Republicans are resorting to childish taunts to defend an uncommonly dishonorable state attorney general

It’s a bit like Lucy with the football. Every few years, Democrats convince themselves that a Texas Senate seat might finally switch from red to blue. On paper, it makes sense. Texas is a large and urbanizing state with an increasingly educated – and increasingly non-white – population.

Other one-time Republican strongholds that have undergone similar demographic shifts have turned purple or even blueish – think Georgia, for example. The border counties along the Rio Grande valley, with their deep poverty and big Latino populations, were long thought to be fertile ground to nurture a kind of anti-Trump populism that could be converted into pro-Democratic sentiment. The state Democratic party is anemic there, but a few talented candidates have emerged.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

The raid is meant to cast an air of suspicion and criminality over Democratic candidates who, like Omar, are facing the voters in a matter of weeks

On Monday, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the Washington DC area home of Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota congresswoman and a progressive Democrat, in the latest instance of Donald Trump’s effort to weaponize the national security state to harass, punish and embarrass his political opponents.

The raid, which was approved by a judge after a reportedly extensive back-and-forth with federal security officials, was nominally carried out in connection with a spurious criminal investigation into Omar’s childhood immigration to the US.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Lethal injection was a way for us to deny the reality of capital punishment. Pike’s experience shows us what it is

Christa Pike had asked to be hanged. In the weeks before her botched execution by lethal injection on 30 September, in which she survived two lethal doses of barbiturate pentobarbital and had to be hospitalized, Pike and her legal team had challenged Tennessee’s execution protocol.

The state’s lethal injection regimen had failed before. In May, Tony Carruthers was also sent to Tennessee’s death chamber, only to leave alive after prison officials struggled to find a vein.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Conservatives long promoted a politics of sexual prohibition. Now such morals have been shed in favor of male domination

Under Kash Patel, the FBI will now hire you even if you have a history of hiring prostitutes, or of having sex with animals. The rightwing Maha influencer Alex Clark had a guest on to her talk show to discuss the idea that wives should provide sex for their husbands on demand. A new ad for a sports gambling website is being hailed as a victory for the political right, because it features a nude Sydney Sweeney clutching footballs to her breasts. The Tate brothers, who encourage their male followers to pursue compulsive sexual conquest and who have been accused of sex trafficking and violence in the operation of their online cam porn business, have reportedly been friendly with members of Trump’s circle. A dizzying array of elites on both sides of the aisle – conservatives very much included – seem to have been socializing with a pedophile financier, and were so unfazed by his constant coterie of underaged girl companions that one begins to wonder whether they were habituated to such scenes. A prominent conservative writer, best known for her opposition to gender transition care for children, has announced a new book claiming to tackle the problem of young women who are supposedly unwilling to have enough sex. And the women of the president’s members club, Mar-A-Lago, are so well known for their dramatic facelifts, and their lips so stuffed with filler that they cannot quite close their mouths, that their faces are now a shorthand in the world of plastic surgery.

Raunch, vulgarity, a boorish entitlement to women’s sexual service, and the aesthetics – and, indeed, the business – of pornography are being embraced by the right.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Clancy’s case became a referendum on mothers, healthcare, and the status of women

Most family annihilators are men. It’s a grim fact that such incidents are common enough to have a discernible pattern. The massacre is carried out by a husband and father, often one who is on the verge of bankruptcy or divorce; typically, it forms the finale of a long reign of domestic violence terror.

About half the time, the perpetrator kills himself after slaughtering his family. Gun use is common – a large number of what are termed “mass shootings” in the United States are in fact family annihilation killings, in which a man turns his weapon on his family members. Other times, the killer uses knives, or fires.

