Holidays coming, will be posting again next week...
November 27, 2024
Ceasefire
Ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah militants has begun
By NPR Staff
A ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah went into effect at 4 a.m. Wednesday local time. Israel agreed Tuesday to the ceasefire to stop the war it has been fighting with the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon for more than a year.
"The Security Cabinet approved the United States' proposal for a ceasefire agreement in Lebanon this evening, with a majority of 10 ministers in favor and one opposed," the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement late Tuesday.
The announcement came during some of the heaviest fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in months, with Israeli airstrikes hitting Beirut and Israeli troops pushing deeper into southern Lebanon on Tuesday, as Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel.
President Biden welcomed the news, saying, "This is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities."
Hezbollah — a militant and political force in Lebanon backed by Iran and listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S., Israel and several other countries — started launching rockets into Israel a day after the Palestinian militant group Hamas led an attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, setting off the war in Gaza.
Israel has launched extensive airstrikes across Lebanon, including one in September that killed Hezbollah's longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah. Israel also sent ground troops into southern Lebanon, saying it was fighting to push the militants away from the border so that thousands of evacuated residents who fled Hezbollah's rockets in northern Israel could return safely.
Almost 14 months of the Israeli military campaign in Lebanon has killed more than 3,700 people, many of them civilians, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, and close to 1 million people have been displaced across Lebanon, according to the United Nations.
In northern Israel, about 80 people, including soldiers and civilians, have been killed in the fighting and about 60,000 residents have evacuated since October 2023, according to the Israeli government.
Before the Cabinet vote, Netanyahu laid out his reasons for supporting the ceasefire, including saying that Israel has dismantled much of Hezbollah's fighting capabilities and killed many senior officials. But he warned that Israel retains the right to attack Hezbollah again if necessary.
"In full coordination with the United States, we are maintaining full military freedom of action," Netanyahu said in his TV address. "If Hezbollah violates the agreement or attempts to rearm, we will strike."
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati welcomed the ceasefire, thanking the United States and France for helping facilitate the deal.
"This understanding, which outlined a roadmap for the cessation of hostilities, was reviewed by me this evening, and I consider it a key step towards establishing calm and stability in Lebanon and enabling the return of displaced people to their homes and towns," Mikati said. "It also contributes to promoting regional stability."
Speaking in the White House Rose Garden Tuesday, Biden explained that over the next 60 days, the Lebanese army and state security forces will take control of their territory, and Israel will gradually withdraw. The United States, France and other countries will work to help ensure the agreement is implemented, but no U.S. troops will be deployed in southern Lebanon, he said.
The Lebanese military — which is separate from Hezbollah and has tried to stay out of the fight with Israel — and a United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon are expected to deploy thousands of soldiers in southern Lebanon, as an international panel monitors compliance by the different sides, The Associated Press reported.
But concerns in Israel and Lebanon remain about how long the ceasefire can hold and whether civilians can be kept safe.
"This agreement is not good because it does not require the Lebanese army and government to disarm Hezbollah," Avigdor Lieberman, an opponent of Netanyahu who is a lawmaker in Israeli parliament, said Monday before the vote.
"It's going to be difficult for Netanyahu to sell this" to the northern Israeli evacuees, Amos Harel, a former nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and a journalist at Israel's Haaretz newspaper.
And the deal left questions about what happens next for the war in Gaza.
Biden said the U.S. would make a push in the coming days with Turkey, Egypt, Qatar and others to reach a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza.
He also said the United States remains ready to conclude an agreement with Saudi Arabia that would normalize relations with Israel and include a security pact and economic assurances, with a pathway for a Palestinian state.
Big cuts...
Trump is promising big cuts. Impoundment is one axe he wants to wield
Franco Ordoñez
President-elect Donald Trump is promising to slash through what he says is significant waste in the American government.
One way he plans to do this is through impoundment. That's when a president effectively holds back money that Congress has approved for a specific purpose.
That plan is raising alarm bells across Washington because it would challenge the traditional separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government.
"I am cautiously optimistic. But I'm also worried," said Eloise Pasachoff, a Georgetown Law professor who has written about the issue.
There's a law aimed at stopping impoundment
Congress has the power of the purse. After funding disputes with President Richard Nixon, Congress passed a law in 1974 called the Impoundment Control Act that requires presidents to spend money as Congress directs.
Trump has said he plans to challenge that law. "We're going to bring back presidential impoundment authority, which nobody knows what it is," Trump said at a rally this spring. "But it allows the president to go out and cut things and save a fortune for our country. Things that make no sense."
Pasachoff said the law is a key check on presidential power. "This is the way the system is supposed to work," she said. "I believe in the rule of law. I believe in government institutions doing what they're set up to do. … I'm also worried because these are complicated times."
Trump says the impoundment law is unconstitutional
Trump has argued the law is unconstitutional, and his allies have drafted plans to expand his presidential powers.
One of those allies is Russ Vought, Trump's nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Vought held the job in Trump's first term too.
"I believe that the loss of impoundment authority — which 200 years of presidents enjoyed — was the original sin in eliminating the ability from a branch on branch to control spending," Vought said this year in an interview on Fox Business. "And we're going to need to bring that back."
Vought is not the only one in Trump's orbit who wants to target the law. So do Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Trump put in charge of an effort called the Department of Government Efficiency — or DOGE.
If Musk recommends closing a specific agency or Ramaswamy suggests firing a percentage of the federal workforce, they would not be able to do that without congressional approval, said Andrew Rudalevige, a professor who studies the presidency at Bowdoin College.
"To the extent that you could try to implement it unilaterally, you would need some kind of authority to impound — to just not do what Congress has said you're supposed to do," he said. "It'll lead pretty directly to constitutional conflict, but that, I think, is the only way that you could impose unilaterally presidential wishes in this area."
What will the courts say about impoundment?
Trump tested his impoundment authority in his first term, when he briefly blocked aid to Ukraine as he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open an investigation of Joe Biden and his family.
Congress objected, and Trump was later impeached over related issues. But the impoundment matter was not litigated in the courts.
This time, the debate is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court, said Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston.
Blackman, who has filed briefs with the Supreme Court supporting Trump, says the court has taken a robust view of presidential power.
He cited the court's decisions on the Trump immunity case and a president's power to remove officials.
"And maybe the most relevant data point is that Chief Justice John Roberts worked in the Reagan White House," Blackman said. "I think he'd be very sympathetic to the arguments that were so influential in his earlier career. So I think Trump might actually have a shot at this one."
Fossilized poops
Over 500 fossilized poops show how dinosaurs came to rule the Earth
Geoff Brumfiel
Researchers have conducted what could be the largest study ever of dinosaur poop. The findings shed new light on how dinosaur's diets allowed them to dominate the planet.
The analysis of hundreds of fossilized droppings (plus a little bit of petrified vomit) from roughly 230 million years ago shows that dinosaurs persevered because they were not picky eaters.
"The first dinosaur ancestors were opportunistic," says Martin Qvarnström, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, who led the study. "They were eating insects, fish, plants — everything that they came across."
Ultimately, he says, over millions of years, that dietary flexibility allowed them to rule the Earth.
Rise of the dinosaurs
The end of the dinosaurs is well known: A giant asteroid came down and wiped them out. But how did they get their start?
"We know a lot about the life and extinction of the dinosaurs, but not so much the rise of the dinosaurs," Qvarnström says.
At the beginning of the Triassic period, dinosaurs were one of many lizards roaming the Earth. "Most of the animals in the ecosystem were the various relatives of crocodiles," Qvarnström says.
But by the end of the Triassic, around 200 million years ago, things had changed quite a bit. Dinosaurs became the dominant species, and other animals took a back seat. There were various theories as to why, but no smoking gun, like an asteroid, to explain their rise.
Enter Qvarnström, who specializes in dinosaur droppings. A few years ago, he and his colleague Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki were analyzing a small number of the droppings, known as coprolites. They started noticing little traces of what the dinosaurs had eaten inside slices of the samples.
"As it turned out, all of our samples contained undigested food residues," he says.
A fish scale here, an insect there — each dropping was a tiny window into what was on the menu. With enough poop, he realized, it might be possible to reconstruct the entire food web from the period when dinosaurs rose to power. He and his colleagues assembled a collection of samples from the Polish Basin in Central Europe. They gathered all the fossilized poop they could, from dinosaurs and other animals as well. They ended up with over 500 samples.
"That's a lot of poop," Qvarnström says.
The poop was exhaustively analyzed by a research team of more than a dozen scientists using advanced techniques, and even a synchrotron particle accelerator, to probe each piece of excrement down to the molecular level.
The results were published this week in the journal Nature. They show that while other lizards at the time were focused on one type of plant or other food source, dinosaurs were eating lots of stuff.
A shifting climate
And that mattered, because during the late Triassic, a giant supercontinent called Pangea was breaking apart. Oceans were forming, volcanoes erupted violently and the climate underwent dramatic shifts. "Dinosaurs were really quick to adapt to the new conditions, whereas the previous more specialized animals had a tougher time," Qvarnström says. Over the course of around 30 million years, he says, dinosaurs became the dominant species on land.
Lawrence Tanner, a professor of environmental science at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., says interest in fossilized coprolites goes way back.
"People have collected and classified coprolites for decades, even hundreds of years," he says. "But no one has studied them in this detail before."
Tanner, who was not involved in the study, applauds the new work, but says it looks at only poo from what is modern-day Central Europe. "What we need now is to try to see if we can see the same sorts of transitions between animal groups at other locations," he says.
In other words, scientists need to study even more fossilized poo.
Qvarnström says he's hoping to have a long career that will remain, at least sometimes, focused on coprolites. "I think it's really cool and an underestimated part of paleontology," he says.
Surprisingly smooth....
Hubble and Webb probe surprisingly smooth disk around Vega
by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
In the 1997 movie "Contact," adapted from Carl Sagan's 1985 novel, the lead character scientist Ellie Arroway (played by actor Jodi Foster) takes a space-alien-built wormhole ride to the star Vega. She emerges inside a snowstorm of debris encircling the star—but no obvious planets are visible.
It looks like the filmmakers got it right.
A team of astronomers at the University of Arizona, Tucson used NASA's Hubble and James Webb space telescopes for an unprecedented in-depth look at the nearly 100-billion-mile-diameter debris disk encircling Vega.
"Between the Hubble and Webb telescopes, you get this very clear view of Vega. It's a mysterious system because it's unlike other circumstellar disks we've looked at," said Andras Gáspár of the University of Arizona, a member of the research team. "The Vega disk is smooth, ridiculously smooth."
The big surprise to the research team is that there is no obvious evidence for one or more large planets plowing through the face-on disk like snow tractors. "It's making us rethink the range and variety among exoplanet systems," said Kate Su of the University of Arizona, lead author of the paper presenting the Webb findings.
Webb sees the infrared glow from a disk of particles the size of sand swirling around the sizzling blue-white star that is 40 times brighter than our sun. Hubble captures an outer halo of this disk, with particles no bigger than the consistency of smoke that are reflecting starlight.
The distribution of dust in the Vega debris disk is layered because the pressure of starlight pushes out the smaller grains faster than larger grains. "Different types of physics will locate different-sized particles at different locations," said Schuyler Wolff of the University of Arizona team, lead author of the paper presenting the Hubble findings. "The fact that we're seeing dust particle sizes sorted out can help us understand the underlying dynamics in circumstellar disks."
The Vega disk does have a subtle gap, around 60 AU (astronomical units) from the star (twice the distance of Neptune from the sun), but otherwise is very smooth all the way in until it is lost in the glare of the star. This shows that there are no planets down at least to Neptune-mass circulating in large orbits, as in our solar system, say the researchers.
"We're seeing in detail how much variety there is among circumstellar disks, and how that variety is tied into the underlying planetary systems. We're finding a lot out about the planetary systems—even when we can't see what might be hidden planets," added Su. "There's still a lot of unknowns in the planet-formation process, and I think these new observations of Vega are going to help constrain models of planet formation."
Disk diversity
Newly forming stars accrete material from a disk of dust and gas that is the flattened remnant of the cloud from which they are forming. In the mid-1990s Hubble found disks around many newly forming stars. The disks are likely sites of planet formation, migration, and sometimes destruction.
Fully matured stars like Vega have dusty disks enriched by ongoing "bumper car" collisions among orbiting asteroids and debris from evaporating comets. These are primordial bodies that can survive up to the present 450-million-year age of Vega (our sun is approximately ten times older than Vega).
Dust within our solar system (seen as the Zodiacal light) is also replenished by minor bodies ejecting dust at a rate of about 10 tons per second. This dust is shoved around by planets. This provides a strategy for detecting planets around other stars without seeing them directly—just by witnessing the effects they have on the dust.
"Vega continues to be unusual," said Wolff. "The architecture of the Vega system is markedly different from our own solar system where giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn are keeping the dust from spreading the way it does with Vega."
For comparison, there is a nearby star, Fomalhaut, which is about the same distance, age and temperature as Vega. But Fomalhaut's circumstellar architecture is greatly different from Vega's. Fomalhaut has three nested debris belts.
Planets are suggested as shepherding bodies around Fomalhaut that gravitationally constrict the dust into rings, though no planets have been positively identified yet. "Given the physical similarity between the stars of Vega and Fomalhaut, why does Fomalhaut seem to have been able to form planets and Vega didn't?" said team member George Rieke of the University of Arizona, a member of the research team.
"What's the difference? Did the circumstellar environment, or the star itself, create that difference? What's puzzling is that the same physics is at work in both," added Wolff.
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First clue to possible planetary construction yards
Located in the summer constellation Lyra, Vega is one of the brightest stars in the northern sky. Vega is legendary because it offered the first evidence for material orbiting a star—presumably the stuff for making planets—as potential abodes of life.
This was first hypothesized by Immanuel Kant in 1775. But it took over 200 years before the first observational evidence was collected in 1984. A puzzling excess of infrared light from warm dust was detected by NASA's IRAS (Infrared Astronomy Satellite). It was interpreted as a shell or disk of dust extending twice the orbital radius of Pluto from the star.
In 2005, NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope mapped out a ring of dust around Vega. This was further confirmed by observations using submillimeter telescopes including Caltech's Submillimeter Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and also the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, and ESA's (European Space Agency's) Herschel Space Telescope, but none of these telescopes could see much detail.
"The Hubble and Webb observations together provide so much more detail that they are telling us something completely new about the Vega system that nobody knew before," said Rieke.
Two papers by Wolff and Su from the Arizona team are available on the preprint arXiv server and will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Binary objects
Jupiter-mass binary objects hidden in Orion Nebula: Study explores new theory on their formation
by University of Sheffield
Deep within the Orion Nebula, researchers are one step closer to understanding how Jupiter-mass binary objects (JuMBOs) form—a longstanding mystery in astrophysics
In a recent study, Dr. Richard Parker and undergraduate student Jessica Diamond explore a new theory on the formation of these intriguing objects. Their article has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is currently available on the arXiv preprint server.
