least partly and, in my view, a large part of the explanation. Yes.

Wow, wow. If true.

I made this point in a Wall Street Journal column where I said, look, there’s still room for a grand bargain. But on a more serious note, if they are not able to come to an agreement and if this continues, I do think public opinion in India is in danger of turning against the US in a way that it really hasn’t for a long time.

Is that bad for India too?

Oh, for sure. I mean, put yourself  in India’s shoes. They have this enormous neighbor, China. They have a disputed border. The Chinese lay claims to chunks of territory that the Indians regard as India, and vice versa.This means that India faces a China, which is technologically more advanced, which has an economy about five times larger than India’s. There was a border clash in 2020, in which 20 Indian soldiers lost their lives. India is moving to mend relations with China, but it recognizes that fundamentally it has a very deep problem with China that stretches back decades.

But they did just have a splashy little summit. Is India and Modi now trying to signal that things could be on the mend with China in light of what’s going on with the United States?

This was Modi’s first visit to China in seven years. This is a big deal. But my view is that he would probably have attended the summit either way. India normally does attend these summits. But what is different and what I think is fair to attribute to Trump’s actions is the very purposeful way in which Modi went around tweeting his photos with Putin and Xi Jinping. 

India was trying to mend its relationship with China. But what Trump has done is made that a much more urgent priority for the Indians than it was before he started this tariff war.

]]> Sean Rameswaram Devan Schwartz <![CDATA[Trump’s controversial homelessness solution? Blue states have done it for years.]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=459100 2025-08-22T17:32:52-04:00 2025-08-25T07:00:00-04:00 A tent for an unhoused person
A homeless encampment in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood in Washington, DC, on August 14. | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump has made it clear that he wants homeless people off the streets of Washington, DC — along with the rest of the nation’s cities.

Alongside encampment sweeps, a key component of Trump’s homelessness policy is involuntary commitments, also known as civil commitments. The idea is to force an unhoused person into a facility to undergo mandatory drug or mental health treatments. That might sound extreme, but it’s a practice that has been around for decades — and it’s now gaining popularity across the country.

“We were committing people before we had medications, before we had electroconvulsive therapy,” says Alex Barnard, assistant professor of sociology at New York University and author of the 2023 book Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness. “This is something that’s been enabled by state law for hundreds of years, and when we look in the archives, we see the extent to which this tool was really abused in the mid-20th Century.” 

That began to change in 1960, when the State of California issued a report describing these psychiatric hospitals as “a dust bin marked ‘miscellaneous’ to receive every problem that doesn’t fit a place in society,” Barnard says. But despite involuntary commitments’ spotty record, they’ve become an increasingly widespread intervention as America seeks to reduce the number of unhoused people. Barnard says these types of commitments only work best when paired with available housing. 

Today, Explained co-host Sean Ramewaram spoke further with Barnard about the efficacy of involuntary commitments and about what he thinks about Trump’s initiatives on homelessness. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

President Trump has just issued an executive order that’s trying to change the way the US approaches homelessness and mental illness, largely by bringing us back to a more heavy-handed course of approach to homelessness, through the mental health system combined with greater criminalization of this population. 

And his executive order is not just about the District of Columbia.

No, the executive order is nationwide. It’s trying to change policy really around three different issues. First, it’s trying to expand the use of civil commitments; that’s involuntary mental health treatment. It’s usually reserved for people who are a danger to themselves, danger to others, or unable to meet their basic needs. And he’s looking to expand that. It’s not totally clear how he’s gonna do that, because that’s determined by state law, but in any case, that’s one of his objectives. 

The second is to expand the criminalization of homelessness: to increase the use of things like encampment sweeps to force people who are homeless to move along. It’s not really clear where he imagines those people [will go], but that’s certainly what they’re doing in DC.

And they wanna move away from that towards a system in which housing is not given; it’s earned based on your participation in rehab programs, or something like that.

What motivated the president of the United States to call for more involuntary commitments?

This is one of those things that, for whatever reason, Trump has a bit of a fixation on. In 2018, in response to the Parkland shooting, rather than talking about gun control, he wanted to talk about bringing back asylums, bringing back large psychiatric hospitals that were really significantly downsized in the 1960s. We closed a lot of those hospitals, but civil commitment never went away. 

Over a million Americans are subjected to some kind of involuntary psychiatric treatment per year. That often starts with a law enforcement officer, seeing somebody in the community who’s not doing well and bringing them to an ER for evaluation. And then that person can be placed in a hospital and medicated involuntarily. That’s civil commitment. The laws for that vary by state, but it exists everywhere — and [Trump’s] vision is that we should ramp up civil commitments to deal with homelessness. 

We really don’t have robust evidence that civil commitment is a good solution to homelessness. In fact, there’s some recent research that came out that suggests that somebody being placed in a psychiatric hospital actually may increase their risk of losing housing, because they’re in a psychiatric hospital, which means they’re not going to their job, they’re not connecting to family. 

If the problem leading to unsheltered homelessness was that there wasn’t enough civil commitments, we would see a really different pattern of civil commitments nationwide. Oklahoma and Utah, for example, are two states with very low levels of civil commitments and very little homelessness. The story there is not that we’re not forcing enough mentally ill people into treatment; the story is that there’s a lot of cheap housing in those states, and as a result, you’re not seeing the kind of unsheltered homelessness that you see in New York or California. California actually has a much higher rate of civil commitments than the national average, and also is home to one half of the unsheltered homeless population. 

I’m sorry. Before we continue, did you just say that half of the nation’s unsheltered people live in California?