The activist made the movement mainstream – and became a receptacle for its hopes and disappointments

• Gloria Steinem, groundbreaking feminist campaigner, dies aged 92

• ‘We badly need to raise our boys more like our girls’: Gloria Steinem – a life in quotes

By the time she died on Wednesday, at 92 years old at her home in New York, Gloria Steinem was synonymous with feminism, a kind of human mascot for the movement. So it can be easy to forget that when she was born, feminism was over. It was something that had been faddish years before, among women who were now old ladies; something that seemed, in retrospect, like it might have been a bit overwrought and out of touch. To the girl Gloria Steinem, growing up in Ohio in the 1930s and 40s, the suffrage movement that had gained women the right to vote less than two decades prior probably seemed remote – especially to a girl like her, growing up itinerant and poor under the care of a single mother who was plagued by a violent and debilitating mental illness. You might say that growing up, Steinem had worries that were more immediate than the status of women.

But experience has a way of radicalizing women about their own gendered condition. Steinem attended Smith, and her education opened up previously unhoped for possibilities. En route to a postgraduate fellowship in India in 1957, when she was in her early 20s, she had an illegal abortion in London. Later, in 1969, while she was working as a journalist for New York magazine, she attended an “abortion speak-out” put on by a group of radical women from the emergent fringe of what was then called the Women’s Liberation movement.

The far-right provocateur helped galvanize a movement that no longer needs him. Now his imitators are claiming victory

It’s been a long, slow decline for Milo Yiannopoulos. From the vantage point of 2026, it’s easy to forget that he was once a big deal.

The British-born far-right provocateur, who was arrested by ICE in Louisiana and deported from the US this week, was among the first media figures to ride the “gamergate” controversy and ensuing rightwing populist wave that brought Donald Trump to office in 2016. An editor of the then ascendant Breitbart News from 2014 to 2017, Yiannopoulous was an early adopter of the media strategy of algorithm-optimized outrage bait, trawling the internet and a consulting large network of well-placed sources in search of stories he could use to fan the flames of online culture war discourses. He would write a story mocking a feminist, or fire off a tweet saying something racist about Muslims, and the ensuing firestorm of controversy would result in online arguments, media coverage, and his own promptly and decisively rising star. Rinse, repeat.

A call revealing Todd Blanche’s plans to crack down on mifepristone lays bare the danger

The abortion pill is a miracle. Mifepristone, then called RU-486, was synthesized by a French lab in the 1980s; in combination with misoprostol, commonly used as ulcer medication, it cuts off the body’s supply of progesterone, halts the development of a pregnancy, and incites contractions, which empty the uterus. The drug allows pregnancies to be terminated with a shocking degree of reliability and ease. Gone are the concoctions of ergot and Spanish Fly dispensed by 19th century midwives, which only sometimes worked to induce a miscarriage; gone are the backroom procedures of the pre-Roe US, when drunk, lascivious, incompetent or cruel providers wielded bent coat hangers in dirty rooms. The abortion pill is safe, effective and cheaper than ever. And since Dobbs, it’s everywhere: even if you live in a state with an abortion ban, you can get the pills shipped to your house in the mail. Since Roe was overturned, there has not been a return to the terror of mass death that marked the pre-Roe era of septic abortion wards, where women routinely found themselves maimed, sickened or killed. There’s exactly one reason why: because illegal abortions were largely unsafe without the pill, and they are extremely safe with it.

So of course, the Trump administration and their allies on the American right are trying to get rid of it. And this month, they gained a powerful new ally when Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and an anti-abortion zealot, was confirmed as attorney general.

The congresswoman’s decision is an assertion of women’s freedom and dignity at a time when our status is rapidly eroding

“Don’t be weird about this,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive star and rumored 2028 presidential contender, said on her live video broadcast as she raised her shirt to angle the syringe into her abdomen. Then, with resignation, “even though I know all of you will be.”

The New York Democrat is 36 years old, and this week she revealed that she is beginning the process of freezing her eggs during Congress’s August recess. In the video, Ocasio-Cortez said that she was seeking to destigmatize the realities of women’s lives as they navigate the conflicting demands of professional aspiration and family building; she explained to viewers the process of the hormonal injections she was administering to herself, showing them the drugs and injector she was using arrayed on a paper towel, beside a disinfecting towelette. The procedure, Ocasio-Cortez explained, was not covered by her insurance, and she would be paying “100% out of pocket”. She had been saving to afford it for some time. “This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” she said, going on to assert her hope that transparency about such questions will destigmatize women’s reproductive lives and promote their dignity.

The party’s silence shows how broadly male supremacist thinking has seeped into the conventional wisdom of political strategists

It’s not exactly strange that elements of the Magaverse have embraced Andrew Tate. What’s strange is that the Democrats do not seem interested in holding the Trump movement to account for it.

Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer who is accused by numerous women around the world and now by British prosecutors of rape and strangulation, as well as assault, sex trafficking, possession of child abuse images and extreme pornography, and various other forms of gender violence and exploitation, was arrested in Miami last week, along with Tristan, his brother and sidekick. Or I should say, they were rearrested: the men were previously charged in Romania, where they were under house arrest until, following some conveniently timed diplomatic moves from the Trump administration, they were allowed to leave the country and resettled in the US. When asked if the Trump administration had secured their release from Romania back then, the Tates’ lawyer said: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.” Now, finally, they are awaiting extradition to the UK, where they are dual citizens.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

When this is all over, people will tell us to move on. But those who perpetrated this reign of terror must be held accountable

One day, when Maga is out of power and the conditions of political possibility have changed, there are going to be people who tell you that the best thing for the country is to move on. There are going to be people who tell you that attempts to hold the purveyors of Trumpism accountable are petty, vindictive, engaging in a kind of petulant recrimination and score-settling. There are going to be people who tell you that there must not be investigations, that it would be a waste of time to have trials. There are going to be people who tell you that it is not wise to change the law to allow for prosecutions and lawsuits; that too great an emphasis on the past will only divide the country, and keep us from looking toward the future. This argument was made after Watergate; it was made after the civil war. It was wrong back then, and it will be wrong again when it is delivered, with piety and smugness, after Trump.

When Maga leaves power, all of the officers, bureaucrats and leaders of ICE – from the uniformed thugs in masks on the streets, to the contractors guarding concentration camps, to the suited vultures directing the operation in Washington and drafting legal memos to justify it – all of them must be held accountable. Their immunity from criminal prosecution and civil suits must be eradicated, and their liability must be made retroactive. They must be investigated, tried, fined, punished and ostracized. Needless to say, ICE must be abolished – attempts to merely reform it must be resisted as betrayals of democratic values. But it is not enough to abolish ICE. Those who are responsible for ICE must be driven from public life.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

The senator is alive, a key requirement to maintain one’s job in the US Senate

Like any good proof-of-life photo, it featured that day’s newspaper. After a nearly month-long disappearance, when it was clear that he had been rushed to the hospital but not clear why or in what condition, Mitch McConnell broke his silence, as they say in the tabloids, by releasing a photograph of himself sitting upright in a hospital bed. He wore a pink button-up shirt, and his vacant, lipless mouth seemed to form something meant to resemble a smile. Beside him was his wife, the comparatively pert former Trump transportation secretary Elaine Chao, her coiffed hair as stiff as the couple’s determination. In a statement, McConnell said that he had been hospitalized after a fall, and was being treated for pneumonia.

The picture was meant to put an end to the rampant speculation over whether the senator, aged 84, was dead or not. You would think this would be a simple enough question to answer. If the man himself wasn’t available to clear up the matter, couldn’t someone have held two fingers to the inside of his wrist to check for a pulse, or propped a hand mirror under his nose to see if it fogged? No such luck, apparently. The Kentucky senator was missing for weeks, with no word, his office only releasing vague and repetitive acknowledgments that he had been hospitalized. Public emergency services records indicate that paramedics were called to his Washington address on 14 June, where they administered CPR on an unconscious person who was allegedly suffering a cardiac arrest – one whose identity has been withheld. McConnell had been in a Washington DC area hospital ever since.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

A document on an embryo adoption program may be marginal – but it marks an escalation in the pursuit of fetal personhood

The Trump administration quietly declared frozen embryos to be children last week. In a call for grant applications related to a nearly 20-year-old program meant to raise awareness about frozen embryo adoption, the Department of Health and Human Services referred to frozen embryos using the terms “child” and “children”, calling for screening standards for frozen embryo purchasers to be raised to those applied to parents seeking to adopt actual children. The document refers to frozen embryos as “children who already exist and are in need of a family”.

The language is strange and conspicuous in context, even if that context itself may seem marginal: what the Trump administration has done here is change its phrasing in the guidelines for a longstanding and somewhat obscure grant program.

The sordid UFC event represents his own efforts to symbolically fuse the federal government with his person, to insist that he is America and is the state

Hitler dreamed of a 1,000-year Reich; Putin is said to have baroque dreams of territorial conquest meant to restore a dubiously historical empire he calls “Greater Russia”. Sure, there are people around Donald Trump who imagine using his rise to power to establish some sort of grand, civilizational project: there are the white nationalists who dream of a country purged of those they deem racially impure; there are the Christian nationalists who imagine a future theocracy in which women wear long braids and skirts, and don’t vote; there are the techno-reactionaries who imagine a future of interplanetary colonies, techno-assisted eugenics, and polygamous harems.

But Trump himself is conspicuously small in his dreams: his are comparatively little ambitions, not extending far beyond the reach of his ego and his senses.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

The justice department decision to launch a criminal investigation into Carroll is a troubling, dark turn

Donald Trump is accused of raping E Jean Carroll, the magazine writer, in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store sometime in the mid-1990s. Trump denies this, as he denies all the sexual abuse allegations that have been made against him by more than two dozen women, but he was found to have sexually abused Carroll by a federal jury; later, another jury found that he defamed her when he said that she had lied about it. She didn’t lie.

Trump has vowed to appeal the rulings, but he’s so far been frustrated: a federal court panel declined to hear his appeal of one verdict, and the US supreme court has so far delayed a decision on whether to hear another of his appeals in the matter no fewer than 12 times. She won two judgments from Trump: $5m for sexual abuse and defamation, and more than $83m for defamation. The president has used his office to enrich himself so blatantly that he almost certainly has the money to pay her. But Carroll hasn’t seen a dime; it’s not clear that she ever will.

The ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ is an extraordinary example of bald self-dealing

Donald Trump is stealing almost $2bn in taxpayer money and handing it out to his friends. That’s the upshot of the president’s recent agreement following a $10bn lawsuit he brought in his personal capacity against the IRS, an agency that he oversees. Trump brought the suit over leaks of some documents from his tax returns to the press. To resolve the suit, the justice department will create a fund of nearly $1.8bn – a wildly outsized figure compared with Trump’s somewhat flimsily alleged injuries – that can be doled out to Trump allies. The Guardian describes the fund as “loosely controlled and secretive”, but members of the Trump administration have not ruled out January 6 insurrectionists as possible awardees.

The so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” will be administered by four commissioners appointed by Trump’s attorney general and one appointed “in consultation” with congressional leadership – Trump, who can fire the commissioners, will have ultimate control. It will have the authority to issue formal apologies for alleged mistreatment of conservative political actors by previous administrations – ie, those few who were prosecuted or sued during the Biden era. When Trump leaves office, any remaining money will not be available for his successor to use similarly, but will instead be distributed back to the federal government. But I doubt that there will be any remaining money. We may never know either way: there is no requirement that the fund’s work be made public, and required reports to the attorney general on its conduct are to be confidential. In addition to the creation of this massive slush fund, the agreement also requires that the IRS drop all audits of Trump and his family.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

The US was not a true democracy before the Voting Rights Act. Wednesday’s decision has essentially destroyed the law

Is America a democracy? The term implies an equality of rights and dignity among citizens, a collective and uniform right of individuals to participate in self-government and to shape the laws that rule them. In that sense, the answer is no: though it has been a republic since its founding, America has only rarely been a true democracy, one where all citizens have the full right to vote and to have that vote counted.

Political scientists such as the University of Notre Dame’s Christine Wolbrecht have argued that America wasn’t really a democracy, not in the meaningful sense of the term, until the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the law that formed the signature achievement of the civil rights movement and sought to end racial barriers to voting across the south when it was passed in 1965. If you accept that premise, you could say that the era of American democracy officially ended on Wednesday, when the supreme court finished its project of dismantling the VRA in its 6-3 decision in Louisiana v Callais. Whatever this country has become now, “democracy” does not describe it.

Sports bans have humiliated trans women and girls across America. Now, the Olympics joins in

Last month, the International Olympic Committee announced that transgender women athletes would be barred from competing in all Olympic events in the women’s category – but not the men’s events. In addition to trans women athletes, cisgender women with conditions known as DSDs – differences in sexual development – will also be banned from competition. The new rules effectively redefine womanhood – but not manhood – as a novel and previously unrecognized category consisting only of those with a specific set of genetic prerequisites. To comply with this new requirement, women athletes – but not male ones – will be made to submit to genetic testing, to determine whether their womanhood meets the committee’s standards. The rule will be in effect for the upcoming summer Olympics, scheduled to take place in Los Angeles in 2028.

The move comes as increased political and media attention to the issue of trans rights and visibility over the past years – along with pressure from the Trump administration – has led athletic federations to ban trans women from sports competitions, a demand that has largely not been made for transgender men in women’s or men’s sports. The vitriol and intensity of this controversy has been acute. Twenty-eight states ban trans girls and women from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity; last year, the NCAA announced a ban on trans athletes competing in women’s collegiate leagues.

The president’s fixation on culture-war grievances is a colossal misreading of voters who just want prices to come down. He has forgotten why he was re-elected

In a carefully coordinated publicity stunt last week, Donald Trump received a McDonald’s takeaway order from delivery driver Sharon Simmons, a 58-year-old grandmother of 10 from Arkansas. Simmons, a Trump supporter and advocate of his “no tax on tips” policy, testified before Congress last year that she began working as a delivery driver for the takeout app DoorDash in order to help cover the cost of her husband’s cancer treatment.

The photo opp should have been a slam dunk for Trump: a simple way to promote one of his policies in the company of a sympathetic advocate and beneficiary. But Trump, in characteristic fashion, could not resist the urge to insert a non sequitur about one of his own grievances: trans women athletes. “Do you think men should play in women’s sports?” Trump asked Simmons. “I really don’t have an opinion on that,” she replied, showing considerably more message discipline than the president. “I’m here about ‘no tax on tips’.”

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

The supreme court appears poised to reject Trump’s attack on a foundation of US identity. We must hope it follows through

American opponents of birthright citizenship – the right of all those born on the soil of a country to claim full legal rights and political representation in that nation – like to point out that many countries don’t have it. On Wednesday at the supreme court, during the oral arguments in Trump v Barbara, the case challenging Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship in the United States by executive order, the Trump administration’s solicitor general, John Sauer, claimed that “almost every country” denies birthright citizenship. Trump himself made the unusual choice to attend the oral arguments in person, signaling his investment in the issue and perhaps hoping that his presence would intimidate the justices into ruling in his favor. But he left soon after Cecillia Wang, a lawyer for the ACLU who represented his opponents in court, began speaking. Not long after he left the supreme court building, Trump used Truth Social, his proprietary social media platform, to echo the rightwing argument about the supposed rarity of birthright citizenship worldwide. “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship! President DONALD J. TRUMP” he posted.

This is not true. The United States’ birthright citizenship – which was originally established in very plain, explicit terms in the 14th amendment, and has been reaffirmed twice by Congress and by more than a century of supreme court precedent – is typical of the Americas. In the western hemisphere, only a handful of countries deny automatic full citizenship to infants born within their borders. They are contrasted with the rest of North and South America, where the legacy of slavery led most states to adopt birthright citizenship.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist