Video by Faiz Shakir and Addison Post

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FAIZ SHAKIR, MORE PERFECT UNION: We know the problem.

SHAKIR: For at least five decades now, America has created a tax code that favors wealth accumulation by the rich over the income earned by workers, resulting in a record-setting wealth gap.

SHAKIR: Fortunately, the American public is loud and clear as to what needs to happen.

PROTEST CLIPS: Tax the rich! Tax the rich!

SHAKIR: But How? How specifically are we going to tax the rich? I traveled to meet with the ultra-wealthy…

NICK HANAUER, ENTREPENUR AND VENTURE CAPITALIST, TO SHAKIR: I mean I know a bunch of these people personally. A lot of these people are narcissistic sociopaths. They just don’t give a rip about anyone but themselves.

SHAKIR: …tax and budget experts…

MICHAEL LINDEN, TAX AND BUDGET PROFESSOR AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, TO SHAKIR: We know for a fact that some of these very, very wealthy people and corporations are literally paying zero.

SHAKIR: …and even anti-tax conservatives to better understand how our tax code works.

SHAKIR, TO GROVER NORQUITS, ANTI-TAX ADVOCATE: In your view, trickle down does work.

NORQUITS: Well, it does trickle down.

SHAKIR: What I learned is that making our tax code work for everyone is not so complicated and that if we want to solve it, we can draw inspiration from the very man whose ‘Reagonomics’ led us into this mess.

SHAKIR: We’ll discuss three key ways to put a big tax on extreme wealth, so that we produce less of it. Let’s get into it.

This is Big Ideas, from More Perfect Union.

Corporations discard millions of pounds of fish every year while people lose access to rivers, and the media is sleeping on the story. Now the working class is fighting back, and their rage could flip the U.S. Senate.

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LIZ SCHELTENS, MORE PERFECT UNION: These ships have a secret.

BILL HILL, COMMERCIAL FISHERMAN AND INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS: This is hidden. You can’t see it because it’s underwater.

SCHELTENS: This is some of the first high-definition underwater footage of an industrial bottom-trawler at work, and ships like these have become the focus of intense political debate here in Alaska.

ALASKAN FISHERMAN TO SCHELTENS: Eventually, when there’s just no fish, what do they do?

ALASKAN BUSINESS OWNER: They’re raping the seas.

SCHELTENS: Over the last four decades, the corporate owners of these trawl ships built a political empire to help protect their profit margins. But in recent years, some of Alaska’s most important fish stocks have collapsed.

And people here are demanding answers and action.

ALEXUS KWACHKA, COMMERCIAL FISHERMAN: People are losing their way of life!

CHARLIE WRIGHT, ALASKA NATIVE FISHERMAN: It’s all for money, and it’s all political. Letting the trawlers take the fish and starving us along the river. I call it a modern-day genocide.

LOUIS KENDRICK, COMMERCIAL FISHERMAN: Who’s representing the common fisherman? No one! We don’t have any lobbyists.

SCHELTENS: I came to Alaska because I wanted to understand this anger. Was this just social media outrage spilling over into real life, as some critics have argued?

McDonald’s prices have doubled in the last ten years. The profits have gone mostly to shareholders, who got nearly $40 billion in dividends over the past decade while customers suffer and workers are underpaid.

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SANYA DOSANI, MORE PERFECT UNION: I came to McDonald’s for a quick, cheap, and easy meal, but McDonald’s has changed a lot since the last time I was here. $5 for a medium french fry. You pretty much can’t get anything for less than $10.

My food took a lot longer than I expected. And while I waited, I noticed how boring and bland the restaurant looked. Remember when McDonald’s used to be fun?

DOSANI, AT THE TABLE WITH MCDONALD’S MEAL: Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Do you think that’s really a quarter pound of beef?

Only one pickle.

DOSANI, EATING QUARTER POUNDER: Honestly, that’s good

DOSANI, EATING FRIES: That slaps. Not going to lie, the [burger] is a lot smaller than I thought it would be.

Back in 2014, these were the average prices of some popular McDonald’s menu items. And here are the prices ten years later. Everything rose by at least 50 percent. The Quarter Pounder meal more than doubled in price. Over that same decade, prices for other consumer goods only rose 31 percent.

It’s not just McDonald’s. All fast food prices are way outpacing inflation.

And what are we getting for that increased cost?

To find out what’s really going on in the kitchens, I reached out to a former McDonald’s corporate chef.

MIKE HARACZ, FORMER MCDONALD’S CORPORATE CHEF: They are willing to serve not as good of a product because I can make more money and serve more people. Make it as cheap as possible so they can get more profit.

DOSANI: Fast food used to be cheap, filling, and obviously fast. But not anymore. So, why does fast food suck now?

Video by Dan Lieberman and Paul Blest

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DAN LIEBERMAN, MORE PERFECT UNION: We’ve heard a lot about waste and fraud in programs like Medicaid and SNAP. But what if I told you that the biggest waste of taxpayer money isn’t due to people like this:

NORMA HUFFMAN, LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS RESIDENT: Him and I fight on who’s going to eat that day. Him and I fight on how my medicine is gonna get paid for.

LIEBERMAN: It’s this.

LIEBERMAN: And behind the political rhetoric…

LIEBERMAN: …there is a lot of money being made.

SARAH GRUSIN, SENIOR ATTORNEY AT THE NATIONAL HEALTH LAW PROGRAM: We’re easily talking billions of dollars.

LUKE FARRELL, FORMER SENIOR ADVISOR FOR TECHNOLOGY AND DELIVERY, WHITE HOUSE DOMESTIC POLICY COUNCIL: The more complicated it is to make a change, the more profitable it is.

LIEBERMAN: So we looked into the companies hired to run the systems standing between Americans getting the help they need…

HUFFMAN: They’re wanting so many pieces of proof that I have no money.

LIEBERMAN: …or falling through the cracks.

OLIVIA CLEAVELAND, LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS RESIDENT: I’ve been struggling with this for years. You’ll get it, it’ll get cut off, you’ll have to redo the process all over again.

LIEBERMAN: Because in this system, working families are set up to fail, while corporations reap the benefits.

STATE SEN. BRYAN KING (R-AR): It makes bank robbers look like at least honest crooks in this deal.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA): We need a system with accountability.

HUFFMAN: Who’s running this system? That’s the problem.

INSIDE THE BUSINESS OF WELFARE

Video by John Russell and Josh Hirschfeld-Kroen

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KENNY, SOFTWARE ENGINEER AND ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANT: You would think [Artificial Intelligence] would make my job easier. But it’s actually harder. I’m doing more work.

REP. RO KHANNA (D-CA): And by the way, are you getting paid more for that more work you’re doing?

KENNY: No.

KHANNA: So you’re more productive, you’re using the tools of AI, you’re doing more work, and who’s benefiting?

CHRIS, FORMER VERIZON EMPLOYEE AND ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANT: [The] CEO.

KENNY: Yep.

JOHN RUSSELL, MORE PERFECT UNION: You say CEOs?

KHANNA: That’s the whole problem.

RUSSELL: The world is changing, fast —

RUSSELL, SEARCHING FOR WAYMO: There it is. Right there. Oh my gosh, it’s in the middle of the road.

RUSSELL: — and nowhere is that more obvious than Silicon Valley…

RUSSELL, RUNNING AFTER WAYMO: No, wait. That’s me. I’m here. Okay.

RUSSELL GETS INSIDE OF THE WAYMO

RUSSELL, TO THE WAYMO AI: Hey, for John?

RUSSELL: …where the cars drive you, AI is everywhere you look, and the CEOs sound like this:

RUSSELL: But thousands of miles away, in parts of the country that have lived through massive job loss before, all this talk of automation hits a little different.

CHRIS, TO RUSSELL: What is a data center? Where’s that mark on history? The industry that killed jobs?

KHANNA, TO RUSSELL: We are ready to make the same mistake we made in globalization, only at a much bigger scale.

RUSSELL: RO KHANNA represents Silicon Valley in Congress.

KHANNA: One-third of the nation’s wealth value is sitting in a 50-mile radius around where we are.

RUSSELL: And he’s also emerged as one of their biggest critics.

RUSSELL: So when I found out that RO KHANNA was coming to Pennsylvania, I wanted to sit him down with blue-collar and white-collar workers to find out: Are we just sitting ducks?

KENNY, TO ROUNDTABLE: Is it too late? Like AI is already here — every day, a new model is coming out, and it’s getting better and better.

RUSSELL: Why does all of this feel so familiar and so inevitable?

CHRIS, TO ROUNDTABLE: I feel like we’re playing whack-a-mole, because these data centers are just popping up all over the state.

RUSSELL: And can a Silicon Valley congressman really be trusted to take on the industry, making his district so rich?

RUSSELL, TO ROUNDTABLE: This is like we walked into the weirdest bar possible —

KHANNA: In a semicircle.

RUSSELL: — in a semicircle, sitting at a bar discussing what we’re gonna do about an absolutely massive issue. Let’s start with the obvious question: How bad is this really gonna get?