That’s correct.

I did not know that statistic. It makes sense, but also wow!

It’s a catastrophic failure. And I think that it does kind of bring disgrace upon the governments of these left-leaning coastal states that despite years and years of policy conversations around this, they have not really moved the needle on homelessness.

I’m glad you brought up California, because I think it gets at something interesting when it comes to involuntary commitments here, which is that it isn’t a left/right, red/blue issue in the United States. 

Donald Trump signed this executive order, and then days later — almost instantly it felt like — [New York City Mayor] Eric Adams was saying, “We’re asking state lawmakers to extend the lifeline of involuntary commitment to those struggling with serious addiction. We’ve already made it easier to use involuntary commitment to help people with untreated severe mental illness to get care.” 

I think Donald Trump is trying to put forward the most cruel possible version of a policy shift that actually has pretty broad support. So with some research assistants here at NYU, we’ve cataloged 1,900 bills around involuntary treatment that have been introduced in state legislatures in the last decade. And of the 10 states that introduced the most bills on this topic, nine of them voted for Democrats in the last presidential elections. 

Wow! 

So this has been largely an initiative that is coming from, you know, blue coastal states. And what we’ve seen is that there’s been almost a reframing of coercion as a form of compassion — that it’s actually progressive not to let somebody die in their feces on the street, but to force that person into treatment that they can’t necessarily accept.

Governors like Gavin Newsom have also embraced encampment sweeps, and other kinds of criminalization measures as another way to deal with urban disorder and homelessness. So in a lot of ways, the blue states have paved the way for this executive order, which is pushing this movement towards a more institutional response to homelessness even further.

And is it controversial on the left? Is it creating division in progressive circles that we need to solve this problem, and some think to do so we have to do this thing that some of us find distasteful?

This has been an area that often puts civil liberties groups and disability rights groups in pretty open conflict with other progressives, sometimes elected officials, mayors particularly — also some clinicians and a lot of families that see their loved ones not able to accept the treatment that we think they need. 

I think, in reality, to really move forward on this policy discussion, we need to realize that people who are experiencing homelessness are a really diverse group. And for the vast majority of them, including many of them with severe mental illness, giving them an apartment is the fastest way to solve their homelessness. But there is a subset of people for whom voluntary services and an independent apartment, where a case manager checks on you once a week, but otherwise you’re left on your own — that actually isn’t gonna be enough to meet those individuals’ needs. And it’s that group that, now, the right is really focusing on and treating as the entire homelessness population — these people who need to be coerced into treatment, because they’re so sick.

Is there a story that you’ve come across or that you tell in your book about involuntary commitment that can help people wrap their heads around the issue? 

This is a story of somebody who consented for me to tell his story. His name was Serge. He had no hands and was missing one eye as a result of an accident when he was younger, and had lived with schizophrenia. He spent a decade homeless in Hollywood.

And this is one of these people where probably, you know, a thousand times a day somebody was walking by and saying, “why isn’t somebody doing anything for this guy?” In reality, he was being picked up by the police and either thrown in jail or taken to an ER dozens and dozens of times. And every time they’d just kick him back out, and sometimes they’d pay for an Uber to send him back to Hollywood. 

In the end it was a private citizen, Kerry Morrison, who was in charge of the business improvement district there, who said, “what is going on here?” She actually convened a meeting of all the stakeholders, everyone who was involved in this person’s case. And they kind of hatched a plan to get this guy into treatment longer term. 

[But] the tragic way this panned out was: the police came, they stopped him, they tried to handcuff him, because that’s how we take people to psychiatric hospitals. But he didn’t have hands, so they had to use zip ties. You know, that’s how we help people in America. 

In the end, he was taken to a hospital. They shepherded him through the system, so he went on to a conservatorship. Once he was conserved, he was sent to a locked facility with barbed wire all around it, way far out of Los Angeles. He was there for months, and no one even really knew; none of the people who had a connection with him even knew where he was. And then, eventually, he stepped down out of that, and went to live in an unlocked facility and got his GED. And when I talked to him, I said, “What do you wish the system had done differently?” And he said, “I wish they had conserved me sooner.” 

That’s a story that really sticks with me. It’s the happy story of civil commitment, but with a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering along the way. Way to go, Serge. Seems like he’s doing pretty well.

If Donald Trump called you tomorrow and asked you what he should do to meaningfully solve this in DC and other cities across the country, what would you tell him?

I think, in some ways, states like California are at least on the right track, which is that we need an all-of-the-above solution. We have to address the root causes of homelessness, which is that housing is too expensive, and when housing is too expensive, the most vulnerable people are gonna be the ones who become homeless. And at the end of the day, you can put somebody in a psychiatric hospital, but if they’re not gonna land in an apartment at the end of it and they’re gonna instead go back to the street, you’ve just wasted a lot of money and restricted somebody’s civil liberties for nothing. 

I do think we need a targeted use of civil commitments — a thoughtful use of civil commitments for some individuals who have been frankly abandoned [for] so long that they’re not able to consent to services that might be necessary to save their lives. But it wouldn’t look at all like this executive order.

]]> Devan Schwartz Sean Rameswaram <![CDATA[The crisis in American air travel, explained by Newark airport]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=415091 2025-06-02T10:40:50-04:00 2025-06-02T10:40:50-04:00 A United plane painted white and blue is seen at the gate at Newark Liberty International Airport.
A United plane is parked at the gate at Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey, on May 7, 2025. | Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images

Air travel is such a common part of modern life that it’s easy to forget all the miraculous technology and communication infrastructure required to do it safely. But recent crashes, including near Washington, DC, and in San Diego — not to mention multiple near misses — have left many fliers wondering: Is it still safe to fly?

