A slab of uplifted rock larger than Italy sits in the center of the American Southwest. It is called the Colorado Plateau, and it is a beautiful place, higher ground in every sense. What little rain falls onto the plateau has helped to inscribe spectacular canyons into its surface. Ice Age mammoth hunters were likely the first human beings to wander among its layered cliff faces and mesas, where the exposed sedimentary rock comes in every color between peach and vermillion. Native Americans liked what they saw, or so it seems: The plateau has been inhabited ever since, usually by many tribes. They buried their dead in its soil and built homes that blend in with the landscape. In the very heart of the plateau, the Ancestral Pueblo people wedged brick dwellings directly into the banded cliffs.
Some of the best-preserved Ancestral Pueblo ruins are located near two 9,000-foot buttes in southeastern Utah, 75 miles from where its borders form a pair of crosshairs with those of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Ancestral Pueblo were not the only Native Americans in the area. Other tribes lived nearby, or often passed through, and many of them describe the buttes as “Bears Ears” in their own languages. Thousands of archaeological sites are scattered across the area, but they have not always been properly cared for. Uranium miners laid siege to the landscape during the early atomic age, and in the decades since, many dwellings and graves have been looted.
In 2015, five federally recognized tribes—the Navajo Nation, the Zuni, the Hopi, the Mountain Ute, and the Ute—joined together to request that President Barack Obama make Bears Ears a national monument. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, as they called themselves, wanted to protect as many cultural sites as possible from further desecration. They asked for nearly 2 million acres centered on the buttes. In 2016, Obama created a monument of roughly two-thirds that size.
The borders of that monument have been shifting ever since. In late 2017, President Donald Trump erased all but roughly 15 percent of the protected land, in the name of reversing federal overreach and restoring local control; and in the years that followed, mining companies staked more than 80 new hard-rock claims within its former borders. The majority were for uranium and vanadium, minerals that are in demand again, now that a new nuclear arms race is on, and tech companies are looking for fresh ways to power the AI revolution.
In 2021, President Joe Biden put the monument’s borders back to where they’d started—and the miners’ claims were put on hold. Now Trump is reportedly planning to shrink Bears Ears once again, possibly during his first week in office.
With every new election, more than 1 million acres have flickered in and out of federal protection. People on both sides of the fight over Bears Ears feel jerked around. In southeastern Utah, the whipsaw of American politics is playing out on the ground, frustrating everyone, and with no end in sight.
Vaughn Hadenfeldt has worked as a backcountry guide in Bears Ears since the 1970s. He specializes in archaeological expeditions. Back when he started, the area was besieged by smash-and-grab looters. They used backhoes to dig up thousand-year-old graves in broad daylight, he told me. Some of these graves are known to contain ceramics covered in geometrical patterns, turquoise jewelry, and macaw-feather sashes sourced from the tropics. Thieves made off with goods like these without even bothering to refill the holes. Later on, after Bears Ears had become a popular Utah stopover for tourists passing through to Monument Valley, the looters had to be more discreet. They started coming in the winter months, Hadenfeldt told me, and refilling the ancient graves that they pillaged. “The majority of the people follow the rules, but it takes so few people who don’t to create lifelong impacts on this type of landscape,” he said.
Hadenfeldt lives in Bluff, Utah, a small town to the southeast of Bears Ears. Its population of 260 includes members of the Navajo Nation, artists, writers, archaeologists, and people who make their living in the gentler outdoor recreation activities. (Think backpacking and rock climbing, not ATVs.) The town’s mayor, Ann Leppanen, told me that, on the whole, her constituents strongly oppose any attempt to shrink the monument. More tourists are coming, and now they aren’t just passing through on the way to Monument Valley. They’re spending a night or two, enjoying oat-milk lattes and the like before heading off to Bears Ears.
But Bluff is a blue pinprick in bright-red southern Utah, where this one town’s affection for the monument is not so widely shared. Bayley Hedglin, the mayor of Monticello, a larger town some 50 miles north, described Bluff to me as a second-home community, a place for “people from outside the area”—code for Californians—or retirees. For her and her constituents, the monument and other public lands that surround Monticello are like a boa constrictor, suffocating their town by forcing it into a tourism economy of low-paying, seasonal jobs. The extra hikers who have descended on the area often need rescuing. She said they strain local emergency-services budgets.
