Category: Politics

This story is published in partnership with The Florida Trib.

In a small, piercingly bright room inside a state prison in northeast Florida, Frank Walls was strapped to a gurney and injected three times: first with a sedative meant to render him unconscious, then a paralytic to prevent any visible movement, and finally potassium acetate to induce cardiac arrest.

Walls’ execution on December 18, 2025, capped Florida’s deadliest year in modern history. With 19 executions last year, Florida more than doubled its own record, and put more people to death than Texas, Alabama, and South Carolina combined. This execution spree came even as Florida’s lethal injection protocol has come under scrutiny, prompting fears that those executed are at risk of complications and needless suffering. 

In his final appeal, Walls asked Florida to review its three-step protocol, arguing that the way the state’s been carrying out executions would violate his Eighth Amendment right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. His attorneys documented allegations that even though men in the death chamber couldn’t physically show the effects due to Florida’s three-drug protocol, some may have suffered and died with the feeling of drowning. And an analysis of court records, prison logs, redacted autopsy reports, and eyewitness testimonies by Mother Jones found documented issues in half the executions last year before Walls.

In at least nine executions from February to September 2025, there were signs of underdosings, the use of expired drugs, drug substitutions, or flaws in drug logs maintained by the Florida Department of Corrections. 

“Mr. Walls will die a needlessly cruel death if Florida insists on trying to kill him with Florida’s version of lethal injection,” wrote anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot, who met Walls at the Florida state prison five months before his execution, in an affidavit Walls’ defense team submitted to the District Court in Tallahassee. 

Autopsy results for Walls, who was sentenced to death for the 1987 killings of an Air Force airman and his girlfriend, have not yet been released. But Zivot feared the three-drug protocol could cause pulmonary edema, a condition that’s been found in previous autopsies of people executed by Florida, and which Zivot said causes “the terror that accompanies drowning and asphyxiation as they choke on their own blood.” 

The Florida Attorney General’s office didn’t dispute Walls’ assertion that he could experience the sensation of drowning and gasping for air after the second drug is injected. They called it “irrelevant.” 

The state has been similarly unmoved by problems in recent executions. 

In June 2025, logs included in a lawsuit showed that one man was executed with half of the required amount of paralytic, and another man didn’t receive a full dose of the drug meant to swiftly induce cardiac arrest. 

Florida Department of Corrections’ own records indicated that the execution team used expired sedatives in four deaths, raising concerns about the effectiveness of the drugs and the risk of complications, including severe pain. They also recorded the use of a local anaesthetic that’s not part of the state’s execution protocol, and listed dates for use of the drugs that don’t match execution dates. 

Each of these issues would violate Florida’s own protocol. Rather than order an investigation, the state’s governor and past presidential candidate, Republican Ron DeSantis, has already scheduled four executions this year.

The death penalty has waxed and waned in public opinion over the years, with botched executions, racial disparities, and wrongful convictions under scrutiny in recent years. Florida alone has seen at least 30 exonerations from its death row. 

But reviving the federal death penalty is a key tenet of President Donald Trump’s tough-on-crime agenda—and DeSantis has positioned Florida at the vanguard of the Trump-led Republican Party. His own political future is unclear after his failed presidential run, but he’s echoing loud and clear the president’s enthusiasm for harsh and swift executions. Florida is leading the death penalty’s resurgence.

“The exact reasons as to why DeSantis has chosen to ramp things up now—I don’t think we know,” said Hannah Gorman, who teaches death penalty law at the Florida International University’s College of Law.

But she said the pace of Florida’s executions have ramifications nationally and internationally. In 2025, executions in the U.S. nearly doubled, and 40% of them were in Florida alone. 

“Florida is an outlier in the U.S.,” said Gorman. “But this is also a massive message coming out of America.” 

DeSantis has issued death warrants for 32 people since he took office in 2019, and 250 people remain on Florida’s death row. 

DeSantis’s office didn’t respond to a list of questions by Mother Jones. But in November 2025, DeSantis said he was doing his “part to deliver justice” to victims’ families by executing those who have been on death row for decades. And the governor has unusually broad power to enact this penalty: he both sets execution dates and proceeds over the clemency hearings that could halt his own execution orders.

The last review of lethal injection protocol by the Department of Corrections Secretary Ricky Dixon was in February 2025, after the year’s executions had already begun. Dixon wrote in a letter to Gov. DeSantis that his department’s lethal injection procedure was in line with decency standards and “dignity of man.”  

“The foremost objective of the lethal injection process is a humane and dignified death,” Dixon wrote. “The process will not involve unnecessary lingering or the unnecessary or wanton infliction of pain and suffering.”

The one-page letter didn’t explain what Dixon’s review entailed, and the Florida Department of Corrections didn’t respond to questions about the review. 

A month after this letter was sent to Tallahassee, in March 2025, Florida executed Edward James. Prison drug logs disclosed in court records show James was given a local anesthetic—lidocaine—that’s not mentioned in the 14-page protocol signed off by Dixon. 

It’s unclear why that drug was administered or who authorized it. 

To Ron McAndrew, a former Florida State Prison warden who led Florida’s executions from 1996-98 and oversaw three electric chair executions, Florida ought to slow down and examine its protocol before executing anyone else. 

Now an anti-death penalty advocate, McAndrew’s concerns extend beyond procedure. He worries about the toll on staff. The ones doing the “dirty work.” 

McAndrew has overseen and witnessed executions gone wrong. He was in charge in 1997, when Pedro Medina’s head burst into flames on the electric chair. The former warden said he wouldn’t wish that on anyone, especially prison staff. 

“To put a warden and a death team through 19 executions in one year was a horrible thing for the Governor to do,” McAndrew said. “These are the people that are going to wake up screaming in the middle of the night. These are the people that are going to suffer for the rest of their lives because the people they have killed are going to come visiting with them on a regular basis. They’re going to sit on the edge of their bed at night and talk to them.” 