That concern is particularly acute at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, which has recently experienced several frightening incidents and near misses in as radio and radar systems have gone dark. This has left an under-staffed and overworked group of air traffic controllers to manage a system moving at a frenetic pace with no room for error.

Andrew Tangel, an aviation reporter for the Wall Street Journal, recently spoke to Jonathan Stewart, a Newark air traffic controller. When Stewart saw two planes potentially headed for a crash, he was worried that radar and radio communication systems might fail as they had days earlier.

According to Tangel, Stewart “sent off a fiery memo to his managers, complaining about how he was put in that situation, which he felt he was being set up for failure.” Stewart now is taking trauma leave because of the stresses of the job. After many delayed flights, United Airlines just announced that it will move some of its flights to nearby John F. Kennedy International Airport. 

To understand how we arrived at our current aviation crisis, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Darryl Campbell, an aviation safety writer for The Verge.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You recently wrote about all these issues with flying for The Verge — and your take was that this isn’t just a Newark, New Jersey, problem. It’s systemic. Why?

You’ve probably seen some of the news articles about it, and it’s really only in the last couple months because everybody’s been paying attention to aviation safety that people are really saying, Oh my gosh!

Newark airport is losing the ability to see airplanes. They’re losing radar for minutes at a time, and that’s not something you want to hear when you have airplanes flying towards each other at 300 miles an hour. So it is rightfully very concerning. But the thing is, what’s been happening at Newark has actually been happening for almost a decade and a half in fits and starts. It’ll get really bad, and then it’ll get better again. 

Now we’re seeing a combination of air traffic control problems; we’re seeing a combination of infrastructure problems, and they’ve got a runway that’s entirely shut down. And the way that I think about it is, while Newark is its own special case today, all of the problems that it’s facing, other than the runway, are problems that every single airport in the entire country is going to be facing over the next five to 10 years, and so we’re really getting a preview of what’s going to happen if we don’t see some drastic change in the way that the air traffic control system is maintained.

We heard about some of these issues after the crash at DCA outside Washington. What exactly is going on with air traffic controllers?

The first problem is just one of staff retention and training. On the one hand, the air traffic control system and the people who work there are a pretty dedicated bunch, but it takes a long time to get to the point where you’re actually entrusted with airplanes. It can be up to four years of training from the moment that you decide, Okay, I want to be an air traffic controller. 

Couple that with the fact that these are government employees and like many other agencies, they haven’t really gotten the cost-of-living increases to keep pace with the actual cost of living, especially in places like the New York and New Jersey area, where it’s just gone up way faster than in the rest of the country.

This is bad at Newark, but you say it promises to get bad everywhere else too. 

The cost of living is still outpacing the replacement level at a lot of these air traffic control centers. And the washout rate is pretty high. We’ve seen the average staffing level at a lot of American airports get down below 85, 80 percent, which is really where the FAA wants it to be, and it’s getting worse over time. 

At Newark in particular, it’s down to about 58 percent as of the first quarter of this year. This is an emergency level of staffing at a baseline. And then on top of that, you have — in order to keep the airplanes going — people working mandatory overtime, mandatory six-days-a-week shifts, and that’s accelerating that burnout that naturally happens. There’s a lot of compression and a lot of bad things happening independently, but all at the same time in that kind of labor system that’s really making it difficult to both hire and retain qualified air traffic controllers.

These sound like very fixable problems, Darryl. Are we trying to fix them? I know former reality TV star and Fox News correspondent — and transportation secretary, in this day and age — Sean Duffy has been out to Newark. He said this: “What we are going to do when we get the money. We have the plan. We actually have to build a brand new state-of-the-art, air traffic control system.”

To his credit, they have announced some improvements on it. They’ve announced a lot of new funding for the FAA. They’ve announced an acceleration of hiring, but it’s just a short-term fix. 

To put it in context, the FAA’s budget usually allocates about $1.7 billion in maintenance fees every year. And so they’ve announced a couple billion more dollars, but their backlog already is $5.2 billion in maintenance. And these are things like replacing outdated systems, replacing buildings that are housing some of these radars, things that you really need to just get the system to where it should be operating today, let alone get ahead of the maintenance things that are going to happen over the next couple of years. It’s really this fight between the FAA and Congress to say, We’re going to do a lot today to fix these problems.

And it works for a little while, but then three years down the road, the same problems are still occurring.  You got that one-time shot of new money, but then the government cuts back again and again and again. And then you’re just putting out one fire, but not addressing the root cause of why there’s all this dry powder everywhere.

People are canceling their flights into or out of Newark, but there are also all these smaller accidents we’re seeing, most recently in San Diego, where six people were killed when a Cessna crashed. How should people be feeling about that?

There’s really no silver bullet and all the choices are not great to actively bad at baseline. Number one is you get the government to pay what it actually costs to run the air traffic control system. That empirically has not happened for decades, so I don’t know that we’re going to get to do it, especially under this administration, which is focused on cutting costs.

The second thing is to pass on fees to fliers themselves. And it’s just like the conversation that Walmart’s having with tariffs — they don’t want to do it. When they try to pass it on to the customer, President Trump yells at them, and it’s just not a great situation. 

The third option is to reduce the number of flights in the sky. Part of this is that airlines are competing to have the most flights, the most convenient schedules, the most options. That’s led to this logjam at places like Newark, where you really have these constraints on it. Right before all of this stuff happens, Newark was serving about 80 airplanes an hour, so 80 landings and takeoffs. Today, the FAA’s actually started to admit restrictions on it, and now it’s closer to 56 flights an hour, and that’s probably the level that it can actually handle and not have these issues where you have planes in danger.