Video by: Trevor Hayes and Addison Post, with additional reporting by Ben McKenzie

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TREVOR HAYES, MORE PERFECT UNION: Just a few weeks ago, President Trump gathered a group of powerful cryptocurrency executives for a press conference:

HAYES: He has good reason to be happy with these guys. Just in the last year, the Trump family made $1.4 billion off of their Cryptocurrency business, while their investors lost nearly $4 billion.

On its surface, the gap between those two numbers doesn’t look like the ‘democratized future of finance’ that cryptocurrency proponents have been promising for years. It looks much more like… a massive wealth transfer.

At the same time, the crypto industry, including the executives standing next to the president, are dumping nearly $200 million into midterm races so far.

HAYES: I wanted to know why. What did they want? Why spend all this money? Well, the industry’s answer to that question is that they really want regulation: To regulate their own industry and do right by their retail investors.

But of course, that’s not the real story. It never is.

We sat Bernie Sanders down with them for a messy debate that isn’t happening in the public right now. If we’re going to live with AI and push for a future that benefits working people, we need more conversations like this one.

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AIDAN WALKER, MORE PERFECT UNION: Lately, it seems like nobody can shut up about how AI will change the world.

WALKER: But the young people who are inheriting that world sure would like them to.

WALKER: A recent study polling adults between 18 and 34 showed that they had overwhelmingly negative opinions on AI CEOs, and a recent Pew [Research Center] study found a majority are more concerned than excited about AI. But there’s a kind of paradox in these scenes that’s easy to miss from the outside looking in.

It’s this: Gen Z is the generation that uses AI the most, and yet has the most negative opinion on it.

That contradiction isn’t represented in the mainstream conversation about AI — which is framed online as a binary debate between Luddites who’ll never touch it, and diehard power users who are looking forward to superintelligent AI solving all their problems.

We wanted to hold a real conversation that gets into all of those messy contradictions and doesn’t simplify them into a shape that’s easier to swallow. To do that, we got 15 young people, ages 18 to 25, and Senator Bernie Sanders together in a room to see what they would say.

We got into their views on AI as it relates to dating, friendship, school, the job market, and the future. Whether they’re luddites or avid AI users, pro-market Conservatives or Socialists, pessimists or optimists;

Gen Z is doing something weirder and harder than just debating whether AI is good or not. They’re figuring out how to live with it

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT), TO ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS: [AI is] kind of like building a plane as it flies — nobody really knows where it’s gonna land.

CHASE, 19, WILLISTON, VA: AI is, without a doubt, this incredible tool and it’s like ‘How are we gonna use it?’

LIAM, 20, DALLAS, PA: [AI] could be all doom and gloom, or it could be beautiful.

SANDERS: [AI] could be [beautiful] but you’re sitting here with a bystander from Mars.

SILAS, 20, WASHINGTON D.C: Senator, I actually disagree with the statement that we should have the government directly take a stake in AI companies.

WALKER: We started by asking everyone some questions about AI to get a sense of their views.

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America’s biggest berry empire doesn’t actually grow berries. A whistleblower alleges the Canadian government repeatedly flagged Driscoll’s berries for exceeding pesticide limits.

TRANSCRIPT

ALEC OPPERMAN, MORE PERFECT UNION: Is produce getting worse?

TRISTAN KWONG: This tastes like an unripe tomato

OPPERMAN: That’s what I’ve been hearing, especially about berries. But — I’ll be honest — I’m skeptical. So I wanted to put this idea to the test.

TRISTAN KWONG: I could crush like 55 of these. No problem.

ADDISON POST, MORE PERFECT UNION: This one tastes more grassy. This one tastes like…

OPPERMAN, TO POST: And is grassy a good thing or a bad thing?

OPPERMAN: I started out with a simple question: If fruits and vegetables are getting worse now, who’s to blame, and what can we do about it? It led me to the heart of a berry empire whose produce you probably encounter in most grocery stores, and a disturbing conversation with an insider who worked for them.

DAVID HARADA, WHISTLEBLOWER: [Produce companies] had gotten rid of their own internal audit systems from the food safety department.

OPPERMAN: And to all kinds of ways that agricultural giants are stacking the deck against American farmers —

HUGH KENT, BLUEBERRY FARMER: We’ve gotten away from a place where innovative, intelligent, hardworking farmers can make a living.

OPPERMAN: — while remaking the food system in ways that land on all of our plates.

The story starts with [HUGH KENT] — a blueberry farmer — but you won’t find his blueberries in any supermarket, and I wanted to know why.

Uber blames rising insurance costs. But one analysis found the fee Uber charges for insurance tracks the price of the ride, not the risk.

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TRANSCRIPT

ERIC GARDNER, MORE PERFECT UNION: Everything is expensive right now, but the rides you take to work, to the airport, home from the bar — that’s climbing higher than almost anything

Uber’s CEO was asked where the money’s going.

GARDNER: And maybe he’s right. So check. Pull up a fare and do the math.

The problem is, you can’t check.

Since 2022, Uber uses an algorithm no one outside the company can see to set prices and wages. In 2024, I ran an experiment with seven drivers. Different pay for the same rides. Uber said we got it wrong. In 2026, Consumer Reports tested the other side: 174 riders, same trip, different prices, and fake promotions.

Uber said they got it wrong.

Drivers have been pooling receipts. Not seven. Not 174. Millions.

But one driver noticed charges that don’t add up the way they should. Same driver. Same ride. Different fee.

LEVI SPIRES, UBER DRIVER: So somebody’s getting rich off of it. I don’t know. Not me. Not the passenger.

GARDNER: Every one of those charges comes out of the same place: The fare you pay.

So I started to investigate, and it led me places I never expected. An Ivy League business school. A little-known insurance company in Hawai’i. And an amendment to a transportation bill.

None of it looks connected. But it all ends up on the same receipt. Yours.

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Insurance companies claim higher prices are justified by higher risks, but we found they are keeping more of our premium dollars than ever. And last year, they made record profits.

TRANSCRIPT

JASON MINOTT, HOMEOWNER: Looking at the bill. I was like, ‘Whoa.’ I was dumbfounded. And I’m just thinking, why is it so expensive? What can we do?

SAM BLACK, MORE PERFECT UNION: Since 2020, the cost of insurance for your car or your home has shot up, more than twice as much as inflation.

BLACK: The usual explanation is that we live in a more dangerous world, so all of us have to pay for increased risks. But that doesn’t explain this: Last year, the insurance industry made record profits.

It made me wonder: Are the higher insurance prices we’re paying really necessary?

JANE KIM, CANDIDATE FOR CALIFORNIA’S INSURANCE COMMISSIONER: There’s this huge profit margin.

BRIAN SHEARER, FORMER ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF POLICY PLANNING AT THE CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU: They’re basically price gouging the climate crisis.

BLACK: I spoke to policyholders and insurance experts, and found another story: Of billion-dollar companies that figured out how to exploit our legitimate fears, while increasingly failing to protect us.

JAMES FANNIN, CHURCH BISHOP OF CHRISTIAN WORSHIP CENTER: We, in good faith, do what we do, expecting the system to work. Does anybody care about us?

BLACK: With Americans now spending a record $1 trillion a year to pay for property and casualty insurance, where is all that money going? And how can we fix this system so that we can get insurance that actually works, at a cost we can afford?

Since taking office, President Donald Trump aggressively pushed for widespread AI integration to the benefit of not only his campaign and inauguration donors, but his own personal finances.

Trump has invested millions of dollars in Big Tech companies, like Microsoft and Meta, that are all-in on the artificial intelligence boom. And since taking office, he has embraced the Silicon Valley interests and Big Tech moguls that have rallied behind his presidency.

Digging through Trump’s financial disclosures, More Perfect Union also uncovered how Trump stands to financially benefit from all the suppliers that make the data center boom possible.

U.S. companies spent more than $44 billion on data center construction in the first fiscal quarter of 2026. Data center developers hope to build nearly 3,000 more complexes beginning in 2028 — with a $2.48 trillion investment value by the end of the decade.

For the last two years, Trump has been quietly buying up millions in AI industry “stealth buys” — the companies that are essential to build out the AI boom — according to his publicly released financial disclosures. These companies offer specialized construction skills, sell water cooling technology, and supply the fiber optics infrastructure that data centers need to work, among other industry-specific products and services.

All in all, Trump traded stocks in at least 25 companies linked to data center construction or real estate leasing. At the end of last year, Trump had up to $25 million invested in these kinds of firms, and he’s made dozens of trades on them this year while his administration has continued to roll out even more pro-AI policy.

This includes firms like Amphenol, a leading “picks-and-shovels” supplier for AI data centers. This year alone, Trump has bought and sold up to $2.78 million in the company’s stock — and that stock has more than doubled in value since he took office.

Trump has also invested in Arista Networks, which designs software for Hyperscale Data Center systems. Last year, Trump disclosed owning up to $1.38 million in stock in the company. This year, he’s bought and sold up to $1.6 million more.

Trane, a company that supplies industrial cooling systems for data centers, has also benefited from the boom. Trump owned nearly a million dollars in their stock last year, and traded another half-million so far in 2026.

This pattern follows for AECOM, the same engineering company that designed Trump’s ballroom also designs hyperscale data centers. Trump’s also invested in Texas Instruments, which designs the technology for data centers; Linde PLC, the chemicals company that makes data center fabrication materials; Fortive Corporation, which provides electrical, fiber, and network testing critical to data center operations; Expand Energy Corporation, which is using its Appalachian Basin to produce LNG for data centers, and many others.