I asked Hedglin which industries she would prefer. “Extraction,” she said. Her father and grandfather were both uranium miners. “San Juan County was built on mining, and at one time, we were very wealthy,” she said. She understood that the monument was created at the behest of a marginalized community, but pointed out that the residents of Monticello, where the median household income is less than $64,000, are marginalized in their own right. I asked what percentage of them support the national monument. “You could probably find 10,” she said. “10 percent?” I asked. “No, 10 people,” she replied.
The two bluffs known as the “Bears Ears” stand off in the distance at sunset in the Bears Ears National Monument on May 11, 2017 outside Blanding, Utah. George Frey / Getty
The election-to-election uncertainty is itself a burden, Hedglin said. “It makes it hard to plan for the future. Even if Trump shrinks the monument again, we can’t make the development plans that we need in Monticello, because we know that there will be another election coming.” Britt Hornsby, a staunchly pro-monument city-council member in Bluff, seemed just as disheartened by what he called the federal government’s “ping-pong approach” to Bears Ears. “We’ve had some folks in town looking to start a guiding business,” he said, “but they have been unable to get special recreation permits with all the back-and-forth.”
The only conventional uranium-processing mill still active in the United States sits just outside the borders of another nearby town, Blanding. Phil Lyman, who, until recently, represented Blanding and much of the surrounding area in Utah’s House of Representatives, has lived there all of his life. Lyman personifies resistance to the monument. He told me that archaeological sites were never looted en masse, as Hadenfeldt had said. This account of the landscape was simply “a lie.” (In 2009, federal agents raided homes in Blanding and elsewhere, recovering some 40,000 potentially stolen artifacts.) While Lyman was serving as the local county commissioner in 2014, two years before Bears Ears was created, he led an illegal ATV ride into a canyon that the Bureau of Land Management had closed in order to protect Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings. Some associates of the anti-government militant Ammon Bundy rode along with him. A few were armed.
To avoid violence, assembled federal agents did not make immediate arrests, but Lyman was later convicted, and served 10 days in jail. The stunt earned him a pardon from Trump and a more prominent political profile in Utah.When Biden re-expanded the monument in 2021, Lyman was furious. While he offered general support for the state of Utah’s legal efforts to reverse Biden’s order, he also said that his paramount concern was not these “lesser legal arguments” but “the federal occupation of Utah” itself. Like many people in rural Utah, Lyman sees the monument as yet another government land grab, in a state where more than 60 percent of the land is public. The feds had colluded with environmentalists to designate the monument to shut down industries, in a manner befitting of Communists, he told me.
Davina Smith, who sits on the board of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition as representative for the Navajo Nation, grew up just a mile outside of Bears Ears. She now lives in Blanding, not far from Lyman. Her father, like Mayor Hedglin’s, was a uranium miner. But Native Americans haven’t always been treated like they belong here, she told me. “People in Utah say that they want local control, but when we tried to deal with the state, we were not viewed as locals.” Indeed, for more than 30 years, San Juan County’s government was specifically designed to keep input from the Navajo to a minimum. Only in 2017 did a federal court strike down a racial-gerrymandering scheme that had kept Navajo voting power confined to one district.
Smith, too, has been tormented by what she called the “never-ending cycle of uncertainty” over the monument. The tribes have just spent three years negotiating a new land-management plan with the Biden administration, and it may be all for naught. “Each new administration comes in with different plans and shifting priorities, and nothing ever feels like it’s moving toward a permanent solution,” Smith said.
The judicial branch of the federal government will have some decisions of its own to make about the monument, and may inject still more reversals. In 2017, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and other groups sued the government over Trump’s original downsizing order, arguing that the president’s power to create national monuments under the Antiquities Act is a ratchet—a power to create, not shrink or destroy. No federal judge had ruled on that legal question by the time of Biden’s re-expansion, and the lawsuit was stayed. If Trump now shrinks the monument again, the lawsuit will likely be reactivated, and new ones likely filed. A subsequent ruling in Trump’s favor would have far-reaching implications if it were upheld by the Supreme Court. It would defang the Antiquities Act, a statute that was written to protect Native American heritage, empowering any president to shrink any of America’s national monuments on a whim. (The Biden administration launched an historic run of monument creation. Project 2025, a policy blueprint co-written by Trump’s former head of BLM, calls for a shrinking spree.) The borders of each one could begin to pulsate with every subsequent presidential handover.