But no airline wants to hear, Hey, you have to cut your flight schedule. We saw that with United: Their CEO was saying that the air traffic controllers who took trauma leave had “walked off the job,” which seemed to suggest that he didn’t think they should be taking trauma leave because you have to have more planes coming in. That’s a competitive disadvantage for him, but you also have to balance safety. It’s difficult to understand. It costs a lot of money to fix. This is your textbook “why governments fail” case study and it’s not really reassuring that in 24 hours I’m going to be in the middle of it again, trying to fly out of Newark.

Correction, June 2, 10:40 am ET: A previous version of this piece misstated what happened when Jonathan Stewart saw two planes potentially headed for a crash; he was worried that radar and radio communication systems might fail as they had days earlier.

]]> Sean Collins Devan Schwartz <![CDATA[The most divisive part of the GOP’s big bill, explained]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=413924 2025-05-22T08:58:17-04:00 2025-05-22T08:30:17-04:00 House Speaker Mike Johnson, white, clean shaven, grey haired, in his black glasses and a navy suit, bows his head as he is surrounded by reporters at the Capitol.
House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks to reporters as he departs for the White House as ongoing negotiations on the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” continue at the US Capitol Building on May 21, 2025.

House Republicans passed a major tax and spending bill early Thursday morning. The bill — which the Republican Party hopes to have signed by Memorial Day — is chock-full of President Donald Trump’s legislative priorities, and has many provisions the GOP has long been agitating for. But it nevertheless was a struggle to get the bill to the House floor for a vote. One big reason was a tax provision known as SALT, the state and local tax deduction.

I asked Today, Explained’s Devan Schwartz — who just produced an episode about this bill — to explain what SALT is, why it’s important, and why it’s roiled the GOP. Here’s what he had to say:

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What is SALT?

SALT is an acronym that stands for “state and local taxes” — it allows Americans to deduct some of what they pay, right now up to $10,000, in state and local taxes (like property taxes and sales taxes) from their federal taxes.

Once, there wasn’t a cap to how much you could deduct, but that changed with Trump’s tax cuts in 2017; those brought in the $10,000 cap.

Removing the SALT cap is seen as benefiting mostly wealthy earners in high-tax states like California or New York: people who might make $500,000 a year or $10 million a year and pay tens or hundreds of thousands in state and local taxes, the sort of people who don’t take the standard deduction.

Why has a tax deduction caused such a stir this week?

The SALT cap hasn’t been too popular with constituents in these high-tax states; they have been putting pressure on their lawmakers to make changes. 

Trump initially expressed support for those changes, and many House GOP lawmakers from blue states ran on making changes when Republicans got back in power. 

Now, House Republican lawmakers are in the middle of putting together a big spending and tax bill, and there was a push to get SALT changes in there. Those that ran on upping the SALT cap said, We’re trying to get reelected in the next year, we need a win to go back to our voters with.

The GOP leadership in the House set up a somewhat arbitrary deadline to get the bill passed from the House to the Senate by Memorial Day — that’s next week. 

That puts lawmakers in a time crunch, but there’s also a numerical problem: The House GOP has very narrow margins. Depending on attendance, they can afford to lose roughly three votes on any one bill. 

That gives the blue-state GOP lawmakers who want to see changes to SALT a lot of power. If you’re one of a small group, and you said, Hey, we’re holdouts, we’re not voting for this until you give us our SALT reform, you’re sinking Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” And that’s what happened this week.

That small group of lawmakers got their way, right?

Yes. The final details could still change, but a deal was made to raise the cap.

Which set off other small groups of lawmakers who want their priorities fulfilled in the bill, and yesterday’s scramble by the White House to try to get everyone in line.

Right. Trump’s stance throughout this has been, stop whining. Don’t grandstand. It’s more important to get a deal done. So if you don’t get a SALT increase, tough luck. If they get their SALT increase, but you don’t get your thing, tough luck.

The Senate hasn’t even weighed in on the bill yet, so we’re a long way from getting changes to SALT enshrined in law. But at this point, what should we take away from the SALT saga?

SALT is inherently interesting because it’s a microcosm of the fragile political process in Congress at this time in which we often see parties with tiny minorities. Congressional leadership is more centralized than ever, but at the same time, small groups of people can really gum up the works. 

It also shows how complex the Republican coalition is — the fight over SALT is really a battle between lawmakers from high-income states and those from lower-income states. We’ve seen pro-SALT lawmakers make the claim that their states’ tax base makes up a disproportionate amount of revenues, and that their constituents deserve a break because of that. 

And smaller states or states with lower incomes might say, in response, we have our own needs, and we provide a lot, from farming to the numbers that power our GOP coalition. 

I wouldn’t say that the fight over SALT is a fight for the soul of the Republican Party, but it’s definitely a factional fight for power.

And overall, it really shows how hard it is to actually legislate right now, in a divided Republican caucus, in a divided America.

This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.

Update, May 22, 8:30 am ET: This story has been updated with the news of the bill’s passage in the House.

]]> Devan Schwartz Sean Rameswaram <![CDATA[The remaking of Marco Rubio]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=411967 2025-05-07T16:57:27-04:00 2025-05-10T07:00:00-04:00 Two men in navy suits and red ties sit in the Oval Office, with a fireplace and gold frames on the wall behind then.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on April 7, 2025. | Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Perhaps you’ve heard about wearing multiple hats at work, but four? It might be too many for most people, but not Marco Rubio. As the New York Times put it this month, he’s become the “secretary of everything” for the Trump administration: secretary of state, interim national security adviser, acting USAID administrator (albeit for a gutted agency), and acting archivist of the United States at the National Archives and Records Administration.

Put another way, if the Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency asked Rubio what he accomplished this week, it would be a long email. And the former Republican senator from Florida is proving to have better survival instincts in Trump world than some observers expected. 

Nahal Toosi, a columnist and senior foreign affairs correspondent at Politico, is one of those Rubio skeptics. She predicted in January that Rubio wouldn’t last long in the second Trump administration, perhaps less than a year. But she’s less sure now, as Rubio emerges from the administration’s first 100 days with a longer list of titles than he began with.

Toosi spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about Rubio’s growing portfolio, how he’s juggling it all, and how he’s accommodated himself to a second Trump administration, including on big issues like immigration and foreign aid. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How did Marco Rubio become so important at work?

He abandoned everything, or much of, what he has stood for in the past, endeared himself to Trump, supported the president vocally and through policy changes, and earned the president’s trust. 

I will also say it’s hard to get into the Trump circle. There’s not a lot of people who meet the loyalty tests. Rubio has proven that he can do that. The reason that it’s important to point this out is because when he took the initial position of secretary of state, many people viewed him as one of the weakest in Trump’s orbit. I wrote an entire column about how all these people in town were saying, He is not going to last very long. He won’t last even six months as scretary of state. 

The fact that he has climbed the ranks and taken all these positions and earned the president’s trust in such a way — that is really remarkable, but it goes to show how unrecognizable he is compared to what Marco Rubio was  five, 10 years ago.

Marco Rubio’s been around a long time. When you hear candidate Donald Trump talking about draining the Washington swamp, it’s people like Marco Rubio. There were reports that he was asking President Biden for more funding for USAID before he became one of the faces of the elimination of USAID. He’s not exactly MAGA. Are you saying that there hasn’t been much tension between Rubio and Trump? 

I wouldn’t say [Rubio is] a traditional Republican. He came in on a wave of reactionary [sentiment against] the establishment. But he over time established his bona fides in the Senate as a hawkish Republican: pro-human rights, pro-democracy promotion, definitely pro-humanitarian assistance, the type of guy who supported Ukraine, wants to be tough on dictatorships around the world, including Iran.

But I would say he also has proven to be a very flexible type of politician over the last several years. He has moderated his positions. My understanding is he’s gone out and learned a lot about the American heartland. But now that he has joined the Trump team, he has really gone to the MAGA world, to the point where even far-right influencers like Laura Loomer are now praising Marco Rubio.

And I imagine much of that acceleration has happened via his initial job, secretary of state? 

Yes. And part of the reason that that has happened is because he’s used that perch to agree very vocally with a lot of Trump policies, right? In defending, for instance, President Trump’s takedown of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy in that famous Oval Office meeting.

But wasn’t Rubio one of the only Cabinet members in that meeting who looked uncomfortable? 

He looked like he was sinking into the couch. But afterward he got on TV, he went public, he defended the president. He realized immediately, Okay, I have to speak out, or it’s gonna look like I’m not supportive of President Trump, right? And I have to be subordinate to him. Look, another area where he’s been astonishingly pro-Trump is the anti-immigration stuff. 

“He’s going to be responsible for any major crisis that happens.”

This is really remarkable for Rubio because he has often touted his own family’s immigrant story. They’re from Cuba. And now he is seemingly gleefully stripping students of their visas and negotiating deals that are sending people to a prison in El Salvador without them getting proper hearings in court. And he’s even suggesting he’ll defy the judges if they request information in support of Trump.

Some of these things you think, Wow, does he have to go this far? Obviously it’s working for him in terms of surviving under Trump. But who knows, in a month from now Marco Rubio may be out of favor. A lot of people thought that Mike Waltz, the national security adviser who was pushed out, would last longer than he did. Now that Rubio is actually in charge of these key portfolios — national security adviser and the State Department — in a way he has a bigger target on his back too. Because he’s going to be responsible for any major crisis that happens. 

This is the job he most recently acquired, Donald Trump’s national security adviser. What exactly does that entail? 

The national security adviser is based at the White House, and they are like a point guard. They keep an eye on what all the agencies are thinking. They coordinate and they bring together options for the president when it comes to foreign policy and national security issues. Now, that’s if they do it in the way that’s considered proper, which is to be an honest broker, to be the guy that says, here’s what State is thinking. Here’s what DOD is thinking, here’s what the CIA wants. 

A lot of national security advisers acquire more power than that. They very much have their own points of view. They do their own negotiations. They rival other people in the administration for power. That’s always caused a bit of tension in past administrations. So we definitely could have seen Rubio at odds with a national security adviser in the future, but now it would be like being at odds with himself.

Is there any conflict there? Does being Trump’s national security adviser come at the expense of his other roles, especially secretary of state? 

One of the key mysteries right now is how is he going to do both jobs at the same time. And remember, he has two other jobs, but let’s put those aside.

How he splits his time is something that’s going to be very important to watch. The only person who’s done this in the past is Henry Kissinger. And that was in the ’70s. And back then, the world was, to be honest, not as complicated. Not that it was great, but it was not what we have now.

What do you think he’s excited about accomplishing as our secretary of state, if not our national security adviser, our chief archivist, and the head of USAID?

If he survives in the roles for several months or over a year, that is an accomplishment. Under President Trump, survival is difficult. He has had a constant turnover in the past. In terms of other accomplishments, if this administration were to strike important deals with Iran, say over its nuclear program, or bring about a peace between Russia and Ukraine, these are things that they can point to as accomplishments.

I do want to point out, there is another major player in terms of foreign policy right now, and that’s Steve Witkoff. He’s a special envoy for the president. He’s actually the lead on portfolios like Iran and Ukraine. But Rubio can very much have a major role in those as well. And ultimately the president is the one who’s going to take the credit for the accomplishments and knowing how Rubio is operating, he will definitely cede the limelight to the president.

]]> Devan Schwartz Sean Rameswaram <![CDATA[Why Florida’s public universities are collaborating with ICE]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=409785 2025-04-21T17:58:30-04:00 2025-04-22T07:30:00-04:00 Ron DeSantis with his two thumbs up.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has made public education ground zero in the culture wars. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Over the last few months, the Trump administration has intensified its attacks on elite, Ivy League institutions like Columbia and Harvard, enacting sweeping funding cuts and even threatening to revoke their tax-exempt status.

But what’s happening on the campuses of state schools is much less covered. Take for example the public university system in Florida. For years, Gov. Ron DeSantis has used public schools at all levels as the battleground for what he calls a war on “woke” — and punched his ticket to national prominence.

And it’s Florida where journalist Josh Moody found his most recent exposé for Inside Higher Ed. 

Though elite universities in the Northeast have largely fought deportation efforts spearheaded by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, DeSantis has openly cooperated with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even appointing university presidents who are friendly to this mission.

Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Moody about his findings, which uncovered formal cooperation agreements between many of Florida’s public universities and ICE that has led to revoked visas, alarmed faculties, and student protests.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What’s going on here with the Florida state schools? Is this a rebrand to ICE-U? What are they doing here? 

You’ve probably not heard of some of these schools because it’s the Florida State University system, which has 12 members, ranging from large schools with tens of thousands of students to New College of Florida, which has about 800 students. At least 10 of those institutions have signed agreements with ICE, which essentially would give their campus police departments immigration enforcement powers, allowing them to question, arrest, and prepare charges for those they suspect of immigration violations.

These agreements, as one expert explained to me, are “force multipliers for ICE.”

And basically these agreements, as one expert explained to me, are “force multipliers for ICE.” So if you wanted to have more immigration enforcement, you would sign an agreement with ICE to delegate that power locally. This is just a way for Florida to expand its immigration enforcement capabilities. The governor, as I mentioned before, has taken a hard line on immigration. 

He ran for president previously. I wouldn’t be surprised if he does so again, and that could be part of his long-term strategy. In this way, he’s sort of outflanking Trump on immigration. 

And this is just a fun question I love to ask while we’re talking about this stuff. Where did Ron DeSantis go to school again? 

Yale, right? Or was it Harvard? 

It was both! Anyway, have any students been detained or deported yet at these Florida state schools like we’ve seen at Columbia? 

Eighteen students at Florida International University and eight students at the University of Florida have had their visas revoked.

What does that mean? Were they deported?

They would have to leave the country. It doesn’t necessarily mean that ICE is going to come scoop them up in a van and facilitate that process, but they would essentially have to begin the process of leaving the country. 

And do we know what specifically these students have had their visas revoked for? 

We do not, but that is not uncommon. That has been the case across the US. Some students have been targeted for their speech. You look at the situation at Tufts and Columbia where students were active in pro-Palestinian protests and the Trump administration has claimed they’re antisemitic and pro-Hamas, but has not provided any evidence that they have done anything illegal. In other cases, they’ve had visas revoked for crimes committed years ago.

And these institutions themselves have often been given no explanation when student statuses were changed — and sometimes they’ve discovered it by looking in their own systems and seeing that those statuses had been revoked.

We don’t know how many international students have been caught up in this, but one of my fellow reporters at Inside Higher Ed is keeping a nationwide database and we have counted at least 1,680 students at 250 colleges who have lost visas. [Editor’s note: These figures reflect the latest numbers and have been updated since this Today, Explained episode first aired.] 

Does that mean there are other university systems around the country that are signing these kinds of agreements with ICE, that are cooperating with ICE at this level? 

Florida institutions are the only ones to have signed agreements with ICE. The professors that I spoke with, the legal experts for this piece, believe this is unprecedented. Neither were aware of another university ever signing into what is known as a 287(g) agreement with ICE. It’s sort of a new frontier in immigration enforcement on college campuses.

Are students on the campuses of these universities upset to hear that they’re signing into agreements with ICE? 

Yes. There were protests at Florida International University today, which had a board meeting. The students that I hear from are often upset about what is happening in the state, not just around immigration, but what has been a broader effort by Florida Republicans to control all aspects of the university, whether that is hiring politicians and lawmakers into the presidencies or overhauling general education requirements to minimize certain disciplines — like sociology — that Florida state officials have deemed liberal.

How do you feel what’s going on at ICE-U down in Florida fits into this other fight that we’re seeing in the Northeast, with Trump going to war with the elite universities?

In Florida, this is being done by the state dictating to these universities: “You need to do this to basically carry out state goals around immigration enforcement.” Whereas the other examples at places like Harvard and Columbia is the Trump administration more or less trying to bring higher education to heel, by making an example of some of the most visible universities, where there have been the most visible pro-Palestinian campus protests over the last year.

If they crumble, it seems only likely that your local institution is going to crumble when faced with the same threats.

People are really freaked out. Professors are worried about academic freedom. But also nationally, people are worried too. They see Harvard and Columbia being at the forefront of this fight, and even though they’re not at all representative of higher education broadly, these are very visible universities that everyone pays attention to. If they crumble, it seems only likely that your local institution is going to crumble when faced with the same threats.

On the show today, we’ve been talking about these two extremes in this culture war right now. On one end, you’ve got the oldest and most prestigious universities in the country. Then, over here, we’ve got this pocket of Florida state schools that are just throwing up their hands and complying with ICE. Where does that leave in your estimation, everyone in between those two extremes?

A lot of that comes down to public or private control. If you are a public university in a dark red state, you should expect that this is coming. If you are at a public university in Texas, you might not be that far behind Florida in terms of an action like this and that’s what I’m hearing from experts too. If you’re in a blue state, you are a little bit more isolated if you’re a public institution there. Private institutions in both will have a lot more latitude.

I don’t like to speculate, but I think it is entirely possible that the Trump administration looks at something like this and says, “Why don’t we do this nationwide?”

What a time.

Absolutely.

]]> Sean Rameswaram Devan Schwartz <![CDATA[Trump is on a losing streak in the courts. How will he respond?]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=405946 2025-03-27T10:13:10-04:00 2025-03-27T10:15:00-04:00 An older balding white man in a black judicial robe.
James Boasberg, chief judge of the US District Court, in Washington, DC, in 2023. | Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg via Getty Images

President Donald Trump isn’t a fan of judges who rule against him. During his first term, he famously attacked Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who sentenced his ally and adviser Roger Stone, by saying she was “totally biased” and had “hatred” for both Trump and Stone.

Now, Trump has only ratcheted up the attacks on judges. This feud reached a new high-water mark after US District Court Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to stop deporting certain Venezuelan immigrants. Boasberg also pressed the administration on the timing of flights from the US to El Salvador, where the immigrants were moved to a mega-prison.

In response, Trump called Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator.” In concert, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the judge had “no right” to be asking about the flights. Similar attack lines have been used by an array of Trump administration officials and allies. 

For more on Trump’s grudge with judges, Today, Explained’s co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Kate Shaw. She’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School, and co-host of the legal podcast Strict Scrutiny.

Click the link below to hear the whole conversation. The following is a transcript edited for length and clarity.

Kate, what is going on with Trump and the judges?

Trump has fared remarkably poorly in litigation in the last two months. He really is on an impressive losing streak. He’s zero for three in the courts of appeals in trying to defend the constitutionality of his birthright citizenship executive order. He has been losing in cases challenging various aspects of Elon Musk’s role in government and the activities of DOGE. In the only two cases to reach the Supreme Court so far, both very early-stage procedural matters, he lost both of them. 

He’s notched a couple of wins in the lower courts, but mostly on procedural issues. So, he’s losing a lot and he’s clearly really unhappy about it. 

And the biggest controversy in all of the losses is perhaps this situation with El Salvador.

I think it’s the one that Trump is the most incensed about. That seems clear, right? And so the administration invoked this 1798 statute: the Alien Enemies Act. That’s been used three times, always in wartime: 1812, World War I, World War II. 

Now, they try to make an argument that this Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, is somehow working in concert with the Venezuelan government in ways that makes them a state actor that we’re basically engaged in active hostilities with. That’s the [reasoning] for invoking this old statute, and that allows designating individuals as alien enemies and expelling them, essentially, to this prison in El Salvador. 

That has been challenged and is before this judge, Judge Boasberg. There have been some preliminary determinations made, but it’s pretty clear the administration is gonna lose big in front of Judge Boasberg. This is the one that I think has Trump the most spun up based on his social media.

He has taken to Truth Social and basically called for Boasberg to be impeached. He has called him a radical left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker, and an agitator. I don’t know this judge, but, no, that is not an accurate characterization of him. 

He was put on the DC local court by George W. Bush and then on the district court by President Obama — and then also designated to serve on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by Chief Justice John Roberts. This is not a judge who is in any way a radical left lunatic. 

It’s a preposterous characterization, but calling for his impeachment based on this preliminary set of rulings is an enormous escalation of the way Trump has been talking about and acting toward the judiciary.

And calling for a judge’s impeachment — has that been reserved for Judge Boasberg, or does that apply to a number of these court battles that the Trump administration is facing?

He has been criticizing federal judges. Others, I think including Musk, have called for other impeachments. I think this might be the first that Trump has called for [impeachment] himself. 

How do judges fight back when a president or an all-but-official vice president call for their impeachments?

It’s a good question and judges are very limited in what they can do. They can’t take to public-facing communications channels. They don’t have a bully pulpit the way the president does. They cannot tweet or skeet or truth or whatever in their own defense. They have a lot of power in a very limited domain. 

There’s defending themselves in the court of public opinion, but then there’s also the possibility that they could actually have to end up defending themselves in the actual United States Congress against impeachment.

How often do we see judges getting impeached? Remind us.

Pretty infrequently. There have been 15 impeachments of federal judges. Only eight of them have resulted in conviction. 

Impeachment is a two-step process. We say somebody has been impeached if a majority of the House of Representatives has voted to approve one or more articles of impeachment against them. It just requires a simple majority in the House and then, colloquially, we say the person has been impeached. 

But then they actually just go to the other House of Congress, the Senate, and that’s where an actual trial happens. It requires a two-thirds supermajority to actually convict someone in a Senate trial, which results in their removal from office. 

So impeachment, again, is the first half of the two-step process in the Constitution. And it does not seem impossible to me that we might see federal judges actually subject to real impeachment proceedings in the House, although 67 votes in the Senate is very hard for me to see ever occurring.

But that’s still playing within the boundaries of what’s legally acceptable. What about if they just openly defy the courts? That’s what is at stake with this case, with Boasberg and the flights to El Salvador. Do we have concrete evidence that that has happened?

I don’t think so. I think we are close. [There’s] this delicate dance in front of Judge Boasberg, in which the administration does suggest that it is complying with a narrow — and I think probably wrong, but at least defensible in legal-sounding language — argument that they weren’t subject to this order. They weren’t defying the order, they were trying to comply with the order. 

So they are at least not saying to the court: you essentially have no power over us. They are maybe inching a little closer to that. I think it matters a lot that they’re continuing to make legal arguments and that they’re continuing to appeal. I think in some ways, the real red lights start flashing if they stop doing that and simply don’t comply. 

I think they’re likelier to do it here than in the context of a challenge to the dismantling of USAID or the Department of Education or an order targeting law firms. Where the president is making claims about national security, the president’s power is always understood to be at its apex, and so they think they have the strongest legal footing for suggesting a court has no power over them here, [compared to] other spaces where it’s obvious that courts absolutely have the power to review and maybe invalidate things the executive branch has done.

Interestingly, one source of that vast executive power comes from Chief Justice John Roberts, who last year helped expand our views of presidential power in this country. But in this case, especially when it comes to this fight between Trump and this DC judge, Boasberg, there’s a bit of tension there.

Yeah. So as you just referenced, July 1 of last year, Roberts authors this opinion granting sweeping new authorities and immunities to presidents and ex-presidents.

And I think it hangs over virtually everything that we’ve seen in the last two months in terms of these extravagant assertions of executive authority and disdain at the idea that courts or any outside institution could act to check a president in any way. 

There’s a straight line between some of the descriptions of presidential power in that Trump v. United States case and the predicament we find ourselves in. So I do think that John Roberts bears a ton of responsibility for the way the administration has comported itself and broadcast its vision of essentially boundless executive power.

It is interesting that Roberts kind of came out swinging after Trump [suggested] on Truth Social that Boasberg should be impeached. Roberts issued this very unusual statement, kind of a rebuke of President Trump.

The chief justice rarely wades into the political fray in any way other than issuing his opinions. So he was obviously worried enough  to speak up.

Any response from the Trump administration?

I think there was something general that didn’t name Roberts, that did suggest, you know, Trump likes to have the last word. Maybe [Roberts’s statement] landed in some way. I don’t know that the White House wants to antagonize John Roberts kind of directly and explicitly, at least right now. And to the earlier point, that does suggest that they are still, in some ways, dwelling in the land of law. And I think that’s important.

]]> Devan Schwartz <![CDATA[The Tesla backlash is here]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=403371 2025-03-12T09:06:38-04:00 2025-03-12T06:45:00-04:00
People participate in a “Tesla Takedown” protest against Elon Musk outside a Tesla dealership in Pasadena, California, March 8, 2025.

Donald Trump turning the White House into a Tesla showroom aside, things are looking pretty grim for the electric car company right now. 

The stock has dropped tremendously. 

There have been reports of Tesla chargers being burned, people vandalizing cars, people flipping Tesla drivers off, breaking glass at Tesla showrooms. 

There have also been very spirited peaceful demonstrations all across the US in front of Tesla dealerships, with protesters voicing their dislike of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and his policies, and the government cuts being enacted by Musk’s DOGE group.

And people are selling their Teslas back, often for significant losses.

The vibes are bad in Europe, too — largely thanks to Musk boosting Germany’s far-right party and making what looked like a Nazi salute. There are widespread protests and a movement for people to buy other types of electric cars. 

Public opinion is starting to crystalize against Tesla because Musk is the face of the company, and many people aren’t happy with what he’s doing politically. The problem for Tesla (and Musk) is when public opinion has catalyzed against something, it can be very hard to reverse course. 

And so then the question becomes: Does Elon Musk care about that?

Faiz Siddiqui, a Washington Post reporter who has written a book on Musk, told me that Tesla’s stock is Musk’s engine. When Musk acquires Twitter or wants to gobble up an AI company, he’s not paying cash. He’s using Tesla stock, based on the understanding that that’s an incredibly profitable, growing asset. 

And Musk is going to continue to need a lot of money. Faiz mentioned that the next big thing for Musk seems to be pivoting Tesla to be a robotics and AI company. Those are expensive goals, and if Tesla stock drops too much, that could limit future ambitions. Maybe Musk cares about that.

However, maybe he sees that as a price worth paying for being the second most powerful man in the world — and some might argue, given his influence on Trump, that he is the most powerful man in the world.

Sure, things are rocky for Tesla at the moment, but Musk now has an unprecedented level of access to the American government and power. And he has a giant portfolio — SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Starlink, xAI — that is very affected by government contracts and regulations. 

So maybe it doesn’t matter if Tesla incurs great losses if Musk is able to use his position to convince the Federal Aviation Administration to move a $2.4 billion government contract from Verizon to Starlink, which is something the FAA is reportedly at least considering. Perhaps DOGE (the “Department of Government Efficiency”) can make his life easier on the regulation front or allow him to learn valuable information about competitors. 

It’s hard to say what Musk’s endgame is, and how secure his position is; there have been some reports of him clashing with other administration officials. 

But one thing the recent Tesla drama has shown is that things seem inevitable until they don’t. Tesla seemed to be on this inevitable glide path to remain one of the most profitable carmakers in the world. Now, maybe not. And the same is true with Elon Musk and his political power: Things can rise and fall faster than you might think.

This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.

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