Author: ProPublica

A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency, and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term. In private speeches delivered in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions. He said the plans are a response to a “Marxist...

In July 2016, warships from more than two dozen nations gathered off the coasts of Hawaii and Southern California to join the United States in the world’s largest naval exercise. The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and others sent hundreds of destroyers, aircraft carriers and warplanes. They streamed in long lines across the ocean, symbols of power and prestige. The USS Freedom had its own special place within the armada. It was one of a new class of vessels known as littoral combat ships. The U.S. Navy had billed them as technical marvels — small, fast and...

Central Wisconsin’s Clark County is home to more dairy farms than any other county in the state, which bills itself as America’s Dairyland. Its identity is so tied to the dairy industry that a 16-foot-tall, black-and-white talking Holstein stands outside downtown Neillsville, the county seat. To corral the cows, milk them and clear their manure at these dairy farms — the dirty, dangerous work that makes this multibillion-dollar industry go — farm owners here and across Wisconsin rely on a labor force that they know is largely undocumented. But the state makes it almost impossible for workers to have...

Nobody working to bring a $346 million Microsoft project to rural Virginia expected to find graves in the woods. But in a cluster of yucca plants and cedar that needed to be cleared, surveyors happened upon a cemetery. The largest of the stones bore the name Stephen Moseley, “died December 3, 1930,” in a layer of cracking plaster. Another stone, in near perfect condition and engraved with a branch on the top, belonged to Stephen’s toddler son, Fred, who died in 1906. “This is not as bad as it sounds,” an engineering consultant wrote in March 2014 to Microsoft...

Ever since claims of election fraud arose in 2020, Wisconsin has seen its share of quixotic attempts to taint the presidential results. A group of phony electors tried to claim the state’s electoral votes for Donald Trump. Wisconsin’s top lawmaker launched a yearlong inquiry led by a lawyer spewing election fraud theories. And its courts heard numerous suits challenging the integrity of the 2020 election and the people administering it. All those efforts failed, sometimes spectacularly. But on a more fundamental level, the election deniers succeeded. They helped change the way Election Day will look in 2022 for crucial...

Voters in Sweden recently gave a leading role to a far-right party with neo-Nazi roots. Italy also put a party in power that has fascist origins. And of course, in the United States, one party has increasingly embraced election denialism and attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the electoral process. To try to understand what, exactly, is happening, we talked with Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego who studies democracies across the world. Her book How Civil Wars Start has become a bestseller. Rather than talk about the prospects for political violence, we discussed...