The recent discovery of JuMBOs in the Orion Nebula Cluster by the James Webb Space Telescope has intensified debate around the origin of free-floating, planetary-mass objects in star-forming regions.
Stars typically form from the gravitational collapse of gas clouds in space, with planets then forming from a disk of gas and dust surrounding the star. JuMBOs, however, are planetary-mass objects orbiting each other in a binary system. Conventional theories of how planets form do not predict that they would form in binary systems, and the JuMBO masses are too small for them to have formed in the same way as stars.
So how did they come into existence?
Dr. Parker and Diamond propose a theory involving "photoerosion." According to their research, JuMBOs initially form in a manner similar to stars, but their growth is inhibited by radiation from nearby massive OB stars. These OB stars emit intense blasts of radiation, which strip away hydrogen gas from the outer layers of the forming JuMBOs—a process known as photoerosion.
Dr. Parker and Diamond's work revisits an old theory for forming planetary-mass objects near very massive stars, but updates it in light of more recent observations that suggest most stars form as binary systems. Photoerosion provides an explanation for JuMBO formation, proposing that radiation from massive stars halts the growth of stellar binaries early.
While this adds insight into the formation of free-floating planetary masses, the true origin and nature of JuMBOs are still under investigation. Ongoing research and future observations will be crucial in confirming their existence and understanding their place in the cosmos.
Dark matter theory
New research challenges dark matter theory in galaxy formation
by Case Western Reserve University
The standard model for how galaxies formed in the early universe predicted that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would see dim signals from small, primitive galaxies. But data are not confirming the popular hypothesis that invisible dark matter helped the earliest stars and galaxies clump together.
Instead, the oldest galaxies are large and bright, in agreement with an alternate theory of gravity, according to new research from Case Western Reserve University published November 12 in The Astrophysical Journal. The results challenge astronomers' understanding of the early universe.
"What the theory of dark matter predicted is not what we see," said Case Western Reserve astrophysicist Stacy McGaugh, whose paper describes structure formation in the early universe.
McGaugh, professor and director of astronomy at Case Western Reserve, said instead of dark matter, modified gravity might have played a role. He says a theory known as MOND, for Modified Newtonian Dynamics, predicted in 1998 that structure formation in the early universe would have happened very quickly—much faster than the theory of Cold Dark Matter, known as lambda-CDM, predicted.
JWST was designed to answer some of the biggest questions in the universe, such as how and when did stars and galaxies form? Until it was launched in 2021, no telescope was able to see that deeply into the universe and far back in time.
Lambda-CDM predicts that galaxies were formed by gradual accretion of matter from small to larger structures, due to the extra gravity provided by the mass of dark matter.
"Astronomers invented dark matter to explain how you get from a very smooth early universe to big galaxies with lots of empty space between them that we see today," McGaugh said.
The small pieces assembled in larger and larger structures until galaxies formed. JWST should be able to see these small galaxy precursors as dim light.
"The expectation was that every big galaxy we see in the nearby universe would have started from these itty-bitty pieces," he said.
But even at higher and higher redshift—looking earlier and earlier into the evolution of the universe—the signals are larger and brighter than expected.
MOND predicted that the mass that becomes a galaxy assembled rapidly and initially expands outward with the rest of the universe. The stronger force of gravity slows, then reverses, the expansion, and the material collapses on itself to form a galaxy. In this theory, there is no dark matter at all.
The large and bright structures seen by JWST very early in the universe were predicted by MOND over a quarter century ago, McGaugh said. He co-authored the paper with former Case Western Reserve postdoctoral researcher Federico Lelli, now at INAF—Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory in Italy, and former graduate student Jay Franck. The fourth co-author is James Schombert from the University of Oregon.
"The bottom line is, 'I told you so,'" McGaugh said. "I was raised to think that saying that was rude, but that's the whole point of the scientific method: make predictions and then check which come true." He added that finding a theory compatible with both MOND and General Relativity is still a great challenge.
Pairs of white dwarf–main sequence binaries
First pairs of white dwarf–main sequence binaries discovered in clusters shine new light on stellar evolution
by University of Toronto
Astronomers at the University of Toronto (U of T) have discovered the first pairs of white dwarf and main sequence stars—"dead" remnants and "living" stars—in young star clusters. Described in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, this breakthrough offers new insights into an extreme phase of stellar evolution, and one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics.
Most stars exist in binary systems. In fact, nearly half of all stars similar to our sun have at least one companion star. These paired stars usually differ in size, with one star often being more massive than the other. Though one might be tempted to assume that these stars evolve at the same rate, more massive stars tend to live shorter lives and go through the stages of stellar evolution much faster than their lower mass companions.
In the stage where a star approaches the end of its life, it will expand to hundreds or thousands of times its original size during what we call the red giant or asymptotic giant branch phases. In close binary systems, this expansion is so dramatic that the dying star's outer layers can sometimes completely engulf its companion. Astronomers refer to this as the common envelope phase, as both stars become wrapped in the same material.
The common envelope phase remains one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics. Scientists have struggled to understand how stars spiraling together during this critical period affects the stars' subsequent evolution. This new research may solve this enigma.
Remnants left behind after stars die are compact objects called white dwarfs. Finding these post-common envelope systems that contain both a "dead" stellar remnant and a "living" star—otherwise known as white dwarf-main sequence binaries—provides a unique way to investigate this extreme phase of stellar evolution.
"Binary stars play a huge role in our universe," says lead author Steffani Grondin, a graduate student in the David A. Dunlap Department for Astronomy & Astrophysics at U of T. "This observational sample marks a key first step in allowing us to trace the full life cycles of binaries and will hopefully allow us to constrain the most mysterious phase of stellar evolution."
The researchers used machine learning to analyze data from three major sources: the European Space Agency's Gaia mission—a space telescope that has studied over a billion stars in our galaxy—along with observations from the 2MASS and Pan-STARRS1 surveys. This combined data set enabled the team to search for new binaries in clusters with characteristics resembling those of known white dwarf-main sequence pairs.
Even though these types of binary systems should be very common, they have been tricky to find, with only two candidates confirmed within clusters prior to this research. This research has the potential to increase that number to 52 binaries across 38 star clusters.
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Since the stars in these clusters are thought to have all formed at the same time, finding these binaries in open star clusters allows astronomers to constrain the age of the systems and to trace their full evolution from before the common envelope conditions to the observed binaries in their post-common envelope phase.
"The use of machine learning helped us to identify clear signatures for these unique systems that we weren't able to easily identify with just a few datapoints alone," says co-author Joshua Speagle, a professor in the David A. Dunlap Department for Astronomy & Astrophysics and Department of Statistical Sciences at U of T. "It also allowed us to automate our search across hundreds of clusters, a task that would have been impossible if we were trying to identify these systems manually."
"It really points out how much in our universe is hiding in plain sight—still waiting to be found," says co-author Maria Drout, also a professor in the David A. Dunlap Department for Astronomy & Astrophysics at U of T. "While there are many examples of this type of binary system, very few have the age constraints necessary to fully map their evolutionary history. While there is plenty of work left to confirm and fully characterize these systems, these results will have implications across multiple areas of astrophysics."
Binaries containing compact objects are also the progenitors of an extreme stellar explosion called a Type Ia supernova and the sort of merger that causes gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime that can be detected by instruments such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). As the team uses data from the Gemini, Keck and Magellan Telescopes to confirm and measure the properties of these binaries, this catalog will ultimately shed light on the many elusive transient phenomena in our universe.
Outlier
The Milky Way represents an outlier among similar galaxies, universe survey data shows
by Stanford University
For decades, scientists have used the Milky Way as a model for understanding how galaxies form. But three new studies raise questions about whether the Milky Way is truly representative of other galaxies in the universe.
"The Milky Way has been an incredible physics laboratory, including for the physics of galaxy formation and the physics of dark matter," said Risa Wechsler, the Humanities and Sciences Professor and professor of physics in the School of Humanities and Sciences. "But the Milky Way is only one system and may not be typical of how other galaxies formed. That's why it's critical to find similar galaxies and compare them."
To achieve that goal, Wechsler cofounded the Satellites Around Galactic Analogs (SAGA) Survey dedicated to comparing galaxies similar in mass to the Milky Way.
After more than a decade of scanning the universe, the SAGA team identified and studied 101 Milky Way-like analogs as a first step in its ongoing research. The results, published in three studies in the Nov. 18 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, reveal that, in many ways, the evolutionary history of the Milky Way is different from other comparable-sized galaxies.
"Our results show that we cannot constrain models of galaxy formation just to the Milky Way," said Wechsler, who is also professor of particle physics and astrophysics at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. "We have to look at that full distribution of similar galaxies across the universe."
In addition to Wechsler, the SAGA project is led by Professor Marla Geha at Yale University and Yao-Yuan Mao, Wechsler's former doctoral student at Stanford, now an assistant professor at the University of Utah. All three co-authored the newly published studies.
Dark matter mystery
The Milky Way is made of ordinary atomic matter, like hydrogen and iron. But ordinary matter only accounts for about 15% of matter in the universe. The remaining 85% is mysterious, invisible dark matter.
"No one knows what dark matter is made of," Wechsler said. "It doesn't interact with ordinary matter or light. There's probably dark matter running through you right now and you don't even know it."
Studies show that galaxies form inside massive regions of dark matter called halos. A dark matter halo may be invisible, but its enormous size creates a gravitational force strong enough to pull in ordinary matter from space and transform it into stars and galaxies.
A key objective of the SAGA Survey is to determine how dark matter halos impact galactic evolution. To begin, the SAGA team focused on galactic satellites—small galaxies that orbit much larger host galaxies like the Milky Way.
The researchers identified four of the Milky Way's brightest satellite galaxies, including the two biggest, known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC). The scientists then conducted a painstaking search for satellites around other host galaxies similar in mass. Using telescopic imaging, they eventually identified 378 satellite galaxies surrounding 101 Milky Way-like hosts.
"There's a reason no one ever tried this before," Wechsler said. "It's a really ambitious project. We had to use clever techniques to sort those 378 orbiting galaxies from thousands of objects in the background. It's a real needle-in-the-haystack problem."
New findings
In one of the three new SAGA studies, researchers found that the number of satellites per host galaxy ranges from 0 to 13. The Milky Way's four observable satellites fit within that range.
The study also revealed that host galaxies with large satellites, similar in size to the Milky Way's massive LMC and SMC galaxies, tend to have more satellites overall. But the Milky Way actually hosts fewer satellites than similar galaxies, making it an outlier among its peers.
A second study focused on star formation in satellite galaxies—an important metric for understanding how galaxies evolve. The study found that in a typical host galaxy, smaller satellites are still forming stars. But in the Milky Way, star formation only occurs in the massive LMC and SMC satellites. All the smaller satellites have stopped forming stars.
"Now we have a puzzle," Wechsler said. "What in the Milky Way caused these small, lower-mass satellites to have their star formation quenched? Perhaps, unlike a typical host galaxy, the Milky Way has a unique combination of older satellites that have ceased star formation and newer, active ones—the LMC and SMC—that only recently fell into the Milky Way's dark matter halo."
The study also found that star formation typically stops in satellite galaxies located closer to the host, perhaps because of the gravitational pull of dark matter halos in and around the host galaxy.
"To me, the frontier is figuring out what dark matter is doing on scales smaller than the Milky Way, like with the smaller dark matter halos that surround these little satellites," Wechsler said.
The third study, led by Stanford doctoral scholar Yunchong "Richie" Wang, compares the new data to computer simulations and calls for the development of a new model of galaxy formation based in part on the SAGA Survey.
"SAGA provides a benchmark to advance our understanding of the universe through the detailed study of satellite galaxies in systems beyond the Milky Way," Wechsler said. "Although we finished our initial goal of mapping bright satellites in 101 host galaxies, there's a lot more work to do."
Of course......
Gaetz Ethics Report Should Stay Sealed Because He’s a “Private Citizen,” Says House Speaker Johnson
The same private citizen Donald Trump has named to lead his Department of Justice.
Julianne McShane
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has debuted a new—and implausible—reason that the House Ethics Committee’s report into allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use by former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) should not be released: Gaetz is now a private citizen.
In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper on Sunday morning, Johnson claimed that since Gaetz resigned from Congress on Wednesday, he does not deserve to be subject to the scrutiny of lawmakers. Yet Johnson neglected to provide the full context: Gaetz resigned shortly after Trump announced he would nominate him for the post of attorney general—which is about as far from “private citizen” as one could get.
“There’s a very important protocol and tradition and rule that we maintain, that the House Ethics Committee’s jurisdiction does not extend to non-members of Congress,” Johnson said. “I think that would be a Pandora’s box. I don’t think we want the House Ethics Committee using all of its vast resources and powers to go after private citizens.”
As Tapper pointed out, Johnson’s claim is untrue: In the past, the committee has released reports focused on former Rep. Bill Boner (R-Tenn.), former Rep. Buz Lukens (R-Ohio), and former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), all after their resignations.
Johnson’s latest stance comes after he initially said, at a Wednesday news conference, that he would not be—and could not be—involved in decisions about whether to release the Gaetz report. Two days later, after reportedly spending time with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Johnson changed his tune and said he would “strongly request” that the committee not release its findings. That was on Friday, the same day the committee was reportedly set to vote on the matter.
When Tapper asked Johnson if Trump asked him to change his position and advocate against the release of the report, the Speaker denied it. “The president and I have literally not discussed one word about the ethics report, not once,” he claimed.
Whether Gaetz actually stands a chance at running the Department of Justice is uncertain: NBC News reported Saturday that more than half of Senate Republicans, including some in leadership roles, do not believe he’ll survive the Senate confirmation process.
The fact that Johnson is still defending him is ironic for more reasons than one: The House Speaker’s hardcore Christian beliefs—which include urging a return to “18th century values”—are well known. Gaetz, on the other hand, was investigated over sex trafficking allegations by the department Trump has tapped him to lead. (Gaetz has denied the allegations and the DOJ opted not to file charges.)
But when Tapper pressed the issue, asking whether the Republican party still cared about electing leaders who are “moral in their personal lives,” Johnson dodged the question. Trump’s nominees, he declared, “are persons who will shake up the status quo.”
Already Harassing
Nancy Mace Is Already Harassing Her New Co-Worker With Transphobia
She said it is “absolutely” meant to target Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.), who—correctly—said Mace is “manufacturing culture wars.”
Julianne McShane
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) has proven time and time again that she will do nearly anything to make headlines.
But on Monday, she reached a new low, introducing a resolution seeking to bar transgender members and employees in the House of Representatives from using the bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity in the Capitol building. Echoing Republican talking points grounded in paranoia, the resolution alleges that allowing trans women to use women’s bathrooms “jeopardizes the safety and dignity” of cisgender women. It would task the House Sergeant-at-Arms with enforcing the resolution if passed.