Between April and May, Trump purchased four shares in Crown Castle Inc. Crown Castle partnered with Available Infrastructure to build a $5 billion AI-powered cloud storage for data centers called Project Qestrel. By the end of 2026, companies aim to deploy the project at 1,000 sites across 30 states.

Similarly, Trump traded stock in PulteGroup, an Nvidia partner testing a pilot program by the California-based startup SPAN to place mini data center nodes on residential property.

Back in May, Trump purchased stock in Vistra Corporation and Xcel Energy, both of which are involved in upcoming Meta data centers.

Trump maintains that he does not personally make these trades, but has also admitted that his sons are involved in his trades and benefit from insider trading.

Meanwhile, Trump has been directing his agencies to ease federal permitting for data center construction, to allow data centers to build their own gas-fired power plants and to connect to the grid, to skip environmental regulations around clean air and clean water, to be exempted from the same Big Tech-facing tariffs that other industries pay, among other moves.

The AI boom has benefited from the Trump administration’s embrace of the industry and regulatory changes to support that — all while the president himself stands to benefit.

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Big Tech claims AI data centers don’t use much water. We found them indirectly consuming 10 times that amount.

TRANSCRIPT

DAN LIEBERMAN, MORE PERFECT UNION: There’s long been a fight over who gets priority when it comes to water in the American West. The arrival of data centers just made it a lot more complicated.

JERRY PACHECO, BORDER INDUSTRIAL ASSOCIATION: I would ask the farmers, why do they keep planting more pecan orchards? That is a bigger water user than the data center.

ROBERTO ROQUE, PECAN FARMER: I hope that those people who support the data centers can eat computer chips, because where are they going to get their food from?

LIEBERMAN: Driven by local tax breaks and an industry-wide space race to build, these companies promise they won’t add to the water burden.

LIEBERMAN: But is that really true?

There’s a web of private equity billionaires with ties to Israel and shadowy corporate armies who stand to profit off never-ending conflict.

We investigated Trump’s Board of Peace.

TRANSCRIPT

SALWA SHAMEEM, MORE PERFECT UNION: For nearly three years, we watched a livestreamed genocide unfold in Gaza. But on the world’s stage, a very different vision was being shared.

SHAMEEM: Billion-dollar pledges followed. Powerful world leaders signed on. Even FIFA pledged $50 million for a Gaza football stadium. And in July, President Trump’s Board of Peace announced a tentative peace agreement for Gaza. But that’s where things start to get murky.

There’s a World Bank fund that was supposed to hold billions for Gaza’s reconstruction. The balance? Zero. And at least some of the money that was supposed to go to the fund? Diverted into a private J.P. Morgan account. It’s not clear who controls the account, why it exists, or how the funds are being used.

So I did what we always do: I followed the networks of money, and I took a closer look at the men inside the Board. I spoke with insiders, including an ex-Blackwater mercenary

MORGAN LERETTE, FORMER BLACKWATER MERCENARY: I joined Blackwater because I wanted to make money and I wanted my adventure.

SHAMEEM: The deeper I went, the more unsettling the picture became. Because Gaza doesn’t just look like a place to be rebuilt. It looks like a testing ground for a new kind of control, and it could just be the start.

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Marc Andreessen blasts regulation — yet government cash built his fortune and antitrust laws saved his company.

His fairy tale promises abundance for all, but returns only flow upward.

TRANSCRIPT

SEAN MORROW, MORE PERFECT UNION: There’s a new powerhouse of political spending in town — bigger than the Koch brothers, than Elon Musk, George Soros, or Sam Altman, and without the name recognition of any of those, and it isn’t even a person, it’s a company: Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.

By May, they’d already put $115.5 million into political spending. a16z is led by Ben Horowitz, and this guy: Marc Andreessen.

MORROW: Andreessen is an investor, so we should examine his political spending like an investor. What does he hope to get as a return on this investment? Because his ideal future is a bit… concerning.

MORROW: Which is, of course, a period immediately followed by a decade of economic depression and destitution. And he told us how he wants to build it, in a now pretty famous blogpost manifesto that lays out his bad guys, his good guys, and the ideal world he says he wants to build; his very own happy ending, almost like… a fairy tale.

It’s called “The Techno Optimist Manifesto,” and it promises a future of ‘abundance’ spurred by technology. And like any great fairy tale, it involves a battle between good and evil, heroes and “enemies.” Really, there’s literally a section called “The Enemy.”

Those enemies include: “sustainability, stakeholder capitalism” — that’s when companies take into consideration everyone they affect, not just shareholders — “risk management, ethics, the limits of growth, collectivism” — that’s just when society works together, and you care about other people — “social responsibility, and safety.”

Andreessen says these enemies are ideas, not people, but they’re all pro-people ideas, right? And we’ll get to that.

But there are some enemies that we can agree on: “corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels, playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences, speech control and thought control.”

I’m totally on board. That’s big bad wolf stuff we can all agree should be vanquished by a knight in shining armor. But is Andreessen, and the plan he outlines in his little fairy tale, the knight we need?

Can someone deeply linked to the modern privatized surveillance state really have a problem with using 1984 as an instruction manual?

So, let’s start this fairy tale at the end…

Trump’s DHS is buying shuttered prisons from GEO Group to turn them into immigration detention centers, while installing GEO Group executives in his administration.

This week, ICE and GEO Group released a plan to convert the shuttered Rivers Correctional Institution in Winton, North Carolina into a 1,400-bed detention facility — creating one of the biggest detention centers on the East Coast.

Under GEO Group’s operation, the facility underwent a class action lawsuit for routinely denying detainees medical care, leading to serious injuries and death before its closure in 2021.

On July 13, ICE announced a $500 million, five-year contract with GEO Group to turn the closed Big Horn Correctional Facility into an 1,100-bed detention facility, doubling the occupancy of the state’s largest detention center.

GEO Group estimates $85 million in annual revenue in its first full year of operation.

DHS began contracting private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic to take over shuttered prisons for conversion last year.

Trump’s immigration policies have been great for business: GEO Group saw a 700% increase in profit from 2024 to 2025, with 48% of its total revenue coming from ICE contracts.

It’s also good for Trump. In 2025, Trump traded between $281k and $990k in GEO Group and CoreCivic stocks.

GEO Group donated $500k to Trump’s inauguration while its PAC gave $1 million to the pro-Trump MAGA Inc. in 2024. The company’s founder and CEO each contributed over $11k to Trump’s Save America PAC.

Trump also appointed former GEO Group executives to head America’s deportation machine. In June, David Venturella, a former GEO Group executive, was appointed as acting director of ICE. Trump’s twice-acting border czar Tom Homan was also a paid consultant for GEO Group.

Former DHS advisor and Trump ally Corey Lewandowski asked GEO Group’s founder for payment in exchange for “protecting and growing” the company’s DHS contracts.

The Department of Homeland Security has seemingly abandoned its initial plan to transform warehouses into detention centers — now reviving shuttered private prisons as ICE facilities.

GEO Group gets paid, Trump continues his deportation machine, and hard-working Americans get a detention center in their backyard.

The biggest election in America is next Tuesday in Michigan, and the debate, as usual, is about electability. We put Abdul El-Sayed’s ideas to the test with real voters.

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TRANSCRIPT

TOM FILAR, FORD EMPLOYEE: Abolish ICE. I have a hard time with that.

ALEXIS MADSEN, SERVICE-DISABLED VETERAN: I know that Medicare for all would be very difficult. Why is now the time?

RACHEL SELLARS: Does he support the continued existence of Jews in Israel-Palestine?

JOSH MILLER-LEWIS, MORE PERFECT UNION: All eyes are on Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed is on the verge of a massive upset in the Senate Democratic primary, campaigning on issues that were previously deemed too radical.

ABDUL EL-SAYED, MICHIGAN SENATE CANDIDATE: I’m running on three things: Money outta politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all.

MILLER-LEWIS: The argument against him is, as usual, about electability.

[MANU RAJU, CNN NEWS CLIP: The electability issue that is really the central question here]

MILLER-LEWIS: The establishment pick is Haley Stevens – who is backed by over $30 million from AIPAC.

[HALEY STEVENS, MS NOW CLIP: No one wants Abdul to win more than the Republicans. They think they can beat him in November.

MILLER-LEWIS: But in an era where an increasing number of Americans feel politically homeless, what does electability actually mean?

JIMMY IZZO, AUTO WORKER: I have a lot of concerns with the Democratic Party

MADSEN: I feel scared to call myself a Democrat.

LINA SAAD, CLINICAL PHARMACIST: I no longer consider myself either a Republican or a Democrat.

MILLER-LEWIS: And can a progressive agenda really win in a purple state like Michigan?

EL-SAYED: What’s my coalition? It’s people who are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

MILLER-LEWIS: We gathered voters with diverse political views to put EL-SAYED’s message to the test.

IZZO: I come from a fourth-generation auto worker family. A lot of what we hear from Democrats is like a lot of lip service when, in actuality, they don’t really follow through on anything that they really say.