An act of Congress might be the only way to permanently resolve the Bears Ears issue. Even with Republican lawmakers in control, such an outcome may be preferable to the endless flip-flops of executive power, Hillary Hoffmann, a co-director of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, told me. “The tribes have built bipartisan relationships with members of Congress.” They might not get as much land for the monument as they did under Obama or Biden, she said, but perhaps a grand bargain could be struck. A smaller allotment of protected land could be exchanged for the stability that would allow local communities—including monument supporters and opponents alike—to plan for their future.
In the meantime, people in southeastern Utah are waiting to see what Trump actually does. When I asked Smith how the tribes are preparing for the new administration, she was coy. She didn’t want to telegraph the coalition’s next moves. “We are definitely planning,” she told me. “This isn’t our first time.” Everyone in the fight over Bears Ears has to find some way to cope with the uncertainty; for Smith, it’s taking the long view. She invoked the deeper history of the Colorado Plateau. She called back to the Long Walk of the Navajo, a series of 53 forced marches that the U.S. Army used to remove thousands of tribe members from their land in New Mexico and Arizona in the 1860s. “When the cavalry came to round up my people, some of them sought refuge in Bears Ears,” she said. “To this day, I can go there and remember what my ancestors did. I can remember that we come from a great line of resilience.”
Five years ago, at the 2020 Golden Globes, the comedian Ricky Gervais issued a scathing critique of celebrity activism. During his opening monologue as the ceremony’s host, Gervais took attendees to task for their apparent hypocrisy: “You say you’re woke, but the companies you work for—I mean, unbelievable,” he said, pointing out how Apple TV+ shows are “made by a company that runs sweatshops in China.” Gervais continued: “So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech, right. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything.”
At the time, the comedian’s admonition was notable for its acidity during what is typically a collegial ceremony. But despite its sour tone, Gervais’s monologue tapped into a real cultural shift: By January 2020, Hollywood’s rallying cries against Donald Trump’s first presidency had lost their headline-making power. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Meryl Streep’s impassioned acceptance speech at the 2017 Golden Globes registered as an existential defense of art and the people who make it. Three years later, such appeals no longer galvanized the industry—or viewers at home. (Neither, for that matter, did much of the actual art produced in protest.)
Looking back on it now, Gervais’s attempt to dampen awards-show speechifying also served as an early indication of how Hollywood might respond to another Trump term—something that was reaffirmed by last night’s Golden Globes. Eight years after an awards season that saw Streep and several other stars (including Hugh Laurie and Viola Davis) delivering sharp rebukes of the incoming president, the celebrities were less willing to do so again. During yesterday evening’s celebration, presenters and awardees alike largely avoided direct commentary about politics or the result of the presidential election, instead making relatively subdued allusions to “difficult moments” or “tough times.” Ahead of another January 6 anniversary, and with weeks to go before Trump’s second inauguration, the hesitation to speak more pointedly suggests that the industry is less inclined to resist MAGA with the same fervor it showed in the mid-2010s.
The cone of relative silence didn’t drop down overnight. In the past several years, Hollywood has wrestled with what constitutes acceptable advocacy. A wave of reactionary voices have decried diversity initiatives and other so-called woke campaigns, drawing scrutiny to such efforts within Hollywood and the corporate world. Many actors and creators are still navigating precarious working conditions, even after the resolution of the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes. And the war in Gaza has sparked division within the industry, prompting some entertainment workers who’ve supported calls for a cease-fire to ask for protections against being blacklisted.
During the recently concluded election cycle, these dynamics shaped the terrain on which celebrities exercised their political speech. And with Trump poised to take office again, the industry is perhaps rattled by the inefficacy of its previous calls to action—or at least lacks a vision of how to meet the political moment through either art or activism. The resulting show last night, in which several well-respected actors spoