What A Day

The Palisades and Eaton fires that began Tuesday in and around Los Angeles have become some of the most destructive — and likely most expensive — wildfires in American history. City and county officials say more than 9,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed so far. And as the fires have spread, so too has a ton of disinformation online, some of it been fanned by President-elect Donald Trump...

The Los Angeles area is battling massive fires. At least five people have died, and more than 2,000 structures have either been damaged or destroyed so far. Tens of thousands of people remain under evacuation orders, including parts of the region that aren’t usually at immediate risk for fire damage. Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources’s...

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the company plans to end its fact-checking program as part of a broader overhaul of how it moderates content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. In a video, Zuckerberg said the move was an effort to prioritize "free expression" and called the 2024 election a "cultural tipping point." It was a notable policy shift ahead of President-elect Donald Trum...

Congress certified President-elect Donald Trump’s victory Monday, exactly four years after he denied President Joe Biden the same courtesy by inciting a violent mob of insurrectionists to march to the Capitol. At 78 years old, Trump will be the oldest president ever sworn into office, edging out Biden by just a few months. And at 82, Biden will walk away as the oldest sitting president ever. In fa...

Congress is set to certify President-elect Donald Trump's victory today, on the four-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Since then, almost 1,500 people have been charged with crimes for their actions that day, and more than 500 people have served — or are still serving — time in prison. Not Trump, though. He's managed to avoid any real consequences for his efforts to overturn the 2020 el...

Something mysterious has been going down in New Jersey this week…but it’s NOT drones. It’s that thousands of people are looking at airplanes in the night sky and thinking they see UFOs. What causes mass delusions like this wave of now mostly debunked drone sightings? In this concluding episode of How We Got Here, Max and Erin share four stories of famous mass hysterias and talk to William Bernstei...

House Republicans on Thursday failed to pass their backup plan to fund the government temporarily. The bill’s demise left lawmakers with few options to avert a looming shutdown Friday, after President-elect Donald Trump and his ‘first buddy’ Elon Musk used their respective social media platforms earlier this week to blow up a bipartisan deal. Politico politics reporter Mia McCarthy, explains the p...

The Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear a case over South Carolina’s effort to defund Planned Parenthood. The state wants to cut off Medicaid funding for all of Planned Parenthood’s healthcare services. That includes things like mammograms, birth control, STD testing — you know, health care. So here we are again, with the very conservative Supreme Court set to hear another case that could af...

President-elect Donald Trump made good on his promise late Monday to sue The Des Moines Register, the newspaper's former pollster, Ann Selzer, and the paper's parent company, Gannett. His lawyers argue that Selzer's early November poll showing Vice President Kamala Harris beating Trump in Iowa amounted to "election interference." The suit comes on the heels of ABC News' decision to pay $15 million...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. started making the rounds on Capitol Hill Monday to lobby Senators on his nomination to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services. There are plenty of reasons why he could face an uphill battle to confirmation, from his prior support for abortion access and background as an environmental lawyer to his hostility toward industrial agriculture. However, chief among the...

President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats are expected to score a big win this week. If all goes to plan, they’ll get their 235th judge on the federal bench, one more than President-elect Donald Trump seated in his first term. But the story is bigger than the total number of judges earning lifetime appointments under Biden. The president is also set to appoint a record number of Black judges, and m...

It’s been a week since Syrian rebels overtook the country’s capital and forced out the longtime dictator, Bashar al-Assad. This has all been a long time coming, but now a lot is happening very quickly. In this week’s How We Got Here, Max takes a look at the handful of other countries whose governments have also been overthrown by rebels to understand what it means for Syria that the guys with guns...

The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has sparked a massive reaction online that’s veered into support for the alleged shooter, with an outpouring of sympathy on social media. This week we also saw a jury acquit Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran who killed a man named Jordan Neely using a chokehold on a New York Subway train. The verdict prompted a similar outpouring of support for Penny...

We are just 39 days away from President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration. But Democrats are still trying to figure out what went wrong in 2024, and how to fix it before 2026. Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin breaks down why she thinks she won re-election in a swing state, in which Trump also won, and how Democrats are approaching the president-elect's cabinet picks.  Later in the show, Pol...

It’s a tense time in international politics right now. And it’s coming at a pretty tough time for the U.S., as President Joe Biden gets ready to hand over the foreign policy reins to President-elect Donald Trump. Syria’s fate is a big question mark as it prepares for a new government, Israel’s war in Gaza is still raging, and Russia and Ukraine are stuck in a stalemate. Ben Rhodes, former deputy n...

TikTok’s days in the U.S. may be numbered after a federal appeals court upheld a federal law late last week to force the ban or sale of the social media app. The case could ultimately end up before the Supreme Court. President-elect Donald Trump has also promised to reverse the ban, even though he tried to ban TikTok in his first term. Louise Matsakis, senior business editor at WIRED, walks us thr...

President-elect Donald Trump stopped by 'Meet the Press' on Sunday for his first network sit-down interview since winning back the White House. During his hour-plus conversation, he reaffirmed his promise to pardon most of the people who violently stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, possibly on his first day back in office. And he said every person who sat on the House committee that investigated the J...

Trump’s rhetoric glorifies an America where men are in charge and women are subjugated. Rights that many of us took for granted for decades—no fault divorce, access to contraception and abortion—as well as newer rights like access to gender-affirming health care and same sex marriage are now in the crosshairs of an empowered conservative bloc. Project 2025 calls for the government to stop barely s...

There are only two weeks left for the 118th Congress to legislate. And there’s a lot to do. Lawmakers must pass a federal spending package to prevent a government shutdown, approve a defense budget, and decide how much money to set aside for relief after a rough year of natural disasters—no big deal. In the Senate, Democrats also need to confirm as many as President Joe Biden’s remaining judicial...

Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth was on Capitol Hill Wednesday to meet with senators, trying to salvage his nomination to be the next defense secretary. His nomination is hanging by a thread amid a drip, drip, drip of sordid details about his very messy personal life. But if Hegseth does manage to win Senate confirmation, he'd oversee the largest U.S. government agency with a nearly $900 billion...

The Supreme Court will hear a landmark case over trans rights today. In U.S. v. Skrmetti, the justices will weigh the constitutionality of a 2023 Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming care for trans minors. A group of families, a doctor, the Biden Administration, and civil rights groups are challenging the law. Sruti Swaminathan, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV project, talks abou...

President-elect Donald Trump’s picks to staff his next administration have been…questionable. His selection over the weekend of Kash Patel to lead the FBI fits into that mold: Patel is a MAGA enthusiast, a 2020 election denier, and a conspiracy theorist who says he’s ready to go after Trump’s political enemies! Ken Klippenstein, a national security reporter, helps us dig into how Patel could help...

With fewer than 50 days until Inauguration Day, President-elect Donald Trump spent the long holiday weekend inviting more people to join his administration. But for Democrats, the conversation is still very much backward looking, as the party litigates why it lost the 2024 election despite delivering on a lot of its promises from four years ago. Matt Yglesias, who writes the Substack newsletter ‘S...

The What A Day team is off this week, but we're excited to share an episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams. In this episode, Stacey speaks with historian Heather Cox Richardson to see what history can teach us about moving forward after Trump’s reelection. They discuss strategies for countering disinformation, how Democratic leaders are preparing to use states’ rights to their advantage t...

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the United States, and many of us will celebrate with full tables. But for millions of Americans, food insecurity is a daily problem, year-round. According to government data from 2023, roughly 14% of American households didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, or whether they could afford to feed everyone in their home. Politician, voting rights activist,...