In the past, botched executions or deviations from established execution procedures have prompted death penalty states to pause. Under Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida prison officials botched a lethal injection in 2006, and Bush temporarily halted executions. In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Mary Fallin had to delay executions twice, after the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in 2014 and again after the revelation that the state substituted a new drug to stop Charles Warner’s heart in 2015. Warner’s final words, the Associated Press reported, were: “My body is on fire.” A grand jury investigation found “negligence” and serious errors in the state’s executions. 

In 2022 in Tennessee, Republican Gov. Bill Lee paused all executions and sought an independent review of its execution protocol over concerns about independent testing of the lethal drugs. When the review ended in 2024, citing fewer opportunities for mistakes, Tennessee moved from a three-drug protocol to a single drug, as at least 1o other states and the federal system have now done.  

Florida has been using the same three-drug combination since 2017. Florida’s governor, however, is yet to announce any investigation into this method or its recent executions, let alone slow his pace in signing death warrants, despite repeated pleas and public accounts. 

In 2025 alone, media coverage described troubling scenes in at least three executions in Florida. In April, Michael Tanzi’s chest heaved for about three minutes, the Associated Press reported. Tanzi was given the unauthorized sedative, lidocaine, prison logs later showed. 

During the execution of Thomas Gudinas in June, media reported that his eyes rolled back and his chest spasmed. Drug logs filed in court records showed that Gudinas was injected with half the amount of paralytic required by Florida’s protocol. Then in November, NBC News reported that former Marine Bryan Jennings’ chest heaved and his arms twitched. Jennings’ autopsy report found that he experienced pulmonary edema—which mirrors the feeling of drowning, and the condition a medical expert feared would happen to Walls at his December execution. 

After Walls’ execution, a spokesperson for the governor’s office said there were no complications with his three-step lethal injection. There were close to 30 witnesses in attendance, including relatives of Walls’ victims. The Pensacola News Journal reported “about six minutes of labored breathing.” 

And Maria DeLiberato, Walls’ former attorney and the legal and policy director for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said she saw Walls gasping and his chest heaving: “Like he’s choking.” What she witnessed, she said, didn’t match the state’s media briefing from the Raiford prison. 

“I thought something was wrong,” DeLiberato said.

In January, Gov. DeSantis signed his first death warrant of this year for Ronald Heath, who was convicted for the 1989 armed robbery and murder of a traveling salesman near University of Florida. A jury sentenced him to death on a 10-2 vote.

Unanimous jury decisions were not required when Heath was convicted. They became law in Florida after a landmark 2016 Supreme Court judgement, but in 2023, Gov. DeSantis signed a bill into law requiring only 8 of 12 jurors to vote for death. 

Heath’s final appeal urged the U.S. Supreme Court to look into Florida’s three-step lethal injection method, citing previous use of expired drugs, inconsistent dosing and inaccurate logs about what happened in the death chamber. The state argued that the Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, “not inaccurate bookkeeping.”

The Supreme Court denied Heath’s request, and Heath’s execution was quick and without outward signs of complications, according to news coverage and a witness. Two weeks later, as Melvin Trotter’s execution date loomed for the murder of a grocery store owner in 1986, he asked for a stay of execution based on the risk of a mangled execution. Though the Supreme Court also rejected Trotter’s petition, this time, Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed her concern about Florida’s “troubling” execution records. 

Sotomayor agreed with denying Trotter’s petition, but acknowledged that prisoners like him are caught in a Catch-22: because they don’t have enough evidence of cruel and unusual punishment, they have been denied the records they’d actually need to prove it. “The very reason” they are seeking these documents, she noted in a four-page statement, is to prove their claims. 

“By continuing to shroud its executions in secrecy, Florida undermines both the integrity of its own execution process and, potentially, this Court’s ability to ensure the State’s compliance with its constitutional obligations,” Sotomayor wrote. 

As Trotter was executed on Feb. 24, he breathed heavily and his body twitched, PBS News reported. Details about the drugs used in Trotter’s execution won’t be revealed until the autopsy reports are made public. 

DeSantis has already ordered two more executions, Billy Kearse on March 3 and Michael King on March 17. And Sotomayor’s words are already reverberating on the busy death row. Within a day of Sotomayor’s statement, her critique of Florida’s secrecy had already been cited in a new appeal—and state officials had already dismissed the justice’s concerns as “speculation.”

The lead prosecutor in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s human smuggling case acknowledged Thursday that he thought it was possible the charges would be viewed as vindictive, but he decided charging him was “the right thing to do.” 

Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who was mistakenly deported to a supermax prison in his home country last year, is seeking to have his charges tossed on the grounds of vindictive prosecution. His legal team has argued that he has been unfairly singled out by the U.S. government as a result of a civil lawsuit he filed against the Trump administration successfully challenging that removal. Abrego Garcia was flown back to the U.S. in June 2025 to face the smuggling charges.

U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw, who is presiding over Abrego Garcia’s criminal case, has already ruled that the Salvadoran man demonstrated that his prosecution may be vindictive, leaving it up to the government to rebut that presumption. He allowed Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to collect material from the government.

In a nearly six-hour hearing in Nashville on Thursday, prosecutors and members of Abrego Garcia’s defense team questioned two government witnesses who were called to the stand. The hearing focused primarily on the timeline of when the Justice Department chose to indict Abrego Garcia, and whether anybody at the White House, the Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security was directly involved. 

Acting U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire — who is leading the prosecution — acknowledged that Abrego Garcia was indicted long after the 2022 traffic stop that was used to justify the smuggling charges, saying he expected to be asked “why now?” He added that he expected a potential vindictive prosecution allegation from Abrego Garcia’s defense team, and that factored into his decision.  

But McGuire said he decided to bring charges because “the evidence pointed to Abrego Garcia having committed a crime.” He also insisted it was his decision to prosecute Abrego Garcia and no one else’s, adding that no one instructed him to do so or directed him to seek an indictment. 

Lawyers for Abrego Garcia brought up internal emails from a high-level Justice Department official that suggested there was significant interest in charging Abrego Garcia after he challenged his deportation, including one that referred to the case as a “top priority.” 

Rana Saoud, a former Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge who investigated Abrego Garcia, also testified at the hearing that she learned about the November 2022 traffic stop in April 2025, a month after Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador.

Saoud stood firm that she never received any pressure to “make this case happen,” and said that Abrego Garcia’s deportation case “did not impact her decision” to investigate him.

The hearing follows a nearly yearlong back-and-forth between Abrego Garcia’s attorneys and the government.  

Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador in March 2025 after he was arrested by immigration agents, even though he had been granted legal protection in 2019 that prevented immigration authorities from deporting him to his home country because of likely persecution from local gangs. A federal immigration official later acknowledged his removal was an “error.”

A federal judge in Maryland presiding over his civil case had ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return from a Salvadoran mega-prison known as CECOT, and the decision was upheld by the Supreme Court. But the Trump administration resisted doing so for weeks and eventually brought Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. last June to face human smuggling charges. He has pleaded not guilty.

The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, when Abrego Garcia was pulled over by the state Highway Patrol for speeding. Abrego Garcia told police he and the nine passengers in the car had been working at a construction site in St. Louis, Missouri. A report from the Department of Homeland Security about the incident said Abrego Garcia was suspected of human trafficking, but he was not arrested or charged with any crime. 

Separately, Abrego Garcia is fighting in federal court in Maryland to avoid being deported a second time.

Abrego Garcia is now seeking to have the criminal case against him dropped, which his lawyers say is part of a “retribution campaign” waged by the government. They accused senior administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Attorney General Pam Bondi, of attacking Abrego Garcia publicly in an effort to discredit and punish him.

Abrego Garcia’s legal team also argued that the indictment returned by a federal grand jury last May was “riddled with inflammatory, irrelevant — and, it has turned out, thinly supported — allegations.”

“The unprecedented public pronouncements attacking Mr. Abrego for his successful exercise of constitutional rights by senior cabinet members, leaders of the DOJ, and even the President of the United States, make this the rare case where actual vindictiveness is clear from the record,” they wrote.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers argued that his indictment was sought as “revenge” against him for suing the government over his removal to El Salvador last year.

“As a matter of timing, it is clear that it was that lawsuit — and its effects on the government — that prompted the government to reevaluate the 2022 traffic stop and bring this case,” they wrote.

Defendants face a high bar for successfully proving a prosecution is vindictive.

In response to Abrego Garcia’s effort, federal prosecutors said they decided to move to indict Abrego Garcia because they believe he “committed a serious federal crime” and could “prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury.”

“The allegation that a criminal indictment in Tennessee was sought to punish the defendant for his assertions in a civil case in Maryland is not true and cannot be established. The defendant’s argument, while high on rhetoric, lacks the basic facts to succeed,” prosecutors argued.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent much of Thursday in a closed-door hearing about accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. It all amounted to a laughable circus led by noted moron James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee.

After Comer threatened Hillary and former President Bill Clinton with jail time if they didn’t testify, the couple agreed to appear before the committee. Of course, the GOP insisted on doing this behind closed doors because that’s the best way for the partisan lawmakers to control the narrative.

Ahead of the hearing, Hillary Clinton shared her opening statement, where she rightly called the committee out for so, so many things. 

Related | Hypocritical GOP targets Clintons in BS Epstein probe

The Oversight Committee’s Epstein investigation is a sham. While the Clintons were subpoenaed and are required to sit for long closed-door sessions, many of the Department of Justice and FBI officials involved in the Epstein investigations and prosecution were allowed to simply submit written statements. 

In her statement, Clinton excoriated the committee for refusing to hold public hearings or allow the media to attend, and for refusing to call people who figure prominently in the files, such as one Donald J. Trump. 

Finally, she pointed out that if the Trump administration was earnestly committed to its supposed goal of stopping sex trafficking and addressing Epstein’s myriad crimes, it would get to the bottom of why the Department of Justice and FBI are withholding material that implicates Trump. 

Oh, and then there’s the whole thing where she said she never met Epstein, never flew on his plane, and, presumably, never drew him a fun little naked-lady sketch as a birthday tribute, unlike how one Donald J. Trump seems to have done. 

Once the hearing started, things almost immediately got very stupid. Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado snapped a photo of Hillary Clinton and sent it to right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson, who posted it online, saying, “This is the first time Hillary has had to answer real questions about Epstein. Clinton does not look happy.”

Well, would you be happy being forced to testify about a person you say you’ve never met—all while Trump, a former close friend of Epstein, doesn’t have to answer for a thing?

Sure, the committee rules explicitly forbid taking pictures, and sure, Boebert was typically smug and sarcastic about it, because rules don’t apply to Republicans, but it was quite the move for a committee that refused to let Clinton testify in public.

Closed-door means closed-door, not forcing Hillary Clinton to testify in private while you dribble out shit to your favorite right-wing influencer.

Boebert’s antics led to the hearing being halted for a bit. It also led to Johnson whining that it’s totally cool that he posted the photo because Clinton was “trying to get out of answering questions about Epstein.”

And how exactly could Johnson tell that from just a photo? It sure sounds like Boebert or another GOP goblin leaked more than just a picture.

Related | Trump’s birthday card to Epstein is real—and it will give you the ick

In a mid-afternoon statement, Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia of California demanded that a full, unedited transcript be released within 24 hours—which is unlikely. For one, it’s a heavy lift for such a long testimony, and for another, Republicans on the committee will want as much time as possible to mischaracterize or just straight-up lie about Hillary’s testimony. 

Garcia also told the press that Clinton had not invoked the Fifth Amendment, setting her apart from, say, Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s co-conspirator. And of course, since the GOP will never call Trump to testify, he doesn’t even need to bother with deciding whether he would take the Fifth. 

When things finally wrapped up well after 5 PM ET, Clinton spoke to the press, and it was clear that the hearing got both stupid and weird. 

 “It then got at the end quite unusual because I started being asked about UFOs and a series of questions about Pizzagate,” she said. “One of the most vile, bogus conspiracy theories that was propagated on the internet.”

Sure, why not. 

GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, never one to miss an opportunity to be creepy and inappropriate, demanded that Clinton answer a question about whether she had any feelings about photographs showing Bill Clinton getting a back rub from a young woman or any other of his associations with Epstein. Hillary told Mace she wasn’t there to talk about her feelings.

Mace did, however, tell the press afterward that Clinton “took every question from every single member.”

Of course she did. Clinton sat for 11 hours of testimony over the farce that was the Benghazi Committee in 2015. She could do 6.5 hours of questioning on Epstein while standing on her head.

But you know who apparently didn’t seem to have any questions about Epstein? James Comer. Clinton confronted him during the hearing and pointed out that he hadn’t asked her a direct question about Epstein all day. Kind of a wuss move from the committee chair who threatened jail time if the Clintons wouldn’t appear. 

Hillary is done, but Bill Clinton testifies on Friday, and let’s be honest: You can expect his questioning to be even stupider, weirder, and longer. Republicans are going to continue to protect Trump and other favored right-wingers, and they’re going to continue to try to make the Clintons the real villains. But in their dark little cramped hearts, Trump’s toadies all know that they’ve got nothing. 

House Oversight Committee Democrats saw their opportunity, and they took it.

Another way of looking at the situation is that Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer’s (R-KY) insistence on trying to transfer Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein to the Clintons is the gift that keeps on giving.

PoliticusUSA is non-partisan and 100% independent. Support us by becoming a subscriber.

After Hillary Clinton’s deposition, House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Robert Garcia (D-CA) started his remarks by talking about Clinton and the fact that she was being deposed.

Garcia said:

I want to begin by just clarifying and putting emphasis on something that’s very important, and it’s something the secretary herself has said. Secretary Clinton never met Jeffrey Epstein. She never visited the island. She never flew on his plane, and she also had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s horrific crime.

So, zero knowledge of any wrongdoing, and you’ve also all heard that directly from her Secretary Clinton is also completely cooperating with the deposition and the committee, and is answering questions in full faith and in good faith, what is not acceptable is Oversight Republicans breaking their own committee rules that they established with the secretary and her team.

Which, you’ve all reported you’ve seen by releasing photos not acceptable, and it was gracious of the secretary and her team to continue the deposition.

Rep. Garcia made the connection between Republicans coming after somebody with no connection to Epstein to cover someone who definitely did.

Read what Garcia had to say about deposing Trump, the missing Epstein files, and watch the video below.

Right before armed guards escorted me from the rally and left me on the edge of a Texas-county road, I was informed that I was no longer welcome at an event that I had already attended. For the past hour, I’d watched as Representative Jasmine Crockett riled up her supporters in deep-red Lubbock, where voters were thrilled to receive a visit from the Democratic Senate candidate. But afterward, as I attempted to join the other reporters interviewing the lawmaker, a woman with a badge approached me.

“Are you Elaine?” she asked. I recognized her from the entrance of the event, where I had identified myself as she’d waved me into the building’s press area. Yes, I answered. “Her team has asked you to leave,” she said. When I asked why, the staffer looked at her phone and read dutifully: “They just said, ‘Elaine from Atlantic, white girl with a hat and notepad. She’s interviewing people in the crowd. She’s a top-notch hater and will spin. She needs to leave.’”

I will, of course, own up to being a white woman wearing a Menards baseball cap. But “top-notch hater” is a distinction that I had never considered for myself. Last year, I wrote a profile of Crockett that displeased the congresswoman. I interviewed her several times for the story, but after she learned that I’d called some of her colleagues in Congress without asking her permission, she told me that she was “shutting down the profile and revoking all permissions.” (In retrospect, I suppose this was a helpful signal that Crockett does not have a firm grasp on the First Amendment, or at least does not particularly care for it.)

As security guards began to materialize around me, I wondered to myself what distinguished a top-notch hater from a middling one. I agreed to leave, and four guards, including at least one who was armed, escorted me out of the building, through the parking lot, and right to the edge of the nearby highway, where they waited as I ordered a car. A spokesperson for the Crockett campaign did not respond to my request for comment on these events or for elaboration on the tiers of haterdom. A spokesperson for her team told Semafor that I had not been removed from the event. Crockett told CBS News there is “no evidence” that a reporter had been removed from an event. She added that there is a “specific journalist” who has a “history of being less than truthful,” and that this person had been sued for defamation and lost. Perhaps she was thinking of someone else, because that’s not something that has ever happened to me.

Perhaps my—very real—ejection shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Crockett is not known for calm restraint. This, in fact, is core to her appeal. For the Democrats who are sick of their leaders wilting before President Trump like cut hydrangeas, Crockett is a refreshing exception. The two-term congresswoman has established herself as the most anti-MAGA candidate in the race and is unafraid to match the president’s vulgarity with insults of her own, such as when she referred to former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body” and called Governor Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, “Governor Hot Wheels.” Crockett’s supporters believe that her pugnacity makes her well suited for this coarse, high-stakes political moment.

Her primary opponent, 36-year-old James Talarico, is responding to this moment very differently. On the campaign trail, the state lawmaker and Presbyterian seminarian bypasses Trump roasts in favor of quotes from the Gospel of Luke. Like Crockett, Talarico appears to be channeling the anger of millions of Democrats, but the target of his ire is not necessarily the president—it’s the billionaires who, he asserts, are rigging America’s economic system and rending its social fabric.

With five days to go until the primary, the two candidates seem fairly evenly matched in the polls. Since November 2024, Democratic voters have been clamoring for a fighter, but it hasn’t always been clear what they mean by that. On Tuesday, Democrats in Texas will have a chance to decide.

Online, at least, the Texas primary seems to get uglier every week. Last fall, Talarico launched his campaign for Senate against former Representative Colin Allred. But when Crockett entered the race in December, Allred bowed out. Earlier this month, Allred slammed Talarico over allegations that Talarico had referred to him as a “mediocre Black man” in a conversation with an influencer. Talarico denied having said this. On social media, proxies for Crockett attacked him as racist—Crockett personally accused a pro-Talarico super PAC of darkening her skin in an ad—while Talarico’s supporters accused Crockett of weaponizing the situation to smear him. This week, more news: The New Yorker reported that Talarico had ignored requests from other prominent Texas Democrats to run for a different office and that Crockett, after jumping into the race, had asked him to jump out. The anecdotes were used by both candidates’ online proxies as evidence of their opponents’ hubris.

But as I traveled through Lubbock, Dallas, and Tyler this week, not a single person I interviewed mentioned any of this drama. They liked both candidates, they told me. They felt lucky, in fact, to have two great options. Rather than policy, their preferences came down to style—and not much else.

The rally in Lubbock was full to bursting with Crockett superfans. When the 44-year-old congresswoman finally emerged through a set of shimmering silver curtains, the crowd, which for half an hour had been smoldering with anticipation, detonated. People shouted and shrieked and chanted. A few elderly women near me wept while, at the front of the room, Crockett embraced the teenage girl who had invited her to town. Attendees spoke about Crockett with reverence, and used words such as ferocious and direct to describe her.

Most had first encountered the congresswoman on television or social media, where they’d seen clips of her insulting Trump allies or questioning witnesses in committee hearings. “I like how she manhandles Pam Bondi,” Tammy Lowrey, a retired Navy chief petty officer, told me before the event, referring to Crockett’s questioning of the attorney general earlier this month. Crockett, who is an attorney, “brings the Texas,” a woman named Dawn, who declined to share her last name, told me. “We are not weak people. We are strong, and she brings that out of us.” For many people in the crowd—which was almost entirely Black, in a county with a Black population of roughly 8 percent—Crockett is also an inspiration. Mothers and daughters wore matching T-shirts with Crockett’s face emblazoned on them. At least a dozen members of Crockett’s sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, posed for group photos in their crimson-and-cream ensembles.

Read: What happened to Pam Bondi?

Crockett is less interested in persuading Republicans or independents to vote for her than she is in energizing the Democratic base. During the hour that Crockett answered questions onstage, she reminded voters that she already has experience on the national stage. “It can’t just be conjecture. I’ve been out there,” she said, alluding to Talarico’s inexperience on the federal level. She reminded them, too, of her willingness to go toe to toe with the president. “I am that girl!” she said. When Democrats are back in power and “it’s time to prosecute some folk, we’ll be ready!” Around me, audience members nodded in agreement. Two people yelled, “Lock ’em up!”

The vibes were very different the next day in East Texas. Rather than frustration or outrage, the general feeling among Talarico’s fans in Tyler was something closer to desperate optimism. The crowd was younger, mostly white and Latino. Many of them had discovered Talarico, like Crockett, in clips on social media; some hadn’t heard of him until his conversation with The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert, who claimed earlier this month that CBS had refused to air the interview at the request of the Federal Communications Commission.

Onstage, Talarico stuck to an earnest, aspirational message about love and economic populism. “It’s not left versus right; it’s top versus bottom,” he said, an oft-repeated line that has helped him earn the endorsement of major progressive groups. Within seven minutes, Talarico was quoting scripture and reminding his audience that human beings are called to care for their neighbors. At the end of his speech, he quoted the late singer-songwriter John Prine: “‘I really love America. I just don’t know how to get there anymore.’” Although parts of Talarico’s speech occasionally verged on corny—“Hate can’t teach a child to read!” he said at one point—people seemed grateful for the change in tone.

Brad Ingram, who wore a cowboy hat and held his fiancée’s pink purse while she posed for a photo with Talarico, told me he’d voted for Trump before but wouldn’t do it again. “Being a fellow Christian, love is central to what we believe,” he said. “Republicans and the MAGA movement have gotten away from that.” A group of nine women in their 40s had come to the rally together; many of their husbands were Trump supporters, they told me, but they themselves wanted a change, and they were hopeful that Talarico might reach some of their family members. One woman told me that her conservative teenage son had recently called Talarico his “GOAT,” short for the “greatest of all time.” Talarico’s “message of hope is appealing to everybody, because everybody’s just tired of the negativity,” Faye Comte, one of the women in the group, told me.

Most of Talarico’s fans liked—or even loved—Jasmine Crockett. But they’d chosen him because they appreciate the way he talks about his faith, and because they believe that he’d have a better chance of appealing to Texans in a general election. Part of that is because of Crockett’s identity; some people I interviewed told me that they weren’t confident that Texans were ready to elect a Black woman to the Senate. But it’s also about Talarico’s appeal to kindness and respect—an easier sell for some of these voters than Crockett’s bombast. Patrick Bonds, an 84-year-old Vietnam veteran, cried as he explained to me that he’d voted Republican all his life but that Trump was “ruining this country.” Bonds is voting for Talarico, he said, because “his thinking is more like me; his behavior is more like me. The way he holds himself is more like me.”

For Talarico, bipartisan appeal is kind of the whole ball game. In his first election to the Texas state House, he flipped a Republican district. Now he’s positioning his Senate campaign as a safe space for independents, moderates, and voters with Trump-shaped regrets. Even his stump speech contains an invitation: “If you have voted for Democrats, but you’re tired of Democratic politicians always folding, you have a place in this campaign,” he told the crowd in Tyler. “And if you voted for Donald Trump, but you are fed up with the extremism and the corruption in our government, you also have a place in this campaign.”

Read: The White House urges Republicans to ignore Trump’s diversions

It could help Talarico that the Texas Republican primary is its own elaborate mess. The longtime Republican Senator John Cornyn, who is unpopular with the MAGA crowd, is running against Attorney General Ken Paxton, who carries substantial personal baggage. Paxton was impeached (and acquitted) over allegations of bribery and corruption, including using his position to benefit a donor; charged with felony securities fraud (prosecutors dropped the charges after Paxton agreed to serve 100 hours of community service); and, more recently, accused by his wife of having an affair. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is working to reelect Cornyn, is airing a new ad calling Paxton a “wife-cheater and fraud.”

If Paxton is the Republican nominee, Democrats could have a decent shot at winning a Senate seat in Texas for the first time since 1988. At a polling place in Arlington, a purple suburb west of Dallas, I met several Texans who’d previously voted for Trump but who were casting their primary ballot for Talarico. Two more told me that if Paxton becomes the nominee, they will seriously consider voting for Talarico.

All of this is exactly what Talarico is hoping to hear. When I told him about those interviews in Arlington, he didn’t seem surprised. A lot of voters “are looking for a home in this crazy political environment,” he told me. “I’m over here waving my hand like I’ve done this before. I’ve actually built this coalition. I’ve been able to win difficult races.” Later, I asked him whether he’d ever watched Crockett speak and considered being sharper or louder with his criticism of Trump and the MAGA movement. “In my experience,” he replied, “real strength is sometimes quieter.”

Now for the betting odds. Early voting in Texas has exploded this year, sending strategists and pollsters into overdrive analyzing county-by-county demographic data. More votes have been cast after nine days of early voting than at this point in both the 2024 and 2020 presidential primaries. Still, it’s hard to say what such a surge means for either candidate. It’s possible that Tuesday’s results will be close enough to prompt a runoff election in late May. Some recent polls have Crockett and Talarico neck and neck. Others show significant gaps: A survey published this week had Crockett ahead by 12 points. In response, Talarico’s team released an internal poll showing him up by four.

Crockett has not run a conventional campaign. Instead of traditional rallies, she has opted for small gatherings and quick events. She has an enormous social-media following but a small on-the-ground operation that, some Texas operatives told me, is run almost entirely by Crockett herself. None of this means she can’t—or won’t—win. But it does suggest that if Crockett is the Democratic nominee, she might have trouble scaling up for a statewide campaign. On Talarico’s side, the problem isn’t resources—he has raised and spent much more than Crockett so far. It’s the fact that many Texas voters are still learning his name.

In the end, maybe all of this effort will add up to nothing. Countless Democratic candidates with national buzz have been here before and lost—sometimes spectacularly. But when Texans head to the polls on Tuesday, we will probably learn something about the kind of fighter that Democrats are craving one year into the second Trump presidency: a firebrand famous for being her own kind of “top-notch hater,” or an earnest preacher-in-training focused mostly on the power of love.

Last fall, an informational sign vanished from a patch of grass across from Chevy Chase Circle in Northwest Washington, DC. The placard—installed in 2022 by the National Park Service after much discussion—described the career of Sen. Francis Newlands, who represented Nevada in Congress for a quarter century and championed irrigation projects in the American west.

In early November, without any announcement from the Park Service, neighbors noticed that the sign was gone. “It just disappeared one day,” said Stephanie Rigaux, a local historian whose Facebook post about the removal is one of the few records of the incident.

The Interior Department, which runs the National Park Service, wouldn’t answer my questions about what happened to the sign. But the mystery doesn’t seem hard to crack. It was evidently a casualty of Donald Trump’s campaign to bar the government from presenting American history in “a negative light.”

The timeline is instructive. In 1932, Congress approved naming a fountain in the circle, which sits on federal land, after Newlands. Ninety years later, in the wake of a nationwide racial reckoning, the Biden administration’s National Park Service installed the offending sign in an effort to add some context regarding Newlands’ legacy. It noted that in addition to his legislative accomplishments, Newlands was a white supremacist who advocated denying citizenship and voting rights to people of color.

Then last March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order instructing government agencies to purge “improper ideology” and “divisive narratives” from federal lands and museums and to ensure that those sites are “uplifting.” The Trump administration appears to have determined that the Newlands sign violated that policy.

Chevy Chase Circle is far from alone. Last May, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum moved to implement Trump’s order, directing the Park Service to scrutinize more than 400 national parks, monuments, battlefields, and historic sites—as well as federally controlled DC green space—for insufficiently patriotic material. The Park Service is removing and altering signs, exhibits, and other media deemed to be “non-conformant” with Trump’s wishes. So far the department has reviewed more than 2,000 pieces of media, according to a person with knowledge of the effort, and has ordered the removal or alteration of at least a few hundred signs and exhibits.

The Interior Department is keeping the precise figures under wraps, and it declined to provide specifics about why the material being targeted is objectionable. “Because this work is still underway, there is no finalized or comprehensive list of changes, and it would be premature to speculate about specific wordage, images, or exhibit content that may or may not be revised,” a spokesperson said.

The Trump administration, that is, is attempting to remove public information in secret.

“It’s left everybody who is concerned about this in the dark,” Alan Spears, senior director at the non-profit National Parks Conservation Association, told Mother Jones. “There is no transparency. We don’t know where these sign removals are going to happen.”

As Trump’s clandestine censorship campaign proceeds, displays that focus on persecution and environmental degradation have become particular targets. But the Park Service is also planning to remove signs that merely acknowledge the existence of controversy or conflict.

At Fort Laramie National Historic Site in Wyoming, the National Park Service plans to alter or remove a sign, titled “A Father’s Grief … A Soldier’s Honor,” that sits alongside a burial marker for Mni Akuwin, the daughter of Lakota chief Spotted Tail. The placard consists mostly of quotes from Army Colonel Henry Maynadier describing a funeral service he arranged at the fort for Mni Akuwin, who had died a few months earlier. The elaborate funeral, which Maynadier reported had moved Spotted Tail to tears, likely helped secure a peace deal with the tribe.

A Park Service official told me that the sign had been flagged by the Interior Department due to a line it quotes from a letter Maynadier sent his wife. Maynadier wrote that after the funeral service, “I can never be willing to see these people, swindled, ill-treated and abused as they have been.” (You can read the full text of the sign here.)

Charles Rankin, a longtime editor and historian of the American West who has written about Mni Akuwin’s funeral, finds the decision galling. “That signage celebrates the fact that these people, over her grave, came together,” Rankin said in an interview. “It celebrates reconciliation. How stupid can we get?”

At Montana’s Glacier National Park, the Park Service is preparing to remove signs telling visitors why the eponymous glaciers are shrinking, as well as placards about declining air quality. The agency has taken down a season of a podcast, called Headwaters, that was produced by park employees. And Interior has ordered employees to remove or alter a film about the park shown to visitors. Written guidance from the department said the changes are necessary due to “scientific inaccuraries [sic]” in the film, but it did not specify what is supposedly incorrect.

Glacier is also removing a sign that attributes a sharp increase in wildfires in the American west to “hotter and drier conditions,” as well as a sign that describes the “controversy” over the hunting of wolves. The department did not explain those decisions.

The department was more forthcoming with its reasoning for replacing a different sign at Glacier. That placard, titled “Blame It on the Grain,” describes the construction of a dam that created a reservoir in the eastern part of the park to support farming. “Rename it something else,” Interior guidance sent to the park says. ”’Blame’ has negative tone to it, when the actual reality is the dam was created to help support American Agriculture and feed America’s growing population.”

Some of the administration’s efforts to implement Trump’s order—such as the removal of exhibits in Philadelphia about people enslaved by George Washington and of panels citing the effects of climate change at Acadia National Park and Fort Sumter—have already drawn attention and outrage. On February 16, federal District Court Judge Cynthia Rufe ordered the Park Service to restore the Philadelphia exhibits. Rufe said the removal violated agreements requiring the city’s consent, and compared the Trump administration to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984. (After restoration began, a federal appeals court gave the administration a partial stay, freezing the exhibits as they are while the court considers the case.)

Still, NPS is moving ahead with sign removals at an industrial scale. The process, launched with Trump’s executive order in March, accelerated in May when Burgum issued a memo implementing the president’s plans at the Park Service and other Interior agencies. The memo instructed NPS to “remove content” that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).” Burgum also ordered the removal of information regarding natural features of the American landscape if it “emphasizes matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance or grandeur of said natural feature.” 

Burgum did not elaborate on that latter instruction. But current and former parks employees described it as ill-advised, and baffling, since applying it literally would require removal of many signs providing basic scientific information. At Muir Woods National Monument in California, for example, the agency recently covered a sign explaining how carbon emissions harm redwoods. And Big Bend National Park in Texas plans to remove signs related to geology, prehistoric times, and fossils, according to the Washington Post.

What remains might not be especially enlightening. “You don’t really need an exhibit at a historic viewpoint to say, “Hey, that really looks good,” said Bill Hayden, Glacier’s former head of interpretation. 

In June, Park Service staffers across the country were instructed to post QR codes and signs encouraging visitors to report any material they felt should be altered. Burgum also ordered the heads of national parks units to submit for review their own lists of signs or other media that might run afoul of Trump’s executive order. The Interior Department sent back decisions in September and then made additional rulings in January. 

Current and past parks employees derided these commands. “I think it’s stupid,” said Hayden. “The goal was to explain the nature and cultural resources to the visiting public—and a lot of those concepts and ideas are not just readily apparent to someone stopping on the side of the road and looking at something.”

Responding to widespread criticism, an Interior spokesperson said that the department’s review “is not about removing history or advancing any single political ideology. It is a collaborative process designed to ensure that the full and accurate history of America is presented, grounded in professional standards and inclusive of multiple perspectives, including those of tribal nations.”

But Park Service employees, who spoke to Mother Jones on the condition of anonymity, described this process, as it has played out nationally, as haphazard, top-down, and far from collaborative.

“It’s childishly unprofessional,” said one current NPS employee involved with producing public material. “It’s not like a serious engagement with the process, or an attempt to educate the public about science or our world.”

Employees said the Interior Department’s instructions are vague, leaving senior career officials, who in many cases are worried about their jobs amid mass firings of government workers, to decide how much self-censorship to engage in. 

The department’s demands “paralyzed a lot of the parks, because there was no guidance,” one employee said. 

According to material obtained by Mother Jones, some park units, like Yellowstone, submitted few or no signs for review by Interior Department officials in Washington. But some other park superintendents generated extensive lists of potentially non-compliant signs. Department officials designated many of those submissions for removal, often without explaining their reasoning, park employees said.

Mother Jones obtained a spreadsheet summarizing the Interior Department’s review of submissions from 33 sites in NPS’ Intermountain Region, which includes some of the most-visited parks. Of 81 submissions, the department said 46 should be altered or removed. The document does not include the department’s reasoning beyond declaring the items to be in “non-conformance” with Burgum’s order. Those include the signs slated for removal at Glacier, the Fort Laramie sign, the Big Bend signage related to dinosaurs and geology, and a panel at Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park describing the role of a cavalry captain who explored the region in an 1870 massacre of Blackfeet Native Americans.

Park service employees described the sign removals as part of a string of interference from Washington that has crushed NPS morale.

“We are being undermined by a clown show of greedy billionaire priorities that are not of service to the parks or country,” one employee said. 

A former NPS employee who was laid off last year characterized the department’s management style as “bullying and demoralizing,” carried out “in an idiotic and not thought-through way.”

The Park Service had lost around a quarter of its workforce by July of last year, due to firings and other causes, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. And attrition continues as the agency struggles to replace departing staff, employees said. 

The Interior Department meanwhile is moving to increase its control over various park service communications. The department has shifted hundreds of employees in public outreach jobs into what it calls a “Consolidated Office of Communications.” Last month, it imposed “a strategic pause” on website updates by NPS staffers as it installed a system in which department officials sign off on new online content. And it recently announced that the department’s press staff will review publication of all social media produced by national parks, according to employees and internal material shared with Mother Jones. “Social media needs to be reviewed and published by someone trained and educated and aligned with NPS and the department as a whole,” Elizabeth Peace, a senior public affairs specialist at the Interior Department, said during a January 15 call with Park Service employees.

NPS employees have even received directions on how to respond to questions about sign removals. Internal guidance instructs them not to “reference media stories, leaked documents or internal reviews”; suggests they “redirect calmly and consistently”; and says that they “do NOT need to engage in conversation about individual signs or parks, which signs are from [Burgum’s order] vs weather or damage. The comms team will take those.”

The department’s communications team did not answer my questions about individual signs and parks. In response to a detailed list of queries, a spokesperson wrote: “Mother Jones is a failing liberal blog that has this story completely wrong. This blog is too small and insignificant to waste our time correcting them when we are focused on implementing the agenda of President Trump – the most iconic and accomplished President in the history of our great nation.” 

The iconic president’s war on park signs isn’t slowing down. Many of the removals the Interior Department has ordered in colder locations will not be executed until spring. In guidance sent to NPS employees in January, Burgum said the department is still reviewing material and instructed parks “to work with regional offices to review next steps for their non-conformant media items.” Interior Department officials have recently visited sites throughout the Park Service’s Washington, DC, region, according to an NPS employee, generating worries they will demand additional alterations.

This chaotic process, current and former agency employees said, contrasts with the deliberative efforts through which the signs and exhibits were originally created. The Newlands sign, for instance, was installed in 2022, the culmination of a multi-year project. Its design and brief narrative were influenced by an expert group convened in 2020, following nearly a decade of debate over public calls to rename the fountain.

The sign disappeared, however, without notice. The removal came during the government shutdown last year, when federal employees were furloughed, raising the question of who actually dislodged it. An NPS employee told Mother Jones that Frank Lands, the Park Service’s deputy director for operations—the top career employee at the agency—personally removed the sign to comply with White House wishes.

Lands, whom I contacted directly, didn’t respond to my questions about this claim. An Interior Department spokesperson said only that the agency “does not comment on specific personnel,” and wouldn’t even confirm that the department was responsible for the sign’s removal.

That is how the United States government is implementing a presidential directive to “restore Federal sites dedicated to history.” The administration appears to have removed a carefully created piece of public information—with no announcement or explanation for why Americans should not be informed that a prominent US senator was a racist.

Now, where the sign once stood, all that remains are two small holes in the ground.

One in five Americans who voted for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election now regret their vote, a new Navigator Research survey released on Thursday found. That marks the highest number the polling outlet has registered since it began asking the question.

The share of Trump voters who have buyer’s remorse is up 6 percentage points since early February, when it was 14%, according to Navigator’s data. 

Twenty-three percent of Republicans who describe themselves as “non-MAGA” regret their vote, as do 13% of self-described MAGA Republicans, who should be the most fervent of Trump’s followers.

The increasing share of people who regret backing Trump in 2024 should be a warning sign for the Republican Party, which cannot afford to have a depressed base going into the midterm elections.

Polls show that Democrats lead by around 5 points on the generic ballot, which asks voters which party they’d like to see control Congress. If much of the Republicans base stays home, it would turn what’s already projected to be a bad night for the party into a catastrophic one.

Other data shows that Trump regret may be playing a role in the GOP’s languishing poll numbers.

Media outlet The Argument found that a growing number of voters who voted for Trump in 2024 are lying to pollsters, saying they either didn’t vote that year or voted for Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. The Argument chalked that up to voters having regrets about Trump.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that Democrats’ lead in the generic ballot has grown to a whopping 11 points among voters who say they are certain to vote, signaling a massive enthusiasm edge for the party.

Regret about voting for Trump comes as people say he has not made the economy better, which he promised to do on the campaign trail. It also comes as voters say they disapprove of Trump’s tariffs, his violent immigration crackdown, and his handling of the government’s files on accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. 

Republicans are privately sounding alarm bells, worrying that Trump’s dismal approval rating, among other things, will cost them not only the House but possibly even the Senate.

In fact, Republicans are even worried about losing Texas’ Senate race. In the primary, Democratic turnout is swamping that for Republicans, in a sign that the enthusiasm gap is impacting voter behavior. (One caveat here is that primary turnout doesn’t necessarily predict general election outcomes. Still, polling suggests Democrats stand a chance in November based on who wins both the Democratic and Republican primaries on Tuesday.)

Ultimately, Trump is a very unpopular president, and the coalition that propelled him back into the White House is falling apart.

With roughly eight months to go before this year’s midterm elections, nothing he is currently doing is likely to help his party, whether that be declaring the economy in spite of Americans’ struggles, continuing to illegally institute tariffs that Americans hate, or hiding the Epstein files.

November is coming, and it’s shaping up to be ugly for Trump and the GOP.