The move comes just weeks after Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.) became the first openly transgender person to serve in Congress. Though it does not directly mention McBride, the bill represents a clear attempt to attack her: Mace told reporters this explicitly on Tuesday, confirming that the bill is “absolutely” meant to target McBride. And in a post on X after announcing the resolution, Mace said McBride “does not get a say in women’s private spaces.”
McBride appeared to respond to the resolution in a post on X, stating: “Every day Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different than their own and engage with them respectfully, I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness.” In a follow-up post, McBride called Mace’s effort “a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing. We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars.”
Other Democratic members also blasted the effort: Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), the first openly gay person to represent her state in Congress and co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, said in a post on X that Mace’s effort was a “petty, hateful distraction,” adding, “There’s no bottom to the cruelty.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio (D-N.Y.) said: “This is not just bigotry, this is just plain bullying.” Laurel Powell, spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, called Mace’s resolution “a political charade by a grown-up bully” and “another warning sign that the incoming anti-equality House majority will continue to focus on targeting LGBTQ+ people rather than the cost of living, price gouging or any of the problems the American people elected them to solve.” And GLAAD CEO Sarah Ellis said in a statement: “Everyone in Congress might try focusing on solutions to improve people’s lives and leading with kindness, and see what progress you might make for every American.”
“Manufacturing culture wars,” as McBride put it, is, indeed, an apt way to describe the transphobic paranoia Mace and supporting members in the GOP appears to be stoking with this resolution—an especially ironic development given that Democrats have been chastised for having been too concerned with trans issues since losing the election.
When it comes to GOP panic about trans people using bathrooms alongside cisgender people, the evidence around the issue does not support the panic. A 2018 study published in the journal Sexual Research and Social Policy found there is no link between trans-inclusive bathroom policies and safety, and that reports of “privacy and safety violations” in bathrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms are “exceedingly rare.” This is probably why most states—37, plus DC—do not have any laws on the books regulating trans peoples’ use of bathrooms or other facilities, according to the Movement Advancement Project. (Mace’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on that research or other questions for this story.) But these facts have not stopped the GOP from pumping millions of dollars into anti-trans ads and filing hundreds of anti-trans bills in state legislatures across the country.
And as for the claim that it’s trans people who pose a danger to cisgender people in bathrooms? The GOP appears to be the party who poses a physical threat. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went so far as to reportedly say in a private House GOP Conference meeting that she would fight a transgender woman if she tried to use a women’s bathroom in the House.
For all the drama this is stirring up, though, Mace’s latest effort may not go any further than the headlines: At a press conference Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said, “This is an issue that Congress has never had to address before and we’re going to do that in a deliberate fashion…and we will accommodate the needs of every single person.” He added that he would not commit to including the language of Mace’s resolution in the rules package the House will vote on in early January. A spokesperson for Johnson did not immediately respond to a question about the consequences if Greene fought another member of Congress or the lack of evidence to support Mace’s resolution.
If you want a new car, buy it now!
There is no such thing as an all-American car. That’s why tariffs could raise all car prices
By Chris Isidore
President-elect Donald Trump is vowing to protect American-made cars through steep tariffs on imports. The problem is, there is no such thing as an all-American car.
Trump has promised that tariffs, which are a tax on goods that are imported from another country, will be a key part of his economic plan in his second term. On Monday he announced plans to impose a 25% tariff on all goods coming from Mexico or Canada on his first day in office.
The US government tracks what percentage of each car’s parts is made “domestically.” But under current trade law, both Canadian-made parts and US-made parts are counted as the same domestic content. Even with the broader definition of “American made,” none exceed 75%.
That’s why auto prices could rise sharply if Trump goes ahead with plans to impose steep tariffs on the parts that go into the “American” vehicles found in showrooms nationwide. The auto industry supply chain depends on parts and materials from around the globe – from relatively inexpensive nuts and bolts that are cheaper to buy from foreign producers, to expensive computer chips and other electronic components that aren’t made in sufficient quantities in US factories to meet demand.
But despite his claim that tariffs are paid by the foreign country, they are in fact paid by whoever is buying the imported good, and US businesses almost always pass most – or all – of that cost onto consumers.
Upending the way of US cars are built
The North American car industry has operated for decades as if the continent is one giant country, thanks to free trade agreements signed by presidents from Bill Clinton to Trump himself. Parts and whole vehicles have flowed freely across borders, sometimes multiple times, before they end up in an American dealership.
But Trump is promising to change that. Because of the threat of tariffs on both Canadian and Mexican exports to the United States, shares of most automakers’ stocks fell Tuesday, with GM closing down 9%, Ford down 3%, Stellantis, the maker of cars under the Jeep, Ram, Dodge and Chrysler brands, off 6%. In addition Toyota closed off 2% in US trading, and Honda fell 3%.
Trump’s plans would upend the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, the three-country trade deal he negotiated. Mexico and Canada are two of America’s largest trading partners, and are currently exempt from most tariffs under the USMCA, but that that could change.
And it’s not just tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada that are raising concern. Trump’s promise to increase tariffs are China an additional 10% beyond existing measures have the potential to make plenty of cars more expensive, too. While China ships relatively few cars to the United States, it is a major source of low-priced auto parts.
Trump argues that the move would bring jobs back to the United States by forcing manufacturers to close plants in other countries and open or expand US plants. But the amount of parts that go into cars assembled here would be difficult for American suppliers to replace, which would make building a car at US auto plants much more expensive.
There are only two vehicles hit that are considered to be 75% American-made by the US government – the Tesla Model 3, and the Honda Ridgeline, a pickup assembled at a Honda plant in Lincoln, Alabama. And once again, that 75% includes any content that currently comes from Canada, and could be subject to new tariffs.
Almost all of the vehicles that have 50% or more of their content from US or Canadian suppliers are either built by Tesla or brands that are ostensibly “foreign,” but actually assemble cars here – Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Nissan, Mazda, Subaru and Toyota.
The Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in the United States for more than 40 years, has the most domestic content of any vehicle made by one of the traditional “Big Three” automakers. While the all the parts are assembled into a pickup truck in either Michigan or Missouri, only 45% of those parts come from US or Canadian factories. Many of the larger versions of its engines come from Mexico.
“Yes, it’s America’s truck, assembled in America, but not with American parts,” Ivan Drury, director of insights for Edmunds, told CNN.
Domestic parts could be tough to find
Finding domestic supplies for many of the imported car parts would be difficult. Even if some are made here, there is not enough excess capacity to replace production of the parts now being imported. And for some of the less expensive goods, it’s not economical to make them at US factories, paying US wages. It would be more economical to pay the tariffs, and pass along the cost to car buyers.
Even if an American parts supply could be found, in most cases it would be more expensive. The low price of imports is the reason automakers turned to those supplies in the first place.
Even modernizing and expanding existing US chip plants, which would need to take place in order to meet increased domestic demand if imported chips become more expensive due to tariffs, could take a year or more. One New York plant that’s being expanded is expected to take 10 years to fully realize its additional production levels.
The tariffs would raise the cost of assembling vehicles at US plants. And those increased costs would definitely hit car buyers who are already spending nearly $50,000 on each new vehicle purchased here.
“Those costs … are not going to be absorbed by the automakers or suppliers,” Jeff Schuster, global vice president of automotive research at consultant GlobalData, told CNN.
Automakers had no comment when asked about their plans and the impact on prices due to new tariffs when contacted by CNN.
Imported car tariffs likely would raise all prices
Even if Trump pulls back on tariff plans and only imposes tariffs on fully-assembled cars imported into the United States, it will raise the price of cars built here, let alone on those imports.
During the campaign he vowed 100% to 200% tariffs on vehicles built in Mexico, saying it was vital to protect American auto jobs, although he made no reference to those plans in Monday’s announcement. That would double or triple the cost of those cars, likely killing all demand for them. He predicted there would be a “bloodbath” in the US auto industry and auto jobs if his tariff plans weren’t imposed.
If tariffs do in fact raise the price of Mexican-assembled vehicles, like the Chevrolet Blazer or Honda HR-V, and subsequently price them out of the the market, automakers might decide to stop offering them altogether rather than build them at US factories. Cars built in Mexico are most often lower priced, lower profit models, that are only able to maintain their profitability by being built with cheaper Mexican labor.
But it’s not just smaller, entry-level models that are built in Mexico that could see price hikes. The tariffs could impact many models car buyers don’t realize are imports, such as the heavy duty versions of Ram pickup trucks, which are built in a Stellantis plant in Saltillo, Mexico. Some versions of the Chevrolet Silverado are also built in Mexico. Even if the automakers shift production of those more profitable vehicles back from Mexico to US factories, it would take years to accomplish the switch.
Fewer imported cars would raise all prices
Tariffs on imported vehicles likely would also lead to higher prices on cars that are assembled here, since it would limit the supply of vehicles in the US market.
When supply is limited and demand remains strong, rapid price increases are often the result, which is what happened in 2021 and early 2022 when a shortage of computer chips and other parts severely restricted production across the industry. Almost all car buyers were suddenly paying above sticker price for the first time, and average prices soared.
And the higher prices on imports would mean less competition for manufacturers making cars and trucks at US plants, giving them the chance to charge more in order to increase profits - not necessarily hire more workers. US automakers have used strong profits in recent years to repurchase billions of dollars worth of their shares to support their stock price, even as they were laying off workers and slowing or trimming production in some cases.
“It will have a ripple effect throughout the market, and fallout on all vehicles,” said Drury. “You’re going to disrupt the used car market as well.”
The exact impact will be difficult to determine until final details of Trump’s tariff plans are spelled out. During his first term there were numerous threats of tariffs that never came to pass. Drury said that some of the tariff talk from the campaign trail might not happen this time either. If they do, it will have a huge impact on car buyers.
“There are all these potential car buyers who have held out because of high prices,” said Drury. “If these tariffs are put in place, it could tank the industry. I hope for the car buying public, nothing is as aggressive as advertised.”
By Chris Isidore
President-elect Donald Trump is vowing to protect American-made cars through steep tariffs on imports. The problem is, there is no such thing as an all-American car.
Trump has promised that tariffs, which are a tax on goods that are imported from another country, will be a key part of his economic plan in his second term. On Monday he announced plans to impose a 25% tariff on all goods coming from Mexico or Canada on his first day in office.
The US government tracks what percentage of each car’s parts is made “domestically.” But under current trade law, both Canadian-made parts and US-made parts are counted as the same domestic content. Even with the broader definition of “American made,” none exceed 75%.
That’s why auto prices could rise sharply if Trump goes ahead with plans to impose steep tariffs on the parts that go into the “American” vehicles found in showrooms nationwide. The auto industry supply chain depends on parts and materials from around the globe – from relatively inexpensive nuts and bolts that are cheaper to buy from foreign producers, to expensive computer chips and other electronic components that aren’t made in sufficient quantities in US factories to meet demand.
But despite his claim that tariffs are paid by the foreign country, they are in fact paid by whoever is buying the imported good, and US businesses almost always pass most – or all – of that cost onto consumers.
Upending the way of US cars are built
The North American car industry has operated for decades as if the continent is one giant country, thanks to free trade agreements signed by presidents from Bill Clinton to Trump himself. Parts and whole vehicles have flowed freely across borders, sometimes multiple times, before they end up in an American dealership.
But Trump is promising to change that. Because of the threat of tariffs on both Canadian and Mexican exports to the United States, shares of most automakers’ stocks fell Tuesday, with GM closing down 9%, Ford down 3%, Stellantis, the maker of cars under the Jeep, Ram, Dodge and Chrysler brands, off 6%. In addition Toyota closed off 2% in US trading, and Honda fell 3%.
Trump’s plans would upend the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, the three-country trade deal he negotiated. Mexico and Canada are two of America’s largest trading partners, and are currently exempt from most tariffs under the USMCA, but that that could change.
And it’s not just tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada that are raising concern. Trump’s promise to increase tariffs are China an additional 10% beyond existing measures have the potential to make plenty of cars more expensive, too. While China ships relatively few cars to the United States, it is a major source of low-priced auto parts.
Trump argues that the move would bring jobs back to the United States by forcing manufacturers to close plants in other countries and open or expand US plants. But the amount of parts that go into cars assembled here would be difficult for American suppliers to replace, which would make building a car at US auto plants much more expensive.
There are only two vehicles hit that are considered to be 75% American-made by the US government – the Tesla Model 3, and the Honda Ridgeline, a pickup assembled at a Honda plant in Lincoln, Alabama. And once again, that 75% includes any content that currently comes from Canada, and could be subject to new tariffs.
Almost all of the vehicles that have 50% or more of their content from US or Canadian suppliers are either built by Tesla or brands that are ostensibly “foreign,” but actually assemble cars here – Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Nissan, Mazda, Subaru and Toyota.
The Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in the United States for more than 40 years, has the most domestic content of any vehicle made by one of the traditional “Big Three” automakers. While the all the parts are assembled into a pickup truck in either Michigan or Missouri, only 45% of those parts come from US or Canadian factories. Many of the larger versions of its engines come from Mexico.
“Yes, it’s America’s truck, assembled in America, but not with American parts,” Ivan Drury, director of insights for Edmunds, told CNN.
Domestic parts could be tough to find
Finding domestic supplies for many of the imported car parts would be difficult. Even if some are made here, there is not enough excess capacity to replace production of the parts now being imported. And for some of the less expensive goods, it’s not economical to make them at US factories, paying US wages. It would be more economical to pay the tariffs, and pass along the cost to car buyers.
Even if an American parts supply could be found, in most cases it would be more expensive. The low price of imports is the reason automakers turned to those supplies in the first place.
Even modernizing and expanding existing US chip plants, which would need to take place in order to meet increased domestic demand if imported chips become more expensive due to tariffs, could take a year or more. One New York plant that’s being expanded is expected to take 10 years to fully realize its additional production levels.
The tariffs would raise the cost of assembling vehicles at US plants. And those increased costs would definitely hit car buyers who are already spending nearly $50,000 on each new vehicle purchased here.
“Those costs … are not going to be absorbed by the automakers or suppliers,” Jeff Schuster, global vice president of automotive research at consultant GlobalData, told CNN.
Automakers had no comment when asked about their plans and the impact on prices due to new tariffs when contacted by CNN.
Imported car tariffs likely would raise all prices
Even if Trump pulls back on tariff plans and only imposes tariffs on fully-assembled cars imported into the United States, it will raise the price of cars built here, let alone on those imports.
During the campaign he vowed 100% to 200% tariffs on vehicles built in Mexico, saying it was vital to protect American auto jobs, although he made no reference to those plans in Monday’s announcement. That would double or triple the cost of those cars, likely killing all demand for them. He predicted there would be a “bloodbath” in the US auto industry and auto jobs if his tariff plans weren’t imposed.
If tariffs do in fact raise the price of Mexican-assembled vehicles, like the Chevrolet Blazer or Honda HR-V, and subsequently price them out of the the market, automakers might decide to stop offering them altogether rather than build them at US factories. Cars built in Mexico are most often lower priced, lower profit models, that are only able to maintain their profitability by being built with cheaper Mexican labor.
But it’s not just smaller, entry-level models that are built in Mexico that could see price hikes. The tariffs could impact many models car buyers don’t realize are imports, such as the heavy duty versions of Ram pickup trucks, which are built in a Stellantis plant in Saltillo, Mexico. Some versions of the Chevrolet Silverado are also built in Mexico. Even if the automakers shift production of those more profitable vehicles back from Mexico to US factories, it would take years to accomplish the switch.
Fewer imported cars would raise all prices
Tariffs on imported vehicles likely would also lead to higher prices on cars that are assembled here, since it would limit the supply of vehicles in the US market.
When supply is limited and demand remains strong, rapid price increases are often the result, which is what happened in 2021 and early 2022 when a shortage of computer chips and other parts severely restricted production across the industry. Almost all car buyers were suddenly paying above sticker price for the first time, and average prices soared.
And the higher prices on imports would mean less competition for manufacturers making cars and trucks at US plants, giving them the chance to charge more in order to increase profits - not necessarily hire more workers. US automakers have used strong profits in recent years to repurchase billions of dollars worth of their shares to support their stock price, even as they were laying off workers and slowing or trimming production in some cases.
“It will have a ripple effect throughout the market, and fallout on all vehicles,” said Drury. “You’re going to disrupt the used car market as well.”
The exact impact will be difficult to determine until final details of Trump’s tariff plans are spelled out. During his first term there were numerous threats of tariffs that never came to pass. Drury said that some of the tariff talk from the campaign trail might not happen this time either. If they do, it will have a huge impact on car buyers.
“There are all these potential car buyers who have held out because of high prices,” said Drury. “If these tariffs are put in place, it could tank the industry. I hope for the car buying public, nothing is as aggressive as advertised.”
Global chaos.......
Trump’s trade threats put the world on a precipice and may say a lot about his second term
Analysis by Stephen Collinson
Global chaos delivered via social media is back.
Between 2017 and 2021, Donald Trump had the world on a precipice, bracing for his next move, gaming out whether his bluster was a bluff, an overture to a deal or a break with history, as he sowed mayhem to push adversaries off balance.
President-elect Donald Trump attends the America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on November 14.
Those days are here again, nearly eight weeks before his second term begins.
The president-elect’s online threats Monday of new trade wars with Canada, Mexico and China turned the United States back into an agent of instability, which can pitch a foreign friend or foe into a crisis in an instant.
Trump said America’s two Western Hemisphere neighbors would be punished if they didn’t stop the flow of undocumented migration and fentanyl across their borders. And he demanded China stop shipments of the drug as well.
His first major global brouhaha since winning reelection posed the following questions that will help define the character of his second term.
Is Trump serious about massive tariff hikes that could increase prices for US consumers as soon as he begins a second presidency, which was won partly because voters were so frustrated with inflation and costs of housing and groceries?
Or is the president-elect indulging his view that life and politics is one big real estate deal? And is he setting out an extreme position to create leverage for agreements that might be modest but polish his dealmaker’s brand?
There’s a third possibility — that Trump feels liberated by his election victory and is determined to drive his America First project further than a first term in which his most volatile instincts were often restrained by establishment aides.
Trump believes he has mandate for huge change
Many of Trump’s voters deeply disdain the political, economic, trading and diplomatic systems that they believe have hurt them financially and serve US and global elites. They want their MAGA hero to tear them down, without much idea what would replace them.
Trucks wait on a queue to cross to the US next to the border wall at the Otay commercial crossing port in Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico on November 26, 2024. President-elect Trump said Monday he would impose a 25 percent tariff on all imports from Mexico and Canada as one of his first actions upon becoming US president in January.
Trump could, therefore, simply be creating headlines to show supporters that he’s already fighting for their interests. Or he could have something more sweeping in mind. The second path could take America and the world into risky territory. The idea that he might go for broke could drag the US into trade wars that wreck the economy and spark dangerous standoffs in a world that is far more volatile since he left office four years ago.
“There are plenty of examples (of) Trump’s verbal threats forcing and compelling action on the part of other parties, particularly when it comes to foreign countries,” Pete Seat, a former spokesman in President George W. Bush’s White House, said on “CNN News Central” on Tuesday. “The real question is what will happen in these next two months?” If all three nations make meaningful moves, Seat said, “Trump may back off on this. Otherwise, we’re all going to see price increases.”
The issue of whether Trump is bluffing or is planning to go all in with a revolutionary presidency is not confined to trade.
He has ambitious plans to gut the federal government with a new effort co-chaired by Elon Musk. But going all in would cause huge political and economic disruption that might backfire. Similarly, Trump vowed a mass deportation of up to 10 million undocumented migrants. But such an operation that would cost billions of dollars could buckle the agricultural sector and would also come with high political costs. This equation is mirrored abroad. Some in the West fear Trump will pull the US out of NATO or refuse to defend an alliance member attacked by Russia. Would the president-elect really blow apart the most successful military alliance in history — or is he just trying to wring more defense spending from some of Europe’s lagging powers?
In other words, does Trump have in mind a presidency driven by spectacle and brinkmanship that succeeds, like his first, in delivering mostly incremental change? Or is he really, as some of his fans want, trying to tear everything down?
A quick start
Trump’s sudden warning on Monday of 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports, with a further 10% hike above existing tariffs on Chinese goods, was the latest sign that the president-elect plans to quickly throw his muscle around.
It caused a scramble in Ottawa, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau jumped on the phone with Trump for what he insisted was a “good call.” Within hours, Trump had got the attention of new Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, as she warned of like-for-like retaliation of Trump tariffs after January 20.
The president-elect’s gambit has created an immediate yard stick to judge whether his second presidency will be an attempt to push through far deeper disruption.
There’s no guarantee that Canada, Mexico and China will back down immediately.
Still, deaths from overdoses of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are falling. And Trump’s promises to impose hardline immigration policies are likely to deter many migrants from approaching the US southern border. Therefore, Trump could create an illusion of change to cover a decision to back down if he needs to.
Trump’s trade war rhetoric is a reminder that in his worldview, the United States has few friends — only adversaries against whom it can choose to win or lose. According to this view, it’s fine for a big powerful country like the US to use its natural advantages to push around smaller neighbors, even if they are allies.
But Trump must also size up his opponents both north and south of the border.
Trudeau is politically weakened, and his Liberals are in danger of losing a general election due next year to Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. The prime minister therefore has a huge incentive to avoid a trade war that could cause havoc in the Canadian economy. Both Canada and Mexico are dependent on their trade with the United States because of their geographical realities and may have no choice but to make concessions. But Sheinbaum is new in office, has plenty of political capital and may be keen to stand up to perceived bullying by a new US president.
The case of China is distinct from Trump’s threats to Canada and Mexico. The president-elect significantly stiffened policy toward America’s new superpower rival in his first term. A trade war led to a deal, which again Trump hailed, but that largely dissolved during the pandemic and after China declined to buy the vast quantities of agricultural goods that the then-president said it would.
Trade is only one source of friction between Washington and Beijing, and many of Trump’s team — including Sen. Marco Rubio, his pick for secretary of state — believe that China poses an existential security and economic threat to the United States. This then could be the first salvo in a large and more intense period of confrontation across the Pacific rather than merely a ruse to draw President Xi Jinping to the table.
Other tensions are inevitable
Trump’s early turn against his neighbors will put other allies on notice — especially in Europe, where leaders are bracing for their own trade showdown with Trump, as well as dealing with tensions over how to end the war in Ukraine.
Initial reaction to Trump’s broadside against Canada and Mexico suggests that many observers see his outburst as a negotiating tactic. A Trump transition official told CNN on Tuesday, “We know what works.” In his first term, Trump used the threat of a trade war to force Canada and Mexico to the table to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. The new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement was touted by Trump as a triumph — but it didn’t fundamentally reshape the global economy or significantly improve a hollowed-out US industrial base that Trump pledged to revive in his 2016 and 2024 campaigns.
It’s a measure of his desire to foment discord that Trump is effectively threatening to tear up one of his own first-term achievements.
“What Donald Trump is proposing as an alpha-disrupter is to disrupt the largest trade market in the world,” Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat, told CNN on Tuesday.
Is he serious?
Thanks to Trump’s early setting of expectations, the world will soon find out.
Analysis by Stephen Collinson
Global chaos delivered via social media is back.
Between 2017 and 2021, Donald Trump had the world on a precipice, bracing for his next move, gaming out whether his bluster was a bluff, an overture to a deal or a break with history, as he sowed mayhem to push adversaries off balance.
President-elect Donald Trump attends the America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on November 14.
Those days are here again, nearly eight weeks before his second term begins.
The president-elect’s online threats Monday of new trade wars with Canada, Mexico and China turned the United States back into an agent of instability, which can pitch a foreign friend or foe into a crisis in an instant.
Trump said America’s two Western Hemisphere neighbors would be punished if they didn’t stop the flow of undocumented migration and fentanyl across their borders. And he demanded China stop shipments of the drug as well.
His first major global brouhaha since winning reelection posed the following questions that will help define the character of his second term.
Is Trump serious about massive tariff hikes that could increase prices for US consumers as soon as he begins a second presidency, which was won partly because voters were so frustrated with inflation and costs of housing and groceries?
Or is the president-elect indulging his view that life and politics is one big real estate deal? And is he setting out an extreme position to create leverage for agreements that might be modest but polish his dealmaker’s brand?
There’s a third possibility — that Trump feels liberated by his election victory and is determined to drive his America First project further than a first term in which his most volatile instincts were often restrained by establishment aides.
Trump believes he has mandate for huge change
Many of Trump’s voters deeply disdain the political, economic, trading and diplomatic systems that they believe have hurt them financially and serve US and global elites. They want their MAGA hero to tear them down, without much idea what would replace them.
Trucks wait on a queue to cross to the US next to the border wall at the Otay commercial crossing port in Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico on November 26, 2024. President-elect Trump said Monday he would impose a 25 percent tariff on all imports from Mexico and Canada as one of his first actions upon becoming US president in January.
Trump could, therefore, simply be creating headlines to show supporters that he’s already fighting for their interests. Or he could have something more sweeping in mind. The second path could take America and the world into risky territory. The idea that he might go for broke could drag the US into trade wars that wreck the economy and spark dangerous standoffs in a world that is far more volatile since he left office four years ago.
“There are plenty of examples (of) Trump’s verbal threats forcing and compelling action on the part of other parties, particularly when it comes to foreign countries,” Pete Seat, a former spokesman in President George W. Bush’s White House, said on “CNN News Central” on Tuesday. “The real question is what will happen in these next two months?” If all three nations make meaningful moves, Seat said, “Trump may back off on this. Otherwise, we’re all going to see price increases.”
The issue of whether Trump is bluffing or is planning to go all in with a revolutionary presidency is not confined to trade.
He has ambitious plans to gut the federal government with a new effort co-chaired by Elon Musk. But going all in would cause huge political and economic disruption that might backfire. Similarly, Trump vowed a mass deportation of up to 10 million undocumented migrants. But such an operation that would cost billions of dollars could buckle the agricultural sector and would also come with high political costs. This equation is mirrored abroad. Some in the West fear Trump will pull the US out of NATO or refuse to defend an alliance member attacked by Russia. Would the president-elect really blow apart the most successful military alliance in history — or is he just trying to wring more defense spending from some of Europe’s lagging powers?
In other words, does Trump have in mind a presidency driven by spectacle and brinkmanship that succeeds, like his first, in delivering mostly incremental change? Or is he really, as some of his fans want, trying to tear everything down?
A quick start
Trump’s sudden warning on Monday of 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports, with a further 10% hike above existing tariffs on Chinese goods, was the latest sign that the president-elect plans to quickly throw his muscle around.
It caused a scramble in Ottawa, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau jumped on the phone with Trump for what he insisted was a “good call.” Within hours, Trump had got the attention of new Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, as she warned of like-for-like retaliation of Trump tariffs after January 20.
The president-elect’s gambit has created an immediate yard stick to judge whether his second presidency will be an attempt to push through far deeper disruption.
There’s no guarantee that Canada, Mexico and China will back down immediately.
Still, deaths from overdoses of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are falling. And Trump’s promises to impose hardline immigration policies are likely to deter many migrants from approaching the US southern border. Therefore, Trump could create an illusion of change to cover a decision to back down if he needs to.
Trump’s trade war rhetoric is a reminder that in his worldview, the United States has few friends — only adversaries against whom it can choose to win or lose. According to this view, it’s fine for a big powerful country like the US to use its natural advantages to push around smaller neighbors, even if they are allies.
But Trump must also size up his opponents both north and south of the border.
Trudeau is politically weakened, and his Liberals are in danger of losing a general election due next year to Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. The prime minister therefore has a huge incentive to avoid a trade war that could cause havoc in the Canadian economy. Both Canada and Mexico are dependent on their trade with the United States because of their geographical realities and may have no choice but to make concessions. But Sheinbaum is new in office, has plenty of political capital and may be keen to stand up to perceived bullying by a new US president.
The case of China is distinct from Trump’s threats to Canada and Mexico. The president-elect significantly stiffened policy toward America’s new superpower rival in his first term. A trade war led to a deal, which again Trump hailed, but that largely dissolved during the pandemic and after China declined to buy the vast quantities of agricultural goods that the then-president said it would.
Trade is only one source of friction between Washington and Beijing, and many of Trump’s team — including Sen. Marco Rubio, his pick for secretary of state — believe that China poses an existential security and economic threat to the United States. This then could be the first salvo in a large and more intense period of confrontation across the Pacific rather than merely a ruse to draw President Xi Jinping to the table.
Other tensions are inevitable
Trump’s early turn against his neighbors will put other allies on notice — especially in Europe, where leaders are bracing for their own trade showdown with Trump, as well as dealing with tensions over how to end the war in Ukraine.
Initial reaction to Trump’s broadside against Canada and Mexico suggests that many observers see his outburst as a negotiating tactic. A Trump transition official told CNN on Tuesday, “We know what works.” In his first term, Trump used the threat of a trade war to force Canada and Mexico to the table to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. The new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement was touted by Trump as a triumph — but it didn’t fundamentally reshape the global economy or significantly improve a hollowed-out US industrial base that Trump pledged to revive in his 2016 and 2024 campaigns.
It’s a measure of his desire to foment discord that Trump is effectively threatening to tear up one of his own first-term achievements.
“What Donald Trump is proposing as an alpha-disrupter is to disrupt the largest trade market in the world,” Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat, told CNN on Tuesday.
Is he serious?
Thanks to Trump’s early setting of expectations, the world will soon find out.
The world's tallest tree
Only 50 permits a day are issued on this stunning Northern California hike
The world's tallest tree inspired this California national park
By Suzie Dundas
Ask a nature enthusiast in California to name a famous tree, and they might mention Hyperion, the world’s tallest tree, or General Sherman, the massive giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park. But in the early 1960s, few trees had names. Even fewer were recognized for their ecological or recreational value. Redwood trees, in particular, were valued for their timber — not for their towering beauty or environmental importance.
That began to change in 1964, when the July issue of National Geographic featured articles titled “Finding the Mt. Everest of All Living Things” and “World’s Tallest Tree Discovered.” The issue showcased vivid full-color photographs of the ancient Sequoia sempervirens, including a cover photo of National Geographic editor Melville Bell Grosvenor standing, dwarfed, beside the 367.8-foot Howard Libbey Tree.
For many readers, it was the first time they’d seen California’s redwoods, let alone grasped their monumental scale. The cover story is credited with sparking a national outcry to preserve the remaining old-growth redwoods. But for those involved in the effort to establish Redwood National Park, the publication didn’t begin the work — it cemented it.
“I would characterize that article and discovery of the tallest tree in the [Tall Trees Grove] as the final impetus for creating a national park,” says Leonel Arguello, deputy superintendent at Redwood National and State Parks. “However, the real story is much more nuanced, as the idea for a national park had been a national discussion with environmentalists and advocacy organizations and in the halls of Congress long before that article came out.”
The push for a redwood national park
One recent October afternoon, I stood under Howard Libbey itself — and didn’t even know it. Howard Libbey, also known as “Tall Tree,” no longer holds the title of the tallest tree in the world, as it did from 1963 to 1988. It’s now only the 34th tallest tree — and not even the tallest tree in the surrounding grove. Measuring about 363 feet, it’s seen a slight reduction in height since the 1960s, possibly due to silt deposits from floods or lightning damage to its upper branches.
But while it may have lost approximately 5 feet of height, it saved thousands of acres of other old-growth redwood trees.
The Tall Trees Grove ranks among the most renowned old-growth redwood forests in the world. Tucked deep within Redwood National Park, reaching it requires a 7-mile drive along a dirt road, followed by a challenging 1.5-mile hike down to the grove and an equally steep hike back up. Access is tightly regulated, with only 50 permits issued per day and a locked gate that prevents skirting the permit system. During my October visit, about 10 next-day permits were available online, and I snagged one on a Monday for a Tuesday afternoon visit.
Though each permit allows up to seven people, only two cars were parked at the trailhead when I arrived via the dusty, uneven dirt road. The trail descends quickly but also gives a taste of its grandeur quickly, as hikers will encounter the often-photographed “Tunnel Tree” about .3 miles in. The path follows the Trinidad Trail, an old wagon road that carried supplies to miners working along the nearby rivers. It drops roughly 800 feet before reaching the start of the grove. Fortunately, the National Park Service phone app, which has a Redwoods National Park tour that highlights points of interest along the route, adds an interesting layer of historical context — and acts as a welcome excuse for short breaks on the way back up.
The downhill is speedy, and it took me only about 25 minutes to descend, driven by an eagerness to reach the legendary grove ahead of any later-arriving hikers. While redwoods line the entire trail, when you reach river level, your perspective noticeably shifts. Instead of having an eye-level view of trunks while you’re above them on the trail, you’re now looking up from below, watching the towering giants swaying more than 300 feet above.
“The juxtaposition of tall, large-diameter redwoods and Redwood Creek, in a steep narrow valley bottom surrounded by more old-growth redwoods, is not duplicated elsewhere in the park,” says Arguello.
The grove may be modest in acreage, but it’s certainly not ordinary. Somewhat hidden at the bottom of a forested river canyon and far removed from roads and trails, Tall Trees Grove is not something you’ll find just anywhere in California.
The official “Tall Trees Loop” through the Tall Trees Grove starts at the bottom of the descent trail. At 1 mile long, it’s the easier and only relatively flat part of the hike. From the sign for the Tall Trees Loop, head left. It’s just a few hundred yards to the trees that graced the Nat Geo cover.
Many of these trees were once the tallest in the world, until other trees superseded them. Howard Libbey is just across the trail from Melkor (the largest tree in the park by volume) and close to the National Geographic Tree, abbreviated NGT but affectionately known to arborists as “Nugget.” At 373.5 feet tall, Nugget was the tallest tree in the world from 1991 to 1995; nowadays, it’s the third-tallest tree in the world and the tallest in the grove. That puts it just behind Helios (377 feet, in the park’s nearby Helios Grove) and 380-foot-tall Hyperion, the world’s tallest tree, so threatened from overtourism that visiting it is now illegal.
The expedition spurred the government to act
The notion that a single National Geographic cover captured the collective public psyche to such an extent that it led to the creation of a national park may be appealing, but the NatGeo expedition’s discovery of the trees wasn’t by chance. Local logging companies had long known that trees in that location were extraordinarily large, and federal leaders were already well aware of the urgent need to protect redwood forests.
Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, played a pivotal role in redwood conservation efforts as early as 1917 when he took office. He used his political influence to urge conservationists to explore northern California’s redwood groves; those conservationists went on to found the Save the Redwoods League. The League became instrumental in acquiring land for Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park, and Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in the 1920s and 1930s, and those three parks cover roughly half of the 132,000-acre Redwood National and State Parks system that exists today.
In 1913, the U.S. government declined an opportunity to purchase 22,000 acres of redwood forest for a national park, indicating federal awareness of the redwoods and the threats they faced from logging. This concern grew more urgent with the introduction of electric chainsaws in the 1920s, which intensified the speed at which the giant trees could be felled. It increased pressure on the federal government to act, especially as former Save the Redwoods League Executive Director Newton Drury became NPS director in 1940. In 1963, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall highlighted the risks of deforestation in his book “The Quiet Crisis,” and the collective concern led the National Geographic Society to fund the redwoods expedition.
Not only were the expedition’s findings published in the magazine, but they were shared directly with President Lyndon B. Johnson. He used the report to bolster support for the Wilderness Act, which passed in 1964 and laid the groundwork for a national park in the redwoods.
That legislation had already been in progress, but the striking images and seriousness of the threat outlined in the magazine likely created public pressure to get the bill signed. The magazine combined urgent warnings about deforestation, noting that logging had destroyed 85% of the world’s old-growth redwoods, with romantic accounts of redwood groves and musings on protecting the forest for future generations. One author even wondered, “What if another champion [tree] lay just beyond the next bend in the creek?” (Hyperion, 379.1 feet tall, was found less than half a mile away in 2006).
The magazine became a symbol of the conservation movement, and Udall cited the expedition’s findings when proposing the creation of Redwood National Park. The Redwood National Park Act was signed into law in 1968, allocating $92 million to purchase approximately 58,000 acres of forest from logging companies, though the final cost ultimately exceeded twice that amount.
Tall Trees Grove in Redwood National Park.
60 years later, the grove is still a draw
The Tall Trees Grove remains a favorite among hikers despite its relative difficulty and the long drive to the trailhead. Easier hiking options like the Grove of the Titans and Stout Memorial Grove offer similarly tall trees. For me, the isolation, difficulty and uniqueness of the landscape were part of the allure, and I wanted to feel the mystique of standing under the towering giants National Geographic author Paul Zahn described as “some of the most extraordinary scenery in the world.”
Leonel Arguello told me the trail was a favorite among park staff, and park Interpretation and Education Program Manager Patrick Taylor said he adores everything from the gorgeous drive to the trailhead to the diversity of plant life along the path. But like me, he thinks the grove’s tranquil atmosphere is its best feature. “It really lets you feel the experience of being around the trees,” he noted, pointing to the relatively low number of visitors compared with other areas of the park. In talking with him, it’s clear he feels the same amount of awe I did on that day in October.
“It’s one of the places in the park I see people whispering when they talk,” Taylor added, “out of an implicit reverence for the ancient redwoods.”
The world's tallest tree inspired this California national park
By Suzie Dundas
Ask a nature enthusiast in California to name a famous tree, and they might mention Hyperion, the world’s tallest tree, or General Sherman, the massive giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park. But in the early 1960s, few trees had names. Even fewer were recognized for their ecological or recreational value. Redwood trees, in particular, were valued for their timber — not for their towering beauty or environmental importance.
That began to change in 1964, when the July issue of National Geographic featured articles titled “Finding the Mt. Everest of All Living Things” and “World’s Tallest Tree Discovered.” The issue showcased vivid full-color photographs of the ancient Sequoia sempervirens, including a cover photo of National Geographic editor Melville Bell Grosvenor standing, dwarfed, beside the 367.8-foot Howard Libbey Tree.
For many readers, it was the first time they’d seen California’s redwoods, let alone grasped their monumental scale. The cover story is credited with sparking a national outcry to preserve the remaining old-growth redwoods. But for those involved in the effort to establish Redwood National Park, the publication didn’t begin the work — it cemented it.
“I would characterize that article and discovery of the tallest tree in the [Tall Trees Grove] as the final impetus for creating a national park,” says Leonel Arguello, deputy superintendent at Redwood National and State Parks. “However, the real story is much more nuanced, as the idea for a national park had been a national discussion with environmentalists and advocacy organizations and in the halls of Congress long before that article came out.”
The push for a redwood national park
One recent October afternoon, I stood under Howard Libbey itself — and didn’t even know it. Howard Libbey, also known as “Tall Tree,” no longer holds the title of the tallest tree in the world, as it did from 1963 to 1988. It’s now only the 34th tallest tree — and not even the tallest tree in the surrounding grove. Measuring about 363 feet, it’s seen a slight reduction in height since the 1960s, possibly due to silt deposits from floods or lightning damage to its upper branches.
But while it may have lost approximately 5 feet of height, it saved thousands of acres of other old-growth redwood trees.
The Tall Trees Grove ranks among the most renowned old-growth redwood forests in the world. Tucked deep within Redwood National Park, reaching it requires a 7-mile drive along a dirt road, followed by a challenging 1.5-mile hike down to the grove and an equally steep hike back up. Access is tightly regulated, with only 50 permits issued per day and a locked gate that prevents skirting the permit system. During my October visit, about 10 next-day permits were available online, and I snagged one on a Monday for a Tuesday afternoon visit.
Though each permit allows up to seven people, only two cars were parked at the trailhead when I arrived via the dusty, uneven dirt road. The trail descends quickly but also gives a taste of its grandeur quickly, as hikers will encounter the often-photographed “Tunnel Tree” about .3 miles in. The path follows the Trinidad Trail, an old wagon road that carried supplies to miners working along the nearby rivers. It drops roughly 800 feet before reaching the start of the grove. Fortunately, the National Park Service phone app, which has a Redwoods National Park tour that highlights points of interest along the route, adds an interesting layer of historical context — and acts as a welcome excuse for short breaks on the way back up.
The downhill is speedy, and it took me only about 25 minutes to descend, driven by an eagerness to reach the legendary grove ahead of any later-arriving hikers. While redwoods line the entire trail, when you reach river level, your perspective noticeably shifts. Instead of having an eye-level view of trunks while you’re above them on the trail, you’re now looking up from below, watching the towering giants swaying more than 300 feet above.
“The juxtaposition of tall, large-diameter redwoods and Redwood Creek, in a steep narrow valley bottom surrounded by more old-growth redwoods, is not duplicated elsewhere in the park,” says Arguello.
The grove may be modest in acreage, but it’s certainly not ordinary. Somewhat hidden at the bottom of a forested river canyon and far removed from roads and trails, Tall Trees Grove is not something you’ll find just anywhere in California.
The official “Tall Trees Loop” through the Tall Trees Grove starts at the bottom of the descent trail. At 1 mile long, it’s the easier and only relatively flat part of the hike. From the sign for the Tall Trees Loop, head left. It’s just a few hundred yards to the trees that graced the Nat Geo cover.
Many of these trees were once the tallest in the world, until other trees superseded them. Howard Libbey is just across the trail from Melkor (the largest tree in the park by volume) and close to the National Geographic Tree, abbreviated NGT but affectionately known to arborists as “Nugget.” At 373.5 feet tall, Nugget was the tallest tree in the world from 1991 to 1995; nowadays, it’s the third-tallest tree in the world and the tallest in the grove. That puts it just behind Helios (377 feet, in the park’s nearby Helios Grove) and 380-foot-tall Hyperion, the world’s tallest tree, so threatened from overtourism that visiting it is now illegal.
The expedition spurred the government to act
The notion that a single National Geographic cover captured the collective public psyche to such an extent that it led to the creation of a national park may be appealing, but the NatGeo expedition’s discovery of the trees wasn’t by chance. Local logging companies had long known that trees in that location were extraordinarily large, and federal leaders were already well aware of the urgent need to protect redwood forests.
Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, played a pivotal role in redwood conservation efforts as early as 1917 when he took office. He used his political influence to urge conservationists to explore northern California’s redwood groves; those conservationists went on to found the Save the Redwoods League. The League became instrumental in acquiring land for Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park, and Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in the 1920s and 1930s, and those three parks cover roughly half of the 132,000-acre Redwood National and State Parks system that exists today.
In 1913, the U.S. government declined an opportunity to purchase 22,000 acres of redwood forest for a national park, indicating federal awareness of the redwoods and the threats they faced from logging. This concern grew more urgent with the introduction of electric chainsaws in the 1920s, which intensified the speed at which the giant trees could be felled. It increased pressure on the federal government to act, especially as former Save the Redwoods League Executive Director Newton Drury became NPS director in 1940. In 1963, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall highlighted the risks of deforestation in his book “The Quiet Crisis,” and the collective concern led the National Geographic Society to fund the redwoods expedition.
Not only were the expedition’s findings published in the magazine, but they were shared directly with President Lyndon B. Johnson. He used the report to bolster support for the Wilderness Act, which passed in 1964 and laid the groundwork for a national park in the redwoods.
That legislation had already been in progress, but the striking images and seriousness of the threat outlined in the magazine likely created public pressure to get the bill signed. The magazine combined urgent warnings about deforestation, noting that logging had destroyed 85% of the world’s old-growth redwoods, with romantic accounts of redwood groves and musings on protecting the forest for future generations. One author even wondered, “What if another champion [tree] lay just beyond the next bend in the creek?” (Hyperion, 379.1 feet tall, was found less than half a mile away in 2006).
The magazine became a symbol of the conservation movement, and Udall cited the expedition’s findings when proposing the creation of Redwood National Park. The Redwood National Park Act was signed into law in 1968, allocating $92 million to purchase approximately 58,000 acres of forest from logging companies, though the final cost ultimately exceeded twice that amount.
Tall Trees Grove in Redwood National Park.
60 years later, the grove is still a draw
The Tall Trees Grove remains a favorite among hikers despite its relative difficulty and the long drive to the trailhead. Easier hiking options like the Grove of the Titans and Stout Memorial Grove offer similarly tall trees. For me, the isolation, difficulty and uniqueness of the landscape were part of the allure, and I wanted to feel the mystique of standing under the towering giants National Geographic author Paul Zahn described as “some of the most extraordinary scenery in the world.”
Leonel Arguello told me the trail was a favorite among park staff, and park Interpretation and Education Program Manager Patrick Taylor said he adores everything from the gorgeous drive to the trailhead to the diversity of plant life along the path. But like me, he thinks the grove’s tranquil atmosphere is its best feature. “It really lets you feel the experience of being around the trees,” he noted, pointing to the relatively low number of visitors compared with other areas of the park. In talking with him, it’s clear he feels the same amount of awe I did on that day in October.
“It’s one of the places in the park I see people whispering when they talk,” Taylor added, “out of an implicit reverence for the ancient redwoods.”
Second Transbay Tube
Major update on Bay Area's second Transbay Tube
By Jerold Chinn
The project to build a second Bay Area Transbay Tube, known as Link21, reached a significant milestone last week when its planners introduced a staff recommendation for the first time — that the new rail crossing between Oakland and San Francisco should use standard gauge rail.
A standard gauge system offers critical advantages, such as enabling interoperability with other regional rail systems — like Caltrain, Capitol Corridor and Amtrak — and improving connectivity across Northern California. Standard gauge is the global rail width standard used by most transit systems worldwide, but not by BART, which has a wider, broad gauge system that is unique to it.
Camille Tsao, who serves as the program lead for Link21, shared a conceptual design Wednesday of how a standard gauge would work with metro urban rail service and intercity or express rail that tends to offer less frequent service in the Bay Area. It showed that using a standard gauge in the new rail crossing could help transit reach a larger region. Tsao added that Link21 has been doing community outreach this year and received positive responses about the benefits of using a standard gauge.
The BART chapter of SEIU 1021 was against the use of standard gauge at the BART board meeting Thursday, voicing a preference for the second tube to use BART’s rail standard.
“It just makes no sense to lose this opportunity,” said John Arantes, the chapter’s president. “You’re not going to get another chance to create a third tunnel across the bay. This is it.”
He also reminded the BART board how passengers were riding trains “like sardines in a can.”
Rob Padgette, Capitol Corridor managing director, said the Link21 team will plan further development of the project now that a standard gauge has been recommended. He also said that the California State Transportation Agency and Caltrain plan to take a larger leadership role in the project.
“Important to remember is that this missing link will serve far more than Capitol Corridor,” Padgette said, pointing out that it would provide a connection between regions that will allow for frequent trips.
BART spokesperson Alicia Trost said that both the BART and Capitol Corridor boards will be asked to approve the staff recommendation to advance Link21 as a standard-gauge rail project. Trost gave no timeframe on when the boards will take up the staff recommendation.
Preliminary estimates from Link21 list the cost of the project at $29 billion, with a completion year of 2040.
By Jerold Chinn
The project to build a second Bay Area Transbay Tube, known as Link21, reached a significant milestone last week when its planners introduced a staff recommendation for the first time — that the new rail crossing between Oakland and San Francisco should use standard gauge rail.
A standard gauge system offers critical advantages, such as enabling interoperability with other regional rail systems — like Caltrain, Capitol Corridor and Amtrak — and improving connectivity across Northern California. Standard gauge is the global rail width standard used by most transit systems worldwide, but not by BART, which has a wider, broad gauge system that is unique to it.
Camille Tsao, who serves as the program lead for Link21, shared a conceptual design Wednesday of how a standard gauge would work with metro urban rail service and intercity or express rail that tends to offer less frequent service in the Bay Area. It showed that using a standard gauge in the new rail crossing could help transit reach a larger region. Tsao added that Link21 has been doing community outreach this year and received positive responses about the benefits of using a standard gauge.
The BART chapter of SEIU 1021 was against the use of standard gauge at the BART board meeting Thursday, voicing a preference for the second tube to use BART’s rail standard.
“It just makes no sense to lose this opportunity,” said John Arantes, the chapter’s president. “You’re not going to get another chance to create a third tunnel across the bay. This is it.”
He also reminded the BART board how passengers were riding trains “like sardines in a can.”
Rob Padgette, Capitol Corridor managing director, said the Link21 team will plan further development of the project now that a standard gauge has been recommended. He also said that the California State Transportation Agency and Caltrain plan to take a larger leadership role in the project.
“Important to remember is that this missing link will serve far more than Capitol Corridor,” Padgette said, pointing out that it would provide a connection between regions that will allow for frequent trips.
BART spokesperson Alicia Trost said that both the BART and Capitol Corridor boards will be asked to approve the staff recommendation to advance Link21 as a standard-gauge rail project. Trost gave no timeframe on when the boards will take up the staff recommendation.
Preliminary estimates from Link21 list the cost of the project at $29 billion, with a completion year of 2040.
You know he is brain damaged?
Bumper stickers roasting Elon Musk are suddenly very popular in California
By Stephen Council
For years it was extremely rare to see a bumper sticker on a Tesla — the car's high price range and sleek aesthetic discourage strips of plastic. But that was before hatred for the carmaker’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk peaked.
Hawaii aquarium store manager Matthew Hiller knows how sharply the sentiment has shifted. When he first started selling anti-Musk bumper stickers on his Etsy page in 2023, sales came in at a trickle. Now, they’re at a flood: Musk’s ideological takeover of Twitter and election-year political antics have earned him a new wave of haters.
Some of them own Teslas. Hiller’s most popular sticker reads, “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy.” He told SFGATE he’s now sold 15,000 anti-Musk stickers — and California is his biggest market.
Hiller launched the side hustle after test driving a Tesla. He said he’d wanted the car, but then decided handing $40,000 to a Musk-led company was off-limits. Hiller detested the billionaire’s actions at Twitter, now X: Musk manipulated the algorithm to boost his own posts, and amplified “all the wrong people,” Hiller said. The Honolulu resident thought he must not be alone.
“I figured at that time, there must be a lot of people like me who already have a Tesla, who are just like, 'Wow, I am embarrassed by this guy, I am sickened by this guy,'" Hiller said. So he designed the “before we knew” sticker, in simple black and white, and added it to his Etsy page in February 2023, where he previously sold a range of stickers bearing fish puns.
Sales mostly trickled in at five or six a day, on Etsy and on Amazon, but would speed up briefly after a viral X post or Reddit thread featured the sticker, Hiller said. Business Insider’s September 2023 story on the stickers didn’t name Hiller or his business, but it brought another spike. He designed other versions, like “Anti Elon Tesla Club,” and “F Elon,” using printer companies to create the stickers but doing all the packing and mailing with his wife.
Then Musk stuck his nose into the presidential race — before jumping in headfirst. He endorsed Donald Trump after the former president survived an assassination attempt in July, and went on to become Trump's most high-profile backer. He dispersed anti-immigrant tropes on X, jumped around onstage at a Trump rally (prompting a spike in sales, per Hiller), plowed money into ground campaigns and launched a $1-million-a-day lottery for swing-state voters.
The day after Trump’s Nov. 5 electoral victory, Hiller said, was his sticker shop’s biggest-ever day of sales. His Amazon storefront shows more than 2,250 purchases of anti-Musk stickers in the month before Nov. 26.
Hiller is now ordering the stickers en masse and printing huge stacks of address labels at once. He said that hundreds of the labels, almost every time, list California locations. “California is by far the highest state that I ship to, but San Francisco, within that, is certainly number one,” Hiller said.
Liberal Tesla drivers have been talking for years about a conflict between their love for the vehicles and their disdain for Musk; SFGATE reported on Bay Area drivers’ angst in 2022. The conflict appears to have even reached the Governor’s office: Gavin Newsom has announced a potential new rebate for electric-vehicle purchases, but per Bloomberg, it leaves Tesla out using a market-share clause. The top EV seller in the U.S., Tesla delivered almost 1.3 million cars from January through September.
Hiller's reviews on Etsy and Amazon reflect the gap the buyers see between their cars and Musk. Some have mentioned their love for their Model 3 or Model Y, others explain why they purchased the stickers. “Exactly what my dad wanted / needed for his Tesla, which he’s become very embarrassed by,” one Etsy reviewer wrote. Another described themself as a “Tesla owner who does not support Trump or Elon…and don’t wanna get lumped into the pool of all the weirdos that do.”
Hiller is enjoying the sales — despite slim margins and a boatload of envelope-packing work — but he hasn’t actually seen any of his stickers in the wild yet. He said he’s sold some in Hawaii since climate news site Heatmap published an interview with him, and that he’s carrying around an extra few stickers to give out as a gift.
“Every time I see a Tesla driving down the road, I turn my head. Every time I walk into a parking lot, I check every Tesla,” Hiller said. “I want to take a selfie.”
By Stephen Council
For years it was extremely rare to see a bumper sticker on a Tesla — the car's high price range and sleek aesthetic discourage strips of plastic. But that was before hatred for the carmaker’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk peaked.
Hawaii aquarium store manager Matthew Hiller knows how sharply the sentiment has shifted. When he first started selling anti-Musk bumper stickers on his Etsy page in 2023, sales came in at a trickle. Now, they’re at a flood: Musk’s ideological takeover of Twitter and election-year political antics have earned him a new wave of haters.
Some of them own Teslas. Hiller’s most popular sticker reads, “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy.” He told SFGATE he’s now sold 15,000 anti-Musk stickers — and California is his biggest market.
Hiller launched the side hustle after test driving a Tesla. He said he’d wanted the car, but then decided handing $40,000 to a Musk-led company was off-limits. Hiller detested the billionaire’s actions at Twitter, now X: Musk manipulated the algorithm to boost his own posts, and amplified “all the wrong people,” Hiller said. The Honolulu resident thought he must not be alone.
“I figured at that time, there must be a lot of people like me who already have a Tesla, who are just like, 'Wow, I am embarrassed by this guy, I am sickened by this guy,'" Hiller said. So he designed the “before we knew” sticker, in simple black and white, and added it to his Etsy page in February 2023, where he previously sold a range of stickers bearing fish puns.
Sales mostly trickled in at five or six a day, on Etsy and on Amazon, but would speed up briefly after a viral X post or Reddit thread featured the sticker, Hiller said. Business Insider’s September 2023 story on the stickers didn’t name Hiller or his business, but it brought another spike. He designed other versions, like “Anti Elon Tesla Club,” and “F Elon,” using printer companies to create the stickers but doing all the packing and mailing with his wife.
Then Musk stuck his nose into the presidential race — before jumping in headfirst. He endorsed Donald Trump after the former president survived an assassination attempt in July, and went on to become Trump's most high-profile backer. He dispersed anti-immigrant tropes on X, jumped around onstage at a Trump rally (prompting a spike in sales, per Hiller), plowed money into ground campaigns and launched a $1-million-a-day lottery for swing-state voters.
The day after Trump’s Nov. 5 electoral victory, Hiller said, was his sticker shop’s biggest-ever day of sales. His Amazon storefront shows more than 2,250 purchases of anti-Musk stickers in the month before Nov. 26.
Hiller is now ordering the stickers en masse and printing huge stacks of address labels at once. He said that hundreds of the labels, almost every time, list California locations. “California is by far the highest state that I ship to, but San Francisco, within that, is certainly number one,” Hiller said.
Liberal Tesla drivers have been talking for years about a conflict between their love for the vehicles and their disdain for Musk; SFGATE reported on Bay Area drivers’ angst in 2022. The conflict appears to have even reached the Governor’s office: Gavin Newsom has announced a potential new rebate for electric-vehicle purchases, but per Bloomberg, it leaves Tesla out using a market-share clause. The top EV seller in the U.S., Tesla delivered almost 1.3 million cars from January through September.
Hiller's reviews on Etsy and Amazon reflect the gap the buyers see between their cars and Musk. Some have mentioned their love for their Model 3 or Model Y, others explain why they purchased the stickers. “Exactly what my dad wanted / needed for his Tesla, which he’s become very embarrassed by,” one Etsy reviewer wrote. Another described themself as a “Tesla owner who does not support Trump or Elon…and don’t wanna get lumped into the pool of all the weirdos that do.”
Hiller is enjoying the sales — despite slim margins and a boatload of envelope-packing work — but he hasn’t actually seen any of his stickers in the wild yet. He said he’s sold some in Hawaii since climate news site Heatmap published an interview with him, and that he’s carrying around an extra few stickers to give out as a gift.
“Every time I see a Tesla driving down the road, I turn my head. Every time I walk into a parking lot, I check every Tesla,” Hiller said. “I want to take a selfie.”
$19.7B profit
SF payments giant Visa lays off hundreds in Bay Area after turning record $19.7B profit
By Stephen Council
San Francisco’s Visa, the incredibly profitable payments company that was recently hit with a monopoly lawsuit by the Justice Department, is laying off hundreds of Bay Area workers.
The credit and debit giant announced the new cuts last Thursday in a WARN document, as is generally required in the event of mass staff reductions. The notice lists 192 layoffs in San Mateo and 10 at Visa’s headquarters in Mission Bay. They add to the 91 Bay Area layoffs that Visa previously announced in a WARN from early November.
Both rounds of November cuts slashed workers from Visa’s upper management. The first, per a Nov. 1 document, included four senior vice presidents and 17 vice presidents, 17 senior directors and 17 directors.
Last Thursday’s layoffs hit two senior vice presidents, five vice presidents, 29 senior directors and 23 directors. Dozens of engineers and technical program managers also lost their jobs in the latest round. Already, a few laid-off Visa workers have flocked to LinkedIn with posts looking for new job leads and reminiscing on their careers at the company.
The WARNs seem to confirm October reporting from the Wall Street Journal, which said that Visa was planning to lay off 1,400 employees and contractors by the end of the year, with about 1,000 of those workers in technology roles. The payments company, in a September filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, said it had about 31,600 employees.
Visa spokesperson Fletcher Cook told SFGATE on Tuesday that the new cuts are part of those reported by the Journal but didn’t confirm the 1,400 total. She added that laid off workers will be offered severance packages and counseling and outplacement services.
“We expect to grow the number of employees at Visa this year, next year, and for the foreseeable future,” Cook wrote. “However, we continuously evolve our operating model to better serve clients and accelerate innovation and growth, which can lead to the elimination of some roles.”
The cuts come amid record profits at Visa. During the company’s 2024 fiscal year, which ended in September, Visa turned a $19.7 billion profit on $35.9 billion in revenue — an enviable margin in the corporate world. The successful financial year has driven Visa’s market cap up almost 20% since January; at a $603 billion valuation, the company is one of the 20 largest public firms in America.
It’s also got a major legal problem. In September, the Justice Department announced a civil antitrust suit against Visa, alleging that the company wields its vast scale to illegally maintain a monopoly in the debit sector. Attorney General Merrick Garland accused Visa of forcing higher costs on merchants and banks, which are then passed along to consumers. The Justice Department already blocked a merger between Visa and San Francisco tech startup Plaid in 2021 with another antitrust complaint.
Cook, writing to SFGATE Thursday, defended Visa by saying there’s an “ever-expanding universe of companies offering new ways to pay for goods and services” and touted Visa’s network as secure and reliable, not monopolistic. It’s a statement similar to the one Visa CEO Ryan McInerney gave in an October earnings call.
“We believe the lawsuit is meritless and shows a clear lack of understanding of the payments ecosystem in the United States,” McInerney said. “We will defend ourselves vigorously and are confident in our ability to demonstrate that Visa competes for every transaction in a thriving debit space that continues to grow and see new entrants.”
By Stephen Council
San Francisco’s Visa, the incredibly profitable payments company that was recently hit with a monopoly lawsuit by the Justice Department, is laying off hundreds of Bay Area workers.
The credit and debit giant announced the new cuts last Thursday in a WARN document, as is generally required in the event of mass staff reductions. The notice lists 192 layoffs in San Mateo and 10 at Visa’s headquarters in Mission Bay. They add to the 91 Bay Area layoffs that Visa previously announced in a WARN from early November.
Both rounds of November cuts slashed workers from Visa’s upper management. The first, per a Nov. 1 document, included four senior vice presidents and 17 vice presidents, 17 senior directors and 17 directors.
Last Thursday’s layoffs hit two senior vice presidents, five vice presidents, 29 senior directors and 23 directors. Dozens of engineers and technical program managers also lost their jobs in the latest round. Already, a few laid-off Visa workers have flocked to LinkedIn with posts looking for new job leads and reminiscing on their careers at the company.
The WARNs seem to confirm October reporting from the Wall Street Journal, which said that Visa was planning to lay off 1,400 employees and contractors by the end of the year, with about 1,000 of those workers in technology roles. The payments company, in a September filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, said it had about 31,600 employees.
Visa spokesperson Fletcher Cook told SFGATE on Tuesday that the new cuts are part of those reported by the Journal but didn’t confirm the 1,400 total. She added that laid off workers will be offered severance packages and counseling and outplacement services.
“We expect to grow the number of employees at Visa this year, next year, and for the foreseeable future,” Cook wrote. “However, we continuously evolve our operating model to better serve clients and accelerate innovation and growth, which can lead to the elimination of some roles.”
The cuts come amid record profits at Visa. During the company’s 2024 fiscal year, which ended in September, Visa turned a $19.7 billion profit on $35.9 billion in revenue — an enviable margin in the corporate world. The successful financial year has driven Visa’s market cap up almost 20% since January; at a $603 billion valuation, the company is one of the 20 largest public firms in America.
It’s also got a major legal problem. In September, the Justice Department announced a civil antitrust suit against Visa, alleging that the company wields its vast scale to illegally maintain a monopoly in the debit sector. Attorney General Merrick Garland accused Visa of forcing higher costs on merchants and banks, which are then passed along to consumers. The Justice Department already blocked a merger between Visa and San Francisco tech startup Plaid in 2021 with another antitrust complaint.
Cook, writing to SFGATE Thursday, defended Visa by saying there’s an “ever-expanding universe of companies offering new ways to pay for goods and services” and touted Visa’s network as secure and reliable, not monopolistic. It’s a statement similar to the one Visa CEO Ryan McInerney gave in an October earnings call.
“We believe the lawsuit is meritless and shows a clear lack of understanding of the payments ecosystem in the United States,” McInerney said. “We will defend ourselves vigorously and are confident in our ability to demonstrate that Visa competes for every transaction in a thriving debit space that continues to grow and see new entrants.”
Birthright Citizenship
The Plot Against Birthright Citizenship
The incoming Trump administration wants to take away citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants. Here’s how.
Isabela Dias
In August 2015, Donald Trump sat down to talk with then–Fox News host Bill O’Reilly about one of his central campaign promises: the mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants. “Our country is going to hell,” Trump said. “We have to start a process where we take back our country.”
O’Reilly found the plan ridiculous. Such a colossal and expensive undertaking, the conservative host said, would take decades. Before then, the courts would stop sweeping raids. The idea, O’Reilly continued, was just “not going to happen.” Perhaps the most obvious reason why, he said, was the 14th Amendment, which “says if you’re born here, you’re an American—and you can’t kick Americans out.” O’Reilly almost screamed at one point: “If you’re born here, you’re an American—period! Period!”
Trump was unconvinced. “Many lawyers are saying that’s not the way it is,” he insisted. The incoming president’s view then, and now, is that the American children of undocumented immigrants should not be entitled to automatic citizenship. And, if prompted to weigh in on this issue, he thought the courts would agree.
“I’d much rather find out whether or not ‘anchor babies’ are actually citizens,” Trump said, “because a lot of people don’t think they are.”
The first Trump administration didn’t test this theory. The second one likely will. The former president has made the end of birthright citizenship a cornerstone of his immigration agenda and mass deportation plan. Automatic citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, Trump said in a campaign video from May 2023, “is based on a historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law.”
In his next term, Trump will aim to dispute more than a century of legal precedent and deal a blow to a bedrock constitutional understanding of what it means to be an American citizen. He cannot change everything with the stroke of a pen. But Trump can—and says he will—begin the long task of dismantling birthright citizenship. There is a playbook, decades in the making.
The process would begin with a presidential action. Couching it as an attempt to tackle the threat of an “illegal foreign invasion” in the form of unlawful migration, Trump has promised to sign an executive order on day one that would challenge birthright citizenship. The proposed rule would instruct federal agencies to deny passports and Social Security numbers to children born to immigrants, unless one of the parents is a citizen or green card holder. Crucially, his candidacy platform stated, the executive order would “explain the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment.”
The 14th amendment’s Citizenship Clause establishes that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Ratified after the Civil War to nullify the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which ruled that Black Americans couldn’t be citizens of the United States, it defined citizenship and enshrined the long-standing doctrine of jus solis (“right of soil”)—meaning citizenship by place of birth—in constitutional law.
While the president-elect can’t end birthright citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants with an executive order alone, he can conceivably set up a legal challenge to the reigning interpretation. As Trump hinted at in the 2015 interview with O’Reilly, he and his allies might look at the courts to do their bidding. And they have a playbook for it: undermine the lesser-known Supreme Court landmark decision in the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case reaffirming the guarantee of citizenship to virtually everyone born in the United States.
For years, opponents of birthright citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants have toyed with the possibility of overturning the Wong Kim Ark precedent. Increasingly, such a line of attack seems less hypothetical—especially in light of a Supreme Court conservative supermajority that has demonstrated a willingness to undo their major rulings, like Roe v. Wade, regardless of what the political repercussions and real-life consequences might be.
Inviting the Supreme Court to revisit Wong Kim Ark, explains Robert L. Tsai, a professor of constitutional law at Boston University, “would give the Trump administration the opportunity to ask the court to either overrule or narrow” the well-established legal precedent. “You’ve got a president and a bunch of people around him who disagree fundamentally with notions of citizenship and how they’ve been done for a very long time,” he says. “We’re going to find out just how far they can push those changes.”
It would be nothing short of seismic. “It’s really 100 years of accepted interpretation,” Hiroshi Motomura, a scholar of immigration and citizenship at UCLA’s law school, told me of birthright citizenship. Ending birthright citizenship would cut at the core of the hard-fought assurance of equal treatment under the law, he said, “basically drawing a line between two kinds of American citizens.”
To understand how an attack on birthright citizenship could be mounted, let alone prevail, it’s important to know what stands in the way of it.
Wong Kim Ark was careful. Before he departed California in 1894—boarding a steamship to visit his parents in the Guangdong province of China—Kim Ark ensured he had all the required documents to return. Born in San Francisco in the 1870s to immigrants of humble means—who resettled in China after several years of permanent residence in America—Kim Ark had made the trip before without much trouble. In one of those travels to the family’s ancestral home, in 1889, he married Yee Shee, with whom he would have four children.
But this time, anti-Chinese animus, violence, and laws were on the rise. In 1882, the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The law barred the naturalization of Chinese nationals and the immigration of laborers from China, who were perceived as a threat to the white working class. It marked the first federal restriction on immigration explicitly based on race.
As Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov detail in their 2021 book, American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship, Kim Ark, who worked as a cook from an early age, carried with him an affidavit signed by three white men as witnesses to prove he had been born in California. Still, when he arrived at the San Francisco port aboard the Coptic in August 1895, a customs collector by the name of John Wise denied him entry. Kim Ark was held offshore for five months.
Wise, known for his anti-Chinese bias, considered himself a “zealous opponent of Chinese immigration.” He made it exceedingly difficult for even those exempted from the ban—such as merchants, diplomats, and teachers—to be allowed into the United States. Once, Wise even wrote a poem mocking a Chinese man he had ordered deported that read, “So just to make this poor Wong Fong feel very good and nice, I’ve sent him back to China where he can eat his mice.”
At the time, anti-Chinese exclusionists had been looking for a test case to challenge birthright citizenship. They considered Chinese Americans incapable of assimilating. But the law had been clear that did not matter. A federal court had ruled just a few years earlier that a 14-year-old born in California to Chinese immigrants—who had been barred by customs officials—was a citizen under English common law and the 14th Amendment. In Kim Ark, they thought they had found an opportunity to set a different legal precedent.
With help from the Chinese Six Companies organization and lawyer Thomas Riordan, Kim Ark filed a habeas corpus petition challenging his confinement and defending his right to reenter the United States as a recognized native-born citizen. “Think of all the people in this country who have been born of parents who owed allegiance to either Great Britain, Germany, Italy, or some other European power,” Riordan argued in court. “Are all of these people to be declared not citizens?”
His goal beyond helping Kim Ark, Nackenoff and Novkov write, was to “have the broad principle of citizenship settled for all time.”
On behalf of the federal government, US District Attorney Henry S. Foote made the case that Kim Ark had become a citizen by “accident of birth” and his “education and political affiliations remained entirely alien to the United States.” Because Wong’s parents were ineligible for naturalization and “subjects of the Emperor of China,” the argument went, Kim Ark himself was “by reason of his race, language, color and dress, a Chinese person.”
A district court judge disagreed, finding that “it is enough that he was born here, whatever was the status of his parents” and that a ruling against Kim Ark, would have resulted in countless people “denationalized and remanded to a state of alienage.”
The government appealed and the case went before the Supreme Court. Delivering a 6–2 decision in March 1898, the justices determined that Kim Ark was indeed a citizen, regardless of his parents’ ancestry. “The 14th Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory” Justice Horace Gray wrote for the majority, “including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory.”
To exclude “from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries,” the opinion continued, “would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”
Chief Justice Melville Fuller dissented, arguing that the 14th Amendment didn’t “arbitrarily make citizens of children born in the United States of parents who, according to the will of their native government and of this Government, are and must remain aliens.”
Nonetheless, the majority’s understanding of the 14th Amendment provided, in no uncertain terms, that birthright citizenship extended to the children of immigrants, even those unable to naturalize. The case had little repercussion in the press at the time and its details have probably eluded many Americans since. Kim Ark and his sons even continued to encounter a myriad of obstacles when traveling in and out of the United States in the ensuing years. But had it not been for Wong Kim Ark, University of New Hampshire historian Lucy Salyer told the Post in 2018, the United States would not be a nation of immigrants, but rather “colonies of foreigners.”
Most legal scholars consider the issue of birthright citizenship settled law. They agree that the key language of the Citizenship Clause—“subject to the jurisdiction”—carves out only two exceptions: the children of foreign diplomats and Native Americans under tribal rule. (In 1924, Congress extended citizenship to all Native Americans born in the country.)
But for years, immigration restrictionists have continued to advocate for amending or reinterpreting the 14th Amendment, charging that birthright citizenship serves as a “magnet” for unlawful immigration and so-called “birth tourism.” Specifically, they argue that children of undocumented immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because of their parents’ irregular status.
Trump attorney John Eastman has said, being born on US soil is not sufficient to confer automatic citizenship. That right should be contingent on “a total and exclusive allegiance” to the United States. In a 2018 Washington Post op-ed, former Trump national security official and Hillsdale College lecturer Michael Anton made the case that Congress could “clarify legislatively that the children of noncitizens” are not citizens under the 14th Amendment.
In the absence of congressional action, some on the right believe Trump should take matter into his own hands. “Judges faithful to their oaths will have no choice but to agree with him,” Anton wrote. “Birthright citizenship was a mistake whose time has gone.” For modern-day critics of birthright citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants, undermining or, at least, circumventing the well-established legal precedent in Wong Kim Ark could be the way to set things in motion.
Opponents like Anton and Eastman have argued that the justices’ ruling in Wong Kim Ark merely applied to the children of legal immigrants like Kim Ark’s parents and never directly addressed the question of those born to unauthorized noncitizens. Attacking the Wong Kim Ark decision as “erroneous and overly-broad,” Eastman has urged the courts to revisit or limit its interpretation.
Rogers M. Smith, a University of Pennsylvania political science professor and co-author of Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity, is part of a minority of constitutional scholars who share that perspective. “It makes no reference whatsoever for the status of unauthorized aliens, which is why I think it doesn’t address that topic,” he told me. “Lots of people think it does by implication, but that’s clearly an argument that could be challenged.”
How the justices would respond to it is anyone’s guess. During the confirmation hearing of Justice Samuel Alito in 2006, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York asked the nominee if he agreed that “all persons mean all persons” according to the 14th Amendment and if a statute to deny citizenship to the US-born children of undocumented parents would be constitutional. Alito did not respond one way or the other, but nodded at “active legal disputes about the meaning of that provision.” If the question came before him as a sitting justice, he said on the occasion, it could “turn out to be a compelling argument or a frivolous argument or something in between.” More recently, Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to opine on the matter.
Because Wong Kim Ark is overwhelmingly considered good law, the Trump administration could also try to work around it. Instead of arguing that the case should be overruled, they could refer to a specific line in the decision: the exemption of children “of enemies within and during a hostile occupation.” Per that reasoning, unauthorized immigrants could be declared perpetrators of an “invasion” of US territory and their children excluded from the birthright citizenship guarantee under the 14th Amendment.
“It’s kind of an ugly analogy,” Smith says, “but that doesn’t mean the Supreme Court won’t accept it.” He attributes the untested argument to a changed political context in which “conservative judges on the bench have opened the doors for right-wing constitutional arguments that were previously viewed as beyond the pale, as too extreme.”
And they might have already found an opening. Judge James C. Ho, who Trump appointed to the ultraconservative 5th Circuit and is thought to be a contender for a vacant seat in the Supreme Court, recently appeared to signal he would consider this theory against birthright citizenship—in what observers have flagged as a notable departure from his previously unflinching endorsement of the accepted understanding and a not-so-subtle effort to prove his loyalty to Trump.
“Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment,” Judge Ho wrote in 2006. “That birthright is protected no less for children of undocumented persons than for descendants of Mayflower passengers.” He added: “Text, history, judicial precedent, and Executive Branch interpretation confirm that the Citizenship Clause reaches most US-born children of aliens, including illegal aliens.”
But in an interview with conservative law professor Josh Blackman, Judge Ho suggested there is “a direct connection between birthright citizenship and invasion.” He was alluding to the idea that migrants coming to the United States constitute an “invasion,” a largely dismissed theory advanced by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and others to justify states taking extraordinary actions to crackdown on migration. “Birthright citizenship obviously doesn’t apply in case of war or invasion. No one to my knowledge has ever argued that the children of invading aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship,” Judge Ho said.
“Effectively, what he’s saying is that even though there’s a guarantee of birthright citizenship,” explains Evan Bernick, an assistant professor of law at Northern Illinois University and co-author of The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit, “the president can kind of turn it off by declaring an invasion and try to remove whoever he says is invading…It’s not even a loophole, it swallows the entire guarantee.” The fact that Trump referred to a foreign invasion in his campaign video, he adds, suggests they might be anticipating litigation and trying to “boost as much as possible their very minimal odds.”
In combination with a touted denaturalization program, it could be a “prelude” to mass deportation. “Even if this ultimately dies in the sense that a majority of the Supreme Court ultimately rejects it,” Bernick says, “it’s worth taking both literally and seriously. It’s not something that can be laughed off in the way that the proposition that a 33-year-old is eligible for the presidency can be laughed off. It’s real. It’s serious. These people believe it and they’re not just doing it because they think Trump wants it. There’s a real constitutional conviction on the part of the people who argue this.”
The incoming Trump administration wants to take away citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants. Here’s how.
Isabela Dias
In August 2015, Donald Trump sat down to talk with then–Fox News host Bill O’Reilly about one of his central campaign promises: the mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants. “Our country is going to hell,” Trump said. “We have to start a process where we take back our country.”
O’Reilly found the plan ridiculous. Such a colossal and expensive undertaking, the conservative host said, would take decades. Before then, the courts would stop sweeping raids. The idea, O’Reilly continued, was just “not going to happen.” Perhaps the most obvious reason why, he said, was the 14th Amendment, which “says if you’re born here, you’re an American—and you can’t kick Americans out.” O’Reilly almost screamed at one point: “If you’re born here, you’re an American—period! Period!”
Trump was unconvinced. “Many lawyers are saying that’s not the way it is,” he insisted. The incoming president’s view then, and now, is that the American children of undocumented immigrants should not be entitled to automatic citizenship. And, if prompted to weigh in on this issue, he thought the courts would agree.
“I’d much rather find out whether or not ‘anchor babies’ are actually citizens,” Trump said, “because a lot of people don’t think they are.”
The first Trump administration didn’t test this theory. The second one likely will. The former president has made the end of birthright citizenship a cornerstone of his immigration agenda and mass deportation plan. Automatic citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, Trump said in a campaign video from May 2023, “is based on a historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law.”
In his next term, Trump will aim to dispute more than a century of legal precedent and deal a blow to a bedrock constitutional understanding of what it means to be an American citizen. He cannot change everything with the stroke of a pen. But Trump can—and says he will—begin the long task of dismantling birthright citizenship. There is a playbook, decades in the making.
The process would begin with a presidential action. Couching it as an attempt to tackle the threat of an “illegal foreign invasion” in the form of unlawful migration, Trump has promised to sign an executive order on day one that would challenge birthright citizenship. The proposed rule would instruct federal agencies to deny passports and Social Security numbers to children born to immigrants, unless one of the parents is a citizen or green card holder. Crucially, his candidacy platform stated, the executive order would “explain the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment.”
The 14th amendment’s Citizenship Clause establishes that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Ratified after the Civil War to nullify the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which ruled that Black Americans couldn’t be citizens of the United States, it defined citizenship and enshrined the long-standing doctrine of jus solis (“right of soil”)—meaning citizenship by place of birth—in constitutional law.
While the president-elect can’t end birthright citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants with an executive order alone, he can conceivably set up a legal challenge to the reigning interpretation. As Trump hinted at in the 2015 interview with O’Reilly, he and his allies might look at the courts to do their bidding. And they have a playbook for it: undermine the lesser-known Supreme Court landmark decision in the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case reaffirming the guarantee of citizenship to virtually everyone born in the United States.
For years, opponents of birthright citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants have toyed with the possibility of overturning the Wong Kim Ark precedent. Increasingly, such a line of attack seems less hypothetical—especially in light of a Supreme Court conservative supermajority that has demonstrated a willingness to undo their major rulings, like Roe v. Wade, regardless of what the political repercussions and real-life consequences might be.
Inviting the Supreme Court to revisit Wong Kim Ark, explains Robert L. Tsai, a professor of constitutional law at Boston University, “would give the Trump administration the opportunity to ask the court to either overrule or narrow” the well-established legal precedent. “You’ve got a president and a bunch of people around him who disagree fundamentally with notions of citizenship and how they’ve been done for a very long time,” he says. “We’re going to find out just how far they can push those changes.”
It would be nothing short of seismic. “It’s really 100 years of accepted interpretation,” Hiroshi Motomura, a scholar of immigration and citizenship at UCLA’s law school, told me of birthright citizenship. Ending birthright citizenship would cut at the core of the hard-fought assurance of equal treatment under the law, he said, “basically drawing a line between two kinds of American citizens.”
To understand how an attack on birthright citizenship could be mounted, let alone prevail, it’s important to know what stands in the way of it.
Wong Kim Ark was careful. Before he departed California in 1894—boarding a steamship to visit his parents in the Guangdong province of China—Kim Ark ensured he had all the required documents to return. Born in San Francisco in the 1870s to immigrants of humble means—who resettled in China after several years of permanent residence in America—Kim Ark had made the trip before without much trouble. In one of those travels to the family’s ancestral home, in 1889, he married Yee Shee, with whom he would have four children.
But this time, anti-Chinese animus, violence, and laws were on the rise. In 1882, the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The law barred the naturalization of Chinese nationals and the immigration of laborers from China, who were perceived as a threat to the white working class. It marked the first federal restriction on immigration explicitly based on race.
As Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov detail in their 2021 book, American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship, Kim Ark, who worked as a cook from an early age, carried with him an affidavit signed by three white men as witnesses to prove he had been born in California. Still, when he arrived at the San Francisco port aboard the Coptic in August 1895, a customs collector by the name of John Wise denied him entry. Kim Ark was held offshore for five months.
Wise, known for his anti-Chinese bias, considered himself a “zealous opponent of Chinese immigration.” He made it exceedingly difficult for even those exempted from the ban—such as merchants, diplomats, and teachers—to be allowed into the United States. Once, Wise even wrote a poem mocking a Chinese man he had ordered deported that read, “So just to make this poor Wong Fong feel very good and nice, I’ve sent him back to China where he can eat his mice.”
At the time, anti-Chinese exclusionists had been looking for a test case to challenge birthright citizenship. They considered Chinese Americans incapable of assimilating. But the law had been clear that did not matter. A federal court had ruled just a few years earlier that a 14-year-old born in California to Chinese immigrants—who had been barred by customs officials—was a citizen under English common law and the 14th Amendment. In Kim Ark, they thought they had found an opportunity to set a different legal precedent.
With help from the Chinese Six Companies organization and lawyer Thomas Riordan, Kim Ark filed a habeas corpus petition challenging his confinement and defending his right to reenter the United States as a recognized native-born citizen. “Think of all the people in this country who have been born of parents who owed allegiance to either Great Britain, Germany, Italy, or some other European power,” Riordan argued in court. “Are all of these people to be declared not citizens?”
His goal beyond helping Kim Ark, Nackenoff and Novkov write, was to “have the broad principle of citizenship settled for all time.”
On behalf of the federal government, US District Attorney Henry S. Foote made the case that Kim Ark had become a citizen by “accident of birth” and his “education and political affiliations remained entirely alien to the United States.” Because Wong’s parents were ineligible for naturalization and “subjects of the Emperor of China,” the argument went, Kim Ark himself was “by reason of his race, language, color and dress, a Chinese person.”
A district court judge disagreed, finding that “it is enough that he was born here, whatever was the status of his parents” and that a ruling against Kim Ark, would have resulted in countless people “denationalized and remanded to a state of alienage.”
The government appealed and the case went before the Supreme Court. Delivering a 6–2 decision in March 1898, the justices determined that Kim Ark was indeed a citizen, regardless of his parents’ ancestry. “The 14th Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory” Justice Horace Gray wrote for the majority, “including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory.”
To exclude “from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries,” the opinion continued, “would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”
Chief Justice Melville Fuller dissented, arguing that the 14th Amendment didn’t “arbitrarily make citizens of children born in the United States of parents who, according to the will of their native government and of this Government, are and must remain aliens.”
Nonetheless, the majority’s understanding of the 14th Amendment provided, in no uncertain terms, that birthright citizenship extended to the children of immigrants, even those unable to naturalize. The case had little repercussion in the press at the time and its details have probably eluded many Americans since. Kim Ark and his sons even continued to encounter a myriad of obstacles when traveling in and out of the United States in the ensuing years. But had it not been for Wong Kim Ark, University of New Hampshire historian Lucy Salyer told the Post in 2018, the United States would not be a nation of immigrants, but rather “colonies of foreigners.”
Most legal scholars consider the issue of birthright citizenship settled law. They agree that the key language of the Citizenship Clause—“subject to the jurisdiction”—carves out only two exceptions: the children of foreign diplomats and Native Americans under tribal rule. (In 1924, Congress extended citizenship to all Native Americans born in the country.)
But for years, immigration restrictionists have continued to advocate for amending or reinterpreting the 14th Amendment, charging that birthright citizenship serves as a “magnet” for unlawful immigration and so-called “birth tourism.” Specifically, they argue that children of undocumented immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because of their parents’ irregular status.
Trump attorney John Eastman has said, being born on US soil is not sufficient to confer automatic citizenship. That right should be contingent on “a total and exclusive allegiance” to the United States. In a 2018 Washington Post op-ed, former Trump national security official and Hillsdale College lecturer Michael Anton made the case that Congress could “clarify legislatively that the children of noncitizens” are not citizens under the 14th Amendment.
In the absence of congressional action, some on the right believe Trump should take matter into his own hands. “Judges faithful to their oaths will have no choice but to agree with him,” Anton wrote. “Birthright citizenship was a mistake whose time has gone.” For modern-day critics of birthright citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrants, undermining or, at least, circumventing the well-established legal precedent in Wong Kim Ark could be the way to set things in motion.
Opponents like Anton and Eastman have argued that the justices’ ruling in Wong Kim Ark merely applied to the children of legal immigrants like Kim Ark’s parents and never directly addressed the question of those born to unauthorized noncitizens. Attacking the Wong Kim Ark decision as “erroneous and overly-broad,” Eastman has urged the courts to revisit or limit its interpretation.
Rogers M. Smith, a University of Pennsylvania political science professor and co-author of Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity, is part of a minority of constitutional scholars who share that perspective. “It makes no reference whatsoever for the status of unauthorized aliens, which is why I think it doesn’t address that topic,” he told me. “Lots of people think it does by implication, but that’s clearly an argument that could be challenged.”
How the justices would respond to it is anyone’s guess. During the confirmation hearing of Justice Samuel Alito in 2006, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York asked the nominee if he agreed that “all persons mean all persons” according to the 14th Amendment and if a statute to deny citizenship to the US-born children of undocumented parents would be constitutional. Alito did not respond one way or the other, but nodded at “active legal disputes about the meaning of that provision.” If the question came before him as a sitting justice, he said on the occasion, it could “turn out to be a compelling argument or a frivolous argument or something in between.” More recently, Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to opine on the matter.
Because Wong Kim Ark is overwhelmingly considered good law, the Trump administration could also try to work around it. Instead of arguing that the case should be overruled, they could refer to a specific line in the decision: the exemption of children “of enemies within and during a hostile occupation.” Per that reasoning, unauthorized immigrants could be declared perpetrators of an “invasion” of US territory and their children excluded from the birthright citizenship guarantee under the 14th Amendment.
“It’s kind of an ugly analogy,” Smith says, “but that doesn’t mean the Supreme Court won’t accept it.” He attributes the untested argument to a changed political context in which “conservative judges on the bench have opened the doors for right-wing constitutional arguments that were previously viewed as beyond the pale, as too extreme.”
And they might have already found an opening. Judge James C. Ho, who Trump appointed to the ultraconservative 5th Circuit and is thought to be a contender for a vacant seat in the Supreme Court, recently appeared to signal he would consider this theory against birthright citizenship—in what observers have flagged as a notable departure from his previously unflinching endorsement of the accepted understanding and a not-so-subtle effort to prove his loyalty to Trump.
“Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment,” Judge Ho wrote in 2006. “That birthright is protected no less for children of undocumented persons than for descendants of Mayflower passengers.” He added: “Text, history, judicial precedent, and Executive Branch interpretation confirm that the Citizenship Clause reaches most US-born children of aliens, including illegal aliens.”
But in an interview with conservative law professor Josh Blackman, Judge Ho suggested there is “a direct connection between birthright citizenship and invasion.” He was alluding to the idea that migrants coming to the United States constitute an “invasion,” a largely dismissed theory advanced by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and others to justify states taking extraordinary actions to crackdown on migration. “Birthright citizenship obviously doesn’t apply in case of war or invasion. No one to my knowledge has ever argued that the children of invading aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship,” Judge Ho said.
“Effectively, what he’s saying is that even though there’s a guarantee of birthright citizenship,” explains Evan Bernick, an assistant professor of law at Northern Illinois University and co-author of The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit, “the president can kind of turn it off by declaring an invasion and try to remove whoever he says is invading…It’s not even a loophole, it swallows the entire guarantee.” The fact that Trump referred to a foreign invasion in his campaign video, he adds, suggests they might be anticipating litigation and trying to “boost as much as possible their very minimal odds.”
In combination with a touted denaturalization program, it could be a “prelude” to mass deportation. “Even if this ultimately dies in the sense that a majority of the Supreme Court ultimately rejects it,” Bernick says, “it’s worth taking both literally and seriously. It’s not something that can be laughed off in the way that the proposition that a 33-year-old is eligible for the presidency can be laughed off. It’s real. It’s serious. These people believe it and they’re not just doing it because they think Trump wants it. There’s a real constitutional conviction on the part of the people who argue this.”
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