MADSEN: I am a service disabled veteran. I would previously describe myself politically as more Republican leaning.

SAAD: I have voted Republican in the past. I feel like the mainstream media is very biased, and I do respect a lot of the independent journalists, including Tucker Carlson.

SELLARS: My political views have evolved over time.

IBRAHIM DUHAINI: Donald Trump did visit Dearborn, and he said that he will try his best to end wars in the Middle East. We accepted his, you know, pledge.

MILLER-LEWIS: Have you ever voted for a Republican?

FILAR: Yes. Many times. More often than Democrat.

[EL-SAYED ENTERS THE ROUNDTABLE]

EL-SAYED: Hey everybody. How are you? So good to see you guys. Alexis, nice to meet you. Ibrahim, very nice to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to be out here. I really appreciate you.

MEDICARE FOR ALL

MILLER-LEWIS: Let’s begin with Medicare for All because that is, you know, one of the most important issues in this race.

EL-SAYED: I went to medical school, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this system, wrote a whole book on it, and ultimately realized that the biggest challenge is not making the math work. The biggest challenge is not architecting the system. The biggest challenge is creating the political will to get there.

I want you to imagine that next to your insurance card, you had another card, and that card was your Medicare card. It came to you the day you were born. And it didn’t matter if you turn 26 or get married or get divorced or get a job or lost a job; that you could get healthcare with it. That’s what Medicare for All is.

IZZO: My uncle, he had a precarious health situation, and he put off getting treatment for a while, and he ended up passing away from stomach cancer. I just think that really goes to show how far gone the system stands as it is right now.

EL-SAYED: Most people just put off having to do anything, because the financial burden of actually getting the healthcare you need is more anxiety-provoking than the possibility of being very sick. Now, the current system that we live under allows all of the corporations who make money off of our healthcare system to spend money to elect people who will then turn around and protect the industry.

And they’ve, in effect, manufactured a bipartisan consensus that tells us we can’t have guaranteed healthcare through Medicare for all. This is the question I always get: ‘What doctor? How you gonna pay for it?’

Just remember, we already pay for it. Every single dollar that goes to the back pocket of an insurance CEO, every single dollar that goes to a pharmaceutical company, every single dollar comes from where? One of our pockets. Every single one.

And because you don’t have to worry about that health insurance CEO’s exorbitant salary, now all of a sudden, the overhead of that system goes down. That’s the vision of Medicare for all. We could have it if we actually were willing to fight for it.

SAAD: My name is Lina, I’m a clinical pharmacist. There’s one patient that was not able to afford her oral therapy at the time. And we relied on giving her samples that we would get from drug companies. And I would literally take it and drive it to her on my way home. So how can we incorporate the pharmaceutical aspect into Medicare for all as well?

EL-SAYED: One of the most important things we could do is negotiate prescription drug prices. Medicare becomes the buyer of all prescription drugs on behalf of all of us. And so it can use its power purchasing on behalf of the 350 million people in this country to start bringing those rates down.

Here’s the other crazy thing about pharma: almost every pharmaceutical that has come to market in the last decade has had its roots in NIH-funded research. You know who paid for that? We did. Then some private company comes and buys the rights to this thing, then they get to sell it back to the taxpayer at a ridiculous rate. And that’s insane to me.

IZZO: My mom’s from Canada originally, and it seems like the motive there is to keep the people healthy.

EL-SAYED: So what we really want is prevention. I’ll be honest with you, I actually agree with MAHA on a lot of things. Most people are like, ‘wait, what?’ They’re right about a lot of the problems. The solutions are bat shit crazy, but they’re right about a lot of the problems.

I think we need to stop selling huge amounts of ultra-processed foods in ways that have us subsidizing them via a whole bunch of programs when what we really want is people to be eating healthy foods in the first place, right?

But in our current system, let’s be clear, a lot of people make a lot of money off of people getting sick.

FILAR: I’ve been working for Ford Motor Company for 31 years now. I’ve had it nice being a UAW member that I’ve had health insurance my entire career. I find myself as a parent of a child with autism; I’m coming towards the end of my career. So that’s one of my biggest fears: where the care will be in place for him.

I typically hold more libertarian views on something like this. So, would we be doing like a single payer system?

EL-SAYED: It would be single payer, and what I want is that the government basically guarantees your health insurance, and that allows the healthcare providers to go out and say, ‘look, if I can provide a better service, then I should win more patients.’

But it shouldn’t be that your health insurance says, ‘No, here’s who’s in network and here’s who’s out of network. So you’re gonna go here, and you’re gonna like it.’

And I think there’s a couple of pieces that, that we need to institutionalize. Number one, the governance of this system can’t just change on a dime because you have a new president, right? And so the governance would have to live somewhere similar to the kind that we offer in the Fed, right? So the governance would have to sit under, but separate from, the executive branch in a certain way.

We’re the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world. And, you know, we fight wars for no reason. But whenever we talk about providing healthcare, everyone’s like, ‘well, I don’t know if we could do it.’

Well, it’s a choice. These are policy choices. I would rather not spend a trillion dollars on war. I’d rather spend that money on healthcare and schools and infrastructure.

MILLER-LEWIS: The U.S. relationship with Israel has become a flashpoint in this race.

[EL-SAYED, ABC NEWS CLIP: The question about Israel isn’t about the theoretical right to exist of a country that exists. The question about Israel is, do they have a right to our tax dollars?]

MILLER-LEWIS: AIPAC is spending 30 million tens of millions of dollars to defeat El-Sayed, its ‘largest single-race investment ever.’

AIPAC AD: [EL-SAYED is] Too radical for Michigan. Too radical for the U.S. Senate.

MILLER-LEWIS: And his opponent, Haley Stevens, has made her commitment to Israel very clear.

[STEVENS AIPAC AD: Hello from Israel. I will continue to fight for Israel’s existence. Israel comes to me in my dreams.]

MILLER-LEWIS: But most voters believe the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, according to a recent AP poll. So will El-Sayed’s message actually get him more votes in Michigan?

ISRAEL & AIPAC

MILLER-LEWIS, TO EL-SAYED: As a U.S. senator, how would you seek to reorient U.S. foreign policy?

EL-SAYED: I don’t believe in unconditional foreign military aid to anyone. I don’t pay my taxes every year to be like, ‘Man, I can’t wait for Israel to get a new tank.’

And then when it comes to Israel’s own behavior, I think we need to engage them consistent with what they have done. They have perpetrated genocide, and before that they were perpetrating apartheid, right? They lobbied to move us into a war. Now they’re trying to annex southern Lebanon. Like I just think that any other country that behaved that way would be treated as a rogue nation because they’re violating international law.

SELLARS: A fear that a lot of American Jews have when they hear messaging against the state of Israel is that that is a slippery slope towards Jews don’t belong in Israel-Palestine.

EL-SAYED: I recognize that land is a land that a lot of people have lived on, right? The most recent inhabitants before 1948 were the Palestinian people, but also historically the Jewish people.

The problem though is that the implicit public policy of our government has been to aid, arm, and abet Israel’s current government to the exclusion of the right to peace, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinian people, right?

SELLARS: What would you say to people who are worried that withdrawing defense funding to Israel would make American Jews less safe here at home?

EL-SAYED: This idea that the things that we’re doing with our tax dollars to backstop a foreign government somehow makes Jewish folk more safe here — that doesn’t make sense to me.

I start from a position of principle, which is to say that Jewish Americans are not the same as AIPAC and Israel. That Jewish Americans deserve to live their lives unfettered and unencumbered by discrimination or hate and that we have to fight together to build in America where that antisemitism is stamped out.

DUHAINI: There is the largest Arab-American community here in Michigan, and mostly are from Southern Lebanon. My dad [was] building this dream home for all of us as brothers and sisters, and it vanished, in like, in a couple of seconds. And the soldiers were laughing about demolishing the whole village. As an American citizen, I’m paying taxes for this government to bomb and kill us. For what?

EL-SAYED: I appreciate you lifting your voice, and I’m sorry about your family’s experience. What is happening in southern Lebanon right now is frankly an abomination. I intend to be a voice in the U.S. Senate to consistently advocate for our principles, and that we apply them everywhere and that we apply them consistently.

MADSEN: Do you think that it’s harder to change things so we’re not being proactive anymore? Like, it’s easier just to let things keep going, like Israel AIPAC; is it just the easy way out?

EL-SAYED: I’m threatening a system of power that says, you just go along to get along. The real issue in our politics is not right versus left. It’s not like progressive versus conservative. It’s not Democrat-Republican. It’s people who are locked out of our healthcare, our housing, our economy, versus the people doing the locking out. I just want to always be on the side of the people who are locked out.

In theory, my opponent in this race is Haley Stevens. My real opponent in this race is Chuck Schumer, every corporate PAC, AIPAC. They will run your name in the mud. They will lie about you, they’ll lie about their opponent. It doesn’t matter as long as they maintain a control on power.

MILLER-LEWIS: One of the biggest attacks on El-Sayed right now is that he will lose to Republican Mike Rogers. The Democratic establishment thinks that Stevens ties to the Obama administration and her history as a U.S. Representative since 2018 make her a safer bet.

But recent polls slightly favor El-Sayed’s chances against Rogers.

ELECTABILITY

IZZO: I haven’t decided who I’m gonna vote for for sure. I do think Stevens polls a lot better with like the older demographic who are much more likely to vote. I think Haley would have a better chance to beat [ROGERS].

MILLER-LEWIS: Does that impact how you’re gonna decide to vote?

IZZO: Yes, for sure.

IZZO, TO THE ROUNDTABLE: When it comes to being against Mike Rogers, I want to hear how you can get your message out to people when you are facing these odds of people spending millions and millions of dollars that you don’t necessarily have.

EL-SAYED: You beat Mike Rogers because you build something that embodies the hope and the joy that you want to have for the future. This is a guy who voted to raise prescription drug prices, I don’t know how many times. Then he helped to architect the opioid epidemic. He took $700,000 from the pharma industry.

They’re gonna spend a whole lot of money trying to call me some combination between a communist and a terrorist. And I’m gonna sit out there and be like, ‘yeah, well, he’s corrupt as hell.’

Now I get it. I’m brown, I’m Muslim, I got a name you probably can’t pronounce, right? But I was born and raised here, and I’ve taken the time to, to serve and listen. So I think that’s how we beat him.

FILAR: I do question [El-Sayed’s] ability to win against a Republican. I feel that some of his beliefs turn off a large portion of the population. Listening to his comments that he would like to abolish ice. I have a hard time with that.

[EL-SAYED ANTI-ICE CLIP: I’m Abdul El-Sayed, the only Senate candidate for abolishing ICE, and I approve this message.]

ABOLISH ICE

MILLER-LEWIS: A lot of people in this room, Abolish ICE is one where they are a little bit confused about what it means. Lina, you expressed some questions about what Abdul’s immigration policy looks like.

SAAD: I think we can put ICE to better use to protect our borders and protect Americans. How can we draw that fine line between utilizing this federal agency versus allowing them to go rogue as they’ve done recently?

EL-SAYED: Here’s the thing. So I’ve run government agencies and once they take on a certain culture, it is really hard to change the culture, really, really, really hard. So under Trump, he started to recruit people who specifically came to ICE not to specifically enforce immigration policy, but they’re against immigration.

The whole subtext of this is that Donald Trump sold this fallacy to people where he understood that people were in pain. You’re out of a job, you’re out of a home. You can’t afford your healthcare. And his answer was a simple one: Well, you’re out of a job. It’s ‘cause the immigrant took your job. Out of a home? Immigrants living in your home. Out of healthcare? Immigrants took your healthcare. And so he turned immigrants into the answer to everybody’s problems. And then he built out ICE as a way of demonizing immigration itself.

ICE itself has become a rogue agency based on a premise that is inconsistent with both the Constitution and the ideals of our country. We don’t need it. In fact, we didn’t have it before 2002. America’s a lot older than 2002. So the notion that we can’t protect our southern border, or we can’t enforce immigration policy without ICE, is just not true.

You get rid of the agency, you fire all the people in it, and then you ask yourself, what would you want to build that actually achieved the goals that we have to keep a safe and secure southern border, to create a very clear pathway to citizenship for people, right? And in the cases where you have people who should not be here and do bad things, that you are very targeted in your enforcement, rather than making a show out of enforcing to tell all immigrants that they don’t belong here.

SAAD: That’s very, very enlightening. Thank you.

MADSEN: ‘Cause I think this goes to like ICE and other things that like, our politics are so black and white. How do you change that narrative? ‘Cause we need to recognize each other as like people again.

EL-SAYED: The problem with too many Democrats is it’s too easy to point and say, ‘Trump bad. I’m against Trump. You should vote for me.’ And you’re like, ‘Well, from a policy standpoint, are you really for me?’ You’re taking the money from all the worst people. So, what would happen if we actually built a movement about what could be good?

When we start talking to folks who might have voted for Trump for a whole bunch of different reasons to be like, ‘All right, is your life better now? Do you have better healthcare? Do you have better access to a job? Can you afford a home? If no, here’s an opportunity.’ Let’s focus on that.

Right, so I just really appreciate you guys having this conversation that’s like the lifeblood of what we do in our civics and is really enlightening. Thank you, guys. Appreciate you all.

MILLER-LEWIS: Did Abdul change your mind on any issues?

SAAD: Yeah, definitely on the ICE issue.

FILAR: I think the way that Abdul spoke about Medicare For All as far as it being a plausible and a tangible goal was pretty enlightening and I plan to vote for Abdul.

SELLARS: I think that Abdul did change my mind about what I feel like I can expect from a politician who really believes what they say.

MADSEN: Him taking a stance on something, even if it’s strong and people consider it maybe too strong; I think taking a stance means something.

IZZO: It’s an election. Anybody could lose. Haley Stevens could lose. And I’d rather, you know, vote for somebody who I agree with on their policy points rather than somebody who I just think is against Trump.

I’ve got my mail-in ballot at home. I’m gonna go home and fill it out and mail it in for Abdul El-Sayed

MILLER-LEWIS: The narrative in the media is that El-Sayed’s policies are too radical to win. But with these voters — who largely distrust both parties — his ideas broke through. El-Sayed won’t be able to sit down with every skeptical voter in the state, though. So I asked him what he thinks his path to victory in November looks like.

MILLER-LEWIS, TO EL-SAYED: You talked to a bunch of voters who had voted for Trump, many who identified as Republican for a long time, and they all left the conversation yesterday saying that they’re gonna vote for you.

Are there issues beyond sort of Medicare for all, which is at your core, that you think have the potential to win over disaffected Trump voters in a general election?

EL-SAYED: Corporate monopoly. The corruption of our food system, the role of AI in society, the onslaught of data centers- you think about who’s taking money from these corporations. Unfortunately, it’s Democrats and Republicans.

I always wonder why there’s so much opposition to this in the Democratic Party. I keep coming back to the same answer, which is it’s just laziness. It’s laziness, and it’s this sort of elitism. The laziness part is, ‘Well, if we can’t get money from corporations, then we’re actually gonna have to have a message and go talk about our message anywhere and everywhere.’ I’ve done 450 public events. I challenge my opponent in this race to say how many events she’s done, where she’s actually taking questions. You gotta do the work it turns out.

And then the elitism part is, ‘Well, the corporations are rich, and they throw the fanciest parties, and if I don’t take their money, I’m not gonna be invited to the party.’ I’m like, ‘Fuck your party. Who cares?’ You got the best room on the Titanic and don’t realize that the whole Titanic’s about to go down. I don’t know, man. I really struggle to like, to understand the psychology of it.

MILLER-LEWIS: Yeah. It seems to me that you are interested in something deeper than just winning this election. That it is actually fighting for some sort of change.

EL-SAYED: Losing this primary is not the worst outcome for me. The worst outcome is that I get the job and I fail to deliver. That’s the worst outcome. So I don’t want to fight for the job and, in the process, hamstring myself from doing the work. I don’t want to have been one of those senators that, you know, you had this power, and then you sold out, and then you can’t even account for why you were there.

So right now you’ve got the choice between three candidates, two of us in this primary and then one in the general. There’s only one of us who has never taken money from Blue Cross Blue Shield. Only one of us who doesn’t wanna send your money abroad to drop bombs on other people and wants to keep it here to invest in your kids. There’s only one of us. So which do you pick?

1 in 5 regret their choice to vote for President Donald Trump — now a Democrat could win them back. We sat down with Bobby Pulido and Latino Trump voters. Some voted for him 3x, but they say prices are too high and ICE is out of control.

TRANSCRIPT

NICK VALENCIA, MORE PERFECT UNION: There’s been a lot of talk about … “The Latino Vote.” Every single election in my lifetime, political pundits have spent a lot of time and money trying to analyze the motivations of Latino voters. But we’re going to do something different. We’re going to go out on the ground in the Rio Grande Valley to actually talk to voters.

VALENCIA: 1 in 5 Latino men regret voting for President Trump. That’s you.

EFRAIN GOMEZ JR., BUSINESS OWNER: It’s probably higher than that.

VALENCIA: That’s you. That’s you.

MARIO GUERRERO, BUSINESS OWNER: People are under stress. People are trying to figure out how to put food on the table.

COMMUNITY MEMBERS: The prices of food and the prices of gas and the price of everything keeps going up and up and up and up.

ROBERT DELIR, RETIRED: They’ve seen politicians promise this or that or the other, and they’ve seen politicians turn on those promises. ]

VALENCIA: It’s true that Latinos have shifted dramatically towards Trump in the last two elections. With Latino men, it’s even more dramatic. And, it’s also true that just two years into Trump’s second term, Latino voters could be shifting back again. But, there’s a much deeper story going on that the mainstream media and the leadership of both parties isn’t telling you.

Democrats might be confident they’re winning Latinos back this time but, what happens after this one election if they don’t deliver on their promises? That question might be coming to a head right here in Texas’ 15th district.

The incumbent is Monica De La Cruz, a Republican. Her challenger is new to politics: Bobby Pulido, a Tejano star who retired from his music career to run for office. He’s an unconventional Democrat bringing a shock to the system of South Texas politics.

So what is it about him?

We travelled deep into the conservative heart of the district and sat Pulido down with Latinos who voted for Trump but don’t like what they see. And we watched as Pulido made his pitch to get their vote and give them a convenient pathway into the Democratic Party.

MARIO GUERRERO, BUSINESS OWNER: During the Biden administration, the government just was off, man. It looked weak. It just didn’t look strong, man.

VALENCIA: Mario grew up in the Valley. He runs a construction company. It’s been a family business for years. He voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

GUERRERO: Mom was making dinner, and Dad was in the living room watching TV. And one of the shows that I would watch with Dad was The Apprentice. I believe we were conditioned to keep seeing him, right? And there’s a certain group of people that like to see success. I like success, man. I like success, and I like for people to be successful.

ROBERT DELIR, RETIRED: I voted for Trump during his first term

VALENCIA: Robert also lives in the Rio Grande Valley. Like many of his neighbors, up until recently he was a Trump voter.

DELIR: He promised a whole lot of stuff, and I fell for it, you know. ‘Oh, the country is going to get better. He’s going to bring this economy back, and we’re going to be where we need to be.’

VALENCIA: Texas’s 15th district stretches from the Rio Grande Valley up to the suburbs of San Antonio. It is more than 80% Hispanic and predominantly working-class. It moved significantly right in 2020 and 2024, especially amongst Latino men.

Mario and Robert now think differently about Trump’s success.

[TRUMP CLIP: We’re going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say ‘please, please, it’s too much winning.’]

GUERRERO: Tired of winning would be that the market is stable. Prices and materials for construction are reasonable. People are able to build product and move it out. People are able to give work to the workers that they’ve had. The workers can work without any sort of worry that they can’t even go to the job site because they might be harassed by a state trooper or a police officer here in the city because they’re going to call ICE on them.

[NEWS CLIP: New tonight, experts say ICE is intensifying operations across the country. Sources NBC News almost 10,000 people have been arrested in just five days.}

VALENCIA: How much of what you’ve seen with President Trump’s mass deportation policy has had an impact on you shifting away from the Republican Party?

DELIR: Oh my God.

VALENCIA: A lot?

DELIR: I could not in any good conscience vote or support a Republican candidate.

GUERRERO: We are a border town, and we have people that have been here for 15, 20 years that have been providing a life for their families. And I believe that we need to respect that as a country. And unfortunately, when Mr. Trump started doing what he was doing, I had never seen the level of anxiety that I saw. I had never seen business owners call me at the level where it’s like, ‘We can’t get people to go to work.’

VALENCIA: You had this video that went viral

GUERRERO, ON VIDEO: Mr. Trump, you’re supposed to be our hero, man. But I don’t understand how this makes any sense for anyone.

VALENCIA: Tell me about it.

GUERRERO: It was a cry for help, man. It was a cry for help because I wasn’t seeing our local politicians stressing the amount of impact this is having on our economy — on our builders. And when I wasn’t seeing our politicians, from our mayors to our commissioners, raising awareness that they are picking up people, literally picking them up with proper documentation to be here, why are you our leader?

DELIR: When we’re out on the expressway and we’re out there with our signs protesting and stuff, 95, 96 percent of the response we get from people are positive.

VALENCIA: What would have been like, you know, maybe during Trump 1.0.

DELIR: Oh my gosh.

VALENCIA: Would you even have been out there?

DELIR: No. And I would have laughed at the people that would have gone out there.

VALENCIA: You might be asking yourself, ‘why did these guys vote for Trump if they’re upset about his immigration policy? He was very open about what he wanted to do.’ Well, the flip side is they have a lot of disagreements with Democrats on this issue too.

GUERRERO: The reason I was, you know, inclined to vote for Trump was because during the Biden administration, what we saw was a huge influx of immigrants at our Border. I believe we live in the best country in the world. We have billionaires that could throw rockets into the sky. So why is it that we don’t have a secure border?

VALENCIA: In this political vacuum created by distrust of how both Trump and Democrats have approached the border and the economy, a new political contender has stepped forward.

Last year, Democrat Bobby Pulido launched a campaign for Texas’ 15th Congressional District, taking on Republican incumbent Monica De La Cruz.

Bobby was born and raised in Edinburg, Texas. He rose to fame as a successful Tejano musician before deciding to enter politics.

VALENCIA, TO PULIDO: I would love for you to introduce yourself to people that may not know who you are.

BOBBY PULIDO, CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE: I spent 30 years singing. But before that, I was a Texas boy stater in high school. I studied political science at Saint Mary’s University. I have been very, very politically engaged, albeit not publicly, this whole time.

VALENCIA: He is now making the case for his candidacy as a Democrat in a Trump-supporting region.

PULIDO: It’s a K-shaped economy. There’s definitely more people falling into poverty than not.

VALENCIA: How do you see that reflected here in the Valley?

PULIDO: People are struggling.

VALENCIA: Businesses closing? Gas prices going up?

PULIDO: Absolutely. Yeah. And we as Democrats have not really talked about the prosperity issue. What are we doing to talk about anything that’s economically related? Nothing.

VALENCIA: To find out whether Bobby’s economic message was connecting with voters who felt abandoned by both political parties, we brought together Bobby, Mario, and several local residents for a roundtable discussion about Pulido’s candidacy and the challenges facing the region.

EFRAIN GOMEZ JR.: So my name is Efrain Gomez Junior. I’m from Donna, Texas, a little small town here in the [Rio Grande Valley]. I’m a construction owner. I’m here as a two-time Trump supporter.

RUBEN RUIZ JR., LAND DEVELOPER: My name is Ruben Ruiz Jr. I’m a land developer, builder also here in the Valley. I’ve been doing this for 24 years now. I am a Republican. I voted Republican for many years.

GUERRERO: My name is Mario Guerrero. I voted for Mr. Trump every time he was on the ballot.

VALENCIA: What are some of the biggest issues that voters are facing here right now?

GOMEZ: My wife is a healthcare professional. Ask me if I have healthcare.

VALENCIA: Do you have healthcare?

GOMEZ: I don’t.

GUERRERO: And they just made a billionaire a trillionaire. They just made that happen. So now Elon’s going to go ahead and buy the rest of Boca Chica.

GOMEZ: Meanwhile, I’m adding water to my soap bottle just to make it last longer.

PULIDO: The Rio Grande Valley was a farming community. The one thing that unites us all is that we come from nothing. And one thing that unites us is we always want our kids to do better than what we’ve done. And right now that’s not happening.

VALENCIA: In 2024, Donald Trump successfully courted working-class Latino voters by prioritizing the economy and border security, but many of those same voters are now starting to feel disillusioned.

VALENCIA, TO PARTICIPANTS: 1 in 5 Latino men regret voting for President Trump.

[GOMEZ, RUIZ, and GUERRERO raise their hands.}

GOMEZ: It’s probably higher than that.

VALENCIA: That’s you, that’s you, that’s you. How did that happen? How did you go from being ardent Trump supporters to now not?

RUIZ: Everything he promised, he forgot about. So, yes, I regret voting for him.

VALENCIA: But this is a conservative place — South Texas.

GOMEZ: We’re conservative, but when you start, like, you start attacking our family, we’re such a tight-knit community that you’re attacking our families.

VALENCIA: As Bobby told us, he’s campaigning on economic issues, and those are cutting through to these voters. But immigration is on top of their minds too. And the way they tell it, the two issues are deeply connected as the ICE crackdowns have had a major economic impact on this district and their businesses.

PULIDO: It’s not only that they’re getting out people that are undocumented, they go and detain people with legal U.S. green cards.

RUIZ: They detain naturalized citizens, okay?. So how can you — I mean, they did the paperwork. They did everything right. Why [are] you detaining them?

GUERRERO: They’re scaring people, bro. That’s the thing. And then because people are scared, they’re afraid to go to the job site.

PULIDO: That’s right, a community that is living in fear and paralyzed is not a community that can function, right? When the thing was getting bad, and they were raiding everybody, work just went to a standstill.

If you’re somebody that’s in that business and you say, man, ‘I got a loan out on this project, and I can’t get it going, I need somebody to, at least a shoulder to cry on or go, hey, let me see what I can do.’ Whatever. The last thing you want is for somebody to ignore you.

VALENCIA: There’s still a little trepidation about whether or not Bobby will go and be the Bobby of the Rio Grande when he goes to Washington, D.C. Do you guys worry about that at all? That he’ll switch up on you?

GUERRERO: Now that we know that we can go to Washington at any time, I’m just going to show up at Bobby’s office like, ‘yo, let’s go have lunch.’ I’m being serious — we’ll bring the Valley to you.

VALENCIA: Pulido’s opponent, incumbent Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz, has represented Texas’ 15th Congressional District since 2023. De La Cruz has attacked Bobby’s past as a Tejano star, saying,

[DE LA CRUZ CLIP: South Texas isn’t just a stop on a comeback tour for me.]

VALENCIA: And for some voters, these attacks are resonating.

VOTER 1: I’m real skeptical of people that pop up out of nowhere.

VALENCIA: And that’s Bobby’s story?

VOTER 1: Yeah, you just popped up out of nowhere. Where’s your public service? Where did you go? What did you do?

VOTER 2: I had never heard of him even considering politics, you know, and for him to now be in the race. Well, you know, I mean…

VALENCIA: Kind of surprising?

VOTER 2: Well, you know, because now it’s not going to be him. It’s going to be all his backing, you know, the people that are actually pulling the strings. They got somebody with a good name. You know, he’s very popular.

VALENCIA: What are the issues that voters here care about that Pulido might be missing, or uninformed on.

VOTER 1: I just think they want him to sing. You know, sing. But I mean, you know, are you going to have the Valley’s best interest in mind?

GUERRERO: The person he’s running against is Monica de La Cruz. Why didn’t they — I’m pretty sure people have said this many times, ‘she should have stuck to signing insurances.’ That’s what she did.

I want a politician to understand who we are, what our community is built off of. There’s not one building in the Valley that has not been touched by an immigrant hand. We need representatives to understand that. And we do have that, except for one.

VALENCIA: Despite broad community concern, Monica De La Cruz has continued to vote for funding increases for ICE and border security. Just last month, she voted to pass the Secure America Act, a bill backed by the Trump administration which allocated nearly $70 billion specifically to ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

PULIDO: My biggest issue with her [DE LA CRUZ] is that she does not understand. There’s so many people that I know that have so many questions and have been calling for a town hall forever. They just have questions. They just want, like, answers. Do something.Like, she’s really, like, absent.

VALENCIA: In March, Monica De La Cruz released a campaign video criticizing Pulido, arguing —

[DE LA CRUZ CLIP: This election isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera.]

VALENCIA: The Pulido campaign capitalized on the remark, and promptly put out an open call for invitations to perform at quinceañeras. They received over 1,000 responses in the first 24 hours. We tagged along with Bobby to several of these quinceañeras to get a firsthand look.

[PULIDO performs at a quinceañera.]

VALENCIA: Why go into politics at a time where people don’t trust politicians at an astronomical percentage?

PULIDO: I don’t blame them.

VALENCIA: You want to change that?

PULIDO: Yes, because — because the thing is like, most politicians go in there and it’s just all about their party loyalty. People want you to put them before your party. Don’t worry about the party, worry about us.

[PULIDO sings at a quinceañera.]

VALENCIA: As my time in Texas ended, I kept going back to what I heard in the roundtable. These guys who voted for Trump were opposed to the current administration’s crackdown, and that’s part of what’s motivating them to vote for Bobby. But, they’re also not solidly Democratic voters now.

RUIZ: We don’t want the chaos anymore. We don’t want chaos, period.

GUERRERO: Well, we have chaos right now, you know what I’m saying? It’s like we went from one extreme to another.

VALENCIA: That means there’s a gap wide open beyond this one candidate. And Democrats should be paying attention to this race, not just because Bobby is an unconventional candidate, but because these voters are wrestling with a tension that neither party has been able to solve.

VALENCIA: Next election, you could be up for grabs again if Pulido doesn’t deliver on his promises or in his word?

GUERRERO: I mean, I think that anyone would be.

By Lucy Dean Stockton, More Perfect Union

The Department of Justice just dismissed a years-long criminal probe investigating potentially life-threatening contamination at an Abbott Laboratories facility, an Illinois-based health care and technology company that donated more than $500,000 to President Donald Trump’s inauguration funds and has extensive financial connections to one of Trump’s top cabinet members.

The DOJ this week confirmed that it had dismissed its investigation into potential negligence from Abbott Laboratories, which manufactures popular formula brand Similac, over ​its mismanagement of a baby formula production facility that potentially endangered infants’ lives — and may be connected to two infant deaths.

The probe, which began under the Biden administration, followed an incident in which regulators discovered potentially deadly bacteria on equipment in the facility in February 2022. The facility resumed production in June of that year, but tight industry concentration strained the baby formula market, contributing to a national shortage in 2022, which forced families to seek assistance from food banks, friends and doctor’s offices.

According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, some DOJ prosecutors believed they had evidence to criminally charge the company, but the agency’s top decision-makers closed the probe instead, now opting to pursue financial clawbacks and civil penalties.

Abbott faced another legal battle in January 2023, when Biden’s Federal Trade Commission began formally investigating the company for collusion in the baby formula market. The agency alleged that Abbott may have colluded in bidding for contracts with the USDA’s Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food assistance program. The company is also facing legal penalties of nearly $500 million in a Missouri lawsuit related to its formula for premature infants.

Abbott previously won a $750 million federal contract in 2020 to deliver 150 million COVID-19 rapid test kits, and won another under Biden. In his first term, Trump’s administration also fought on behalf of the baby formula industry, arguing against international resolutions that would have limited companies’ ability to advertise and sell baby formula abroad, threatening Abbott’s part in a $70 billion global industry. Last May, Trump publicly celebrated Abbott’s $500 million investment in its Illinois and Texas manufacturing facilities as a step towards reviving American drug manufacturing.

In the 2024 election, Abbott’s former CEO Miles White — who stepped down from the company in 2021 after a 38-year tenure — chaired former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum’s presidential campaign. White, Abbott employees and their families gave $4 million in donations to the Best Of America PAC, which was created to support Burgum’s presidential run. Of that, White gave at least $2 million. In February 2025, Burgum was confirmed as Trump’s Secretary of the Interior.

Abbott also donated at least $35,000 to Trump’s inaugural event in 2016, and White publicly expressed he was “optimistic” about Trump’s presidency.

No unopened, distributed Abbott baby formula products have ​tested positive for the bacteria that sickened the babies, an Abbott spokesperson told More Perfect Union in an email. Abbott declined to comment on the company’s political donations.

We brought AOC to deep red Georgia to talk data centers. What we found: a data center rebellion, with people willing to radically shift their politics. One conservative voter said: “If there’s a chance that anything can be done, I feel like she’s gonna be the one to do it.”

TRANSCRIPT:

TINA SHEPHERD: When the blasting started, it went on a couple of months. My sister-in-law’s ceiling came crashing down.

PATRICIA SHEPHERD: Nobody from Amazon has bothered to say one word. It was three blasts a day, seven days a week, for months.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: This is unbelievable.

DAN LIEBERMAN VOICEOVER: What happens when you take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the heart of the data center revolt?

AOC: And they’re just trying to say that no one should cover this?

PATRICIA: Yes. And I’m sorry, but I’m on a Social Security check. I can’t afford to do that.

AOC: You didn’t blow up your ceiling!

PATRICIA: No, I didn’t.

DAN VO: We wanted to know how voters who feel politically homeless …

DAN: Raise your hand if your electricity bill has gone up and your water bill is gone up.

DAN VO: … from the Black suburbs of Atlanta…

AOC: Are the local politicians supportive?

PAMELA FELDER: No!

DAN VO: ...to conservative rural communities …

SARAH KING: This is not a party issue. This is a people issue.

AOC: That’s right.

SARAH: So it doesn’t matter what party you are, it’s wrong.

DAN VO: … how are voters going to respond to a democratic socialist from New York?

AOC: People want to call me “woke”? Whatever. This is about power.

DAN VO: With the Trump administration pushing for more data centers...

TRUMP: The AI race is a big deal... the construction of colossal data centers... we have to get this built.

DAN VO: ...where does that leave regular people like Beverly Morris?

BEVERLY MORRIS: I feel trapped because I have no way out.

DAN VO: How is the backlash against a data center boom the key to unlocking America’s politics?

AOC: We’ve never been more polarized. I just think we got to show up in these places and see these things for ourselves.

DAN: Well, do you want to show us there’s been some damage to your house?

PAMELA: Of course. Yeah, sure, come on in.

DAN VO: Pamela Felder purchased her dream home three years ago.

PAMELA: So the first time of shifting I saw was the crack in my porch, all the way across.

AOC: Right here, wow.

DAN VO: All was well until explosive blasts started to shake her home earlier this year.

PAMELA: It sounded like someone picked up my house and went boom. A week after that, that’s when I started seeing cracks all throughout my house. And I found out they’re putting a data center in my backyard.

DAN VO: The two-million-square-foot hyperscale data center is being built less than a mile from Pamela’s home.

PAMELA: You can still see where the paint is ripped all the way up my stairs. I noticed the ceiling — the crack crossed there.

AOC: My dad worked in construction. So if I look like I’m really sticking my nose in here it’s because I’m taking a real look.

AOC: And your neighbors are experiencing the same thing.

PAMELA: We’re all sending letters out to the blasting company.

AOC: And what are they saying when they deny it?

PAMELA: They say my house was settling.

AOC: Oh, so everyone here is settling at the same time?

PAMELA: At the same time.

DAN VO: Pamela’s neighbor also came by and insisted we see a giant sinkhole she said was caused by the blasts.

JANET ROBINSON: Makes you want to cry. That no one’s listening. Why a data center? Why now? Why here?

DAN VO: Unprecedented amounts of money are behind the race to build. Meta is investing $600 billion in data center infrastructure through 2028. OpenAI has pledged over $400 billion. Even the real estate company responsible for this site just closed a $3.25 billion funding round.

AOC: If these tech folks love these data centers so much, put it in your backyard.

PAMELA: That’s right. Put it away from people’s homes.

AOC: This is why we’re saying we need to slow the roll on this — because they’re moving fast. We’re just saying pause it so that we can move forward in a more just way.

PAMELA: That’s right.

AOC: And a fair way for everybody.

DAN VO: But far from the Black suburbs of Atlanta is much Trumpier country, and the idea of AOC isn’t as enthusiastically received.

ROBERT LYTTEN: There’s some really extreme liberal views out there.

DAN VO: Before they met her, I asked folks what they knew about AOC’s politics.

ROBERT: Just from an overall view, very fringe left.

SARAH: I’m probably a lot more conservative than she is.

DAN: How are your politics evolving?

CONNIE LYTTEN: They’re evolving!

BEVERLY: I’m not real impressed with the politics on either side.

DAN VO: We first met Beverly Morris and her husband Jeff last year, when they showed us how the construction of a 2.5-million-square-foot Meta data center is contaminating their drinking water, a charge which Meta denies.

BEVERLY: This is my cold water pressure in the kitchen.

DAN: You can see the sediment from the data center.

BEVERLY: And this is what’s in all of the pipes, too. They should be responsible for that, not us.

DAN: When we were here last year with them, Meta was still building this data center. Now it’s operational.

BEVERLY: I worry about using the water for everything. I don’t use the water for cooking anymore. I did for a while, you know, I thought, you know, I’ve got to use it. I wouldn’t drink it. I haven’t drank the water here in years.

AOC: This is my view but it should be a right for you to be able to turn on your tap and drink what comes out of it.

DAN VO: The Morrises aren’t alone. Other residents also came to us with stories of their contaminated water.

LINDSEY WILSON: This is the sediment it’s picking up. The cold water pressure everywhere is pretty bad. You cannot take a shower and wash dishes, or take a shower and fill up the horse’s water.

CHRIS WILSON: Our refrigerator broke. Our HVAC broke. We have issues with the pool. Anything that’s water-related, we have issues with. This is the filter from the filtration system after we pull it out.

AOC: And you used to change those filters once a year, or?

CHRIS: Yeah.

LINDSAY: Typical people are probably six months to a year.

AOC: And now you’re doing it once a month?

LINDSEY: Yes.

AOC: And now you feel stuck, right? You feel like — even if you wanted to leave, you can’t?

LINDSEY: Not and be able to get the value that we put into our home.

DAN: Let’s keep going down the line. Connie?

CONNIE: Our fight is in Coweta County. We just had a large parcel of land rezoned for a data center, but we don’t know who it is yet that’s coming.

TINA: And I’m Tina. I live in Oxford, Georgia. It’s the Amazon data center.

SARAH: We’re not just fighting Facebook or Amazon or any of these data centers. That’s not who we’re fighting. We’re fighting the entire institution that allows it.

AOC: They think people aren’t paying attention. This is usually what happens. They’ll go sniffing around. I say it’s like they’re jiggling every door handle to see what county they can push these things through on.

SARAH: It is necessary. I understand the need for all of this. But the manner in which they’re going about it is not only wrong, it doesn’t even make sense.

CONNIE: I don’t blame Amazon. I don’t blame those businesses. I blame our government. That’s who is supposed to be taking care of us. My commissioner should’ve been looking after our community. Our governor should be looking after our state. Like, it goes up. A business is a business. It’s about making money. They don’t care what they’re doing to people. That’s a shame.

AOC: That’s the way it is.

SARAH: We appreciate you taking the time to come here, because until someone from the national level gets really serious about it, nothing’s going to happen.

AOC: We should be starting congressional investigations on the effect of these, and figuring out with precision how we protect our water supplies, how we protect your power bills and water bills, and keep people from getting sick.

DAN VO: Fifty miles away from the Morrises, a group of residents successfully pushed for a moratorium on a 95-acre data center project.

TERRENCE BROOKS: And wait a minute, where do I know you from?

AOC: I’m a congresswoman from New York.

TERRENCE: Oh! Come here. Yeah, you’re my girl.

CAROLE HUTCHERSON: We organized because we know what we want in our community. And they did not anticipate when they had the board of commissioners meeting that hundreds us were going to show up. And they couldn’t deny us. They had to stop and say, wait a minute.

DAN VO: Across the country, more than 50 local data center moratoriums have already been enacted, with dozens more proposed or under consideration across the U.S. But this patchwork approach has left a lot of communities vulnerable.

ALAINA REAVES: We’re in a neighborhood that’s in unincorporated Clayton County. But just over the fence line is the city limits of Forest Park, and that is where the facility is being built.

AOC: Wow, okay. So the county has a moratorium, but the city does not?

ALAINA: Correct.

AOC: Wow. And so ethe city, even though the city’s inside the county, it’s not covered?

ALAINA: Correct.

AOC: Talk about a loophole.

DAN VO: For now, the local fight continues.

CAROL: The community has said we want walkability in our neighborhoods, we want clean air, we want clean water. But we have to keep fighting. It’s like a continual fight. It’s like we’re surrounded by piranhas, you know, that just keep trying to pick at us, but we just kep fighting.

DAN VO: In March 2026, AOC and Senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation at the federal level called the AI Data Center Moratorium Act — both a response to growing opposition to these facilities and a push to establish a nationwide policy about their construction.

AOC: Our responsibility is to take care of people. And that is what we’re here to do today.

ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANT: What you’re proposing is a national moratorium?

AOC: It’s not the same thing as an outright ban, but it’s saying we need to meet some basic protections for people. We need some guarantees on your water, on the air that you breathe. We need to make sure that the jobs that are wiped out, that there’s a plan for that and we’re not just leaving people, you know, out to try. And we need to just have some really basic common sense protections for people.

DAN VO: The bill would require a building moratorium until the federal government passes laws mitigating job losses, preventing utility rate hikes, and establishing environmental protections, among other things. The question is whether this is enough to persuade conservative voters to support someone far across the political aisle.

DAN: Do you think the people here could get behind someone like AOC and her ideas for AI and data centers?

SARAH: I think they would get behind anyone who was going to fight for their right to clean water and to live their life without dealing with this.

AOC: Now tide on this is starting to turn. The politics on this, because everyday people are starting to catch on to what’s going on.

ROBERT: She may be on the left, but on the data center issue she seems more centered and genuinely concerned about people. And that’s refreshing to hear.

DAN: How do you wrap your head around addressing this at the national level?

AOC: We need to put people first. And we need those protections to be ironclad and guaranteed before we can have a conversation about what does and doesn’t get constructed.

DAN: Do you think that this is an issue that could maybe pull our country together?

CONNIE: I don’t know if it’s going to pull our government all together. It’s pulling the people together.

BEVERLY: If there is a chance that anything can be done, I feel like she is going to be the one to do it.

DAN VO: Days later, AOC showed Beverly’s water samples to an EPA water official testifying before her committee.

AOC: I have a jar right here. The only difference between the clean water and this was that data center. I have another one as well. This is what the drinking water now looks like next to that data center. And I think both of us can agree that neither one of these things are drinkable.

JESSICA KRAMER, Assistant Administrator, EPA Water: As soon as I get back to the office, I will be looking into exactly what you’ve just talked about. Because anywhere, whatever type of construction it is, it is a priority to ensure that water quality standards established by the EPA are being met.

DAN: There are a lot of people with a lot of money who don’t want to see this thing slow down. They’re like, ‘The train is moving fast, we can’t afford to stop, doesn’t matter, we’ll figure it out later.

AOC: I’ve been in a lot of political fights that have seemed insurmountable before that we’ve won. I just don’t believe in impossible. If you think something’s impossible, that’s an imagination problem.

Here’s how it starts.

The checkout clerk will offer you 10% off your purchase in order to join the store’s free loyalty program.

Or the airline says you can accrue miles or points on your flight, all in exchange for your personal information like email address, phone number, and consent for the company to build a profile on you. It’s designed to feel irresistible, but really, it’s like a Trojan horse. Once inside, the company can experiment with rewards, segment customers by willingness to pay, and steadily ratchet up data extraction.

A Consumer Reports investigation revealed that Kroger collects such vast amounts of data that it builds profiles of its customers, including income, gender, household size, and education level — and it sells that data to tobacco firms, financial companies, and data brokers. Home Depot captures internet activity, including browsing history and in-store Wi-Fi usage. Macy’s tracks customers’ license numbers, search history, and even ethnic origin and sells it to data brokers.

It’s all part of an emerging industry: how to hack your brain. Because companies invest a lot in these programs, they expect a big return on their investment. They’re increasingly charging for the privilege to participate in these loyalty programs. A big strategy? Take something that customers took for granted, like ad-free videos or lounge access, and then gussy it up like it’s a premium perk. Or simply, steadily raise the price of membership over time. And they’ll degrade the program too — devaluing points, limiting redemption options, and curtailing benefits. Meanwhile, companies make loyalty programs hard to leave, or sticky. In other words, coerced loyalty.

By now you’re fully caught in the company’s trap, which means that they flip the bargain, making you — the customer in the loyalty program — pay more than you would’ve outside of it. The result is a wholesale transfer of wealth from consumers to corporations.

How do we stop it? I called up Stephanie Nguyen, who wrote the report exposing the scheme, to find out.

Stephanie Nguyen: States have passed laws to protect privacy and stop predators, but many carve out loyalty programs from those protections. That loophole needs to be closed. That means real discounts, transparent terms, and limited data collection. States can act now to protect loyalty programs and stop surveillance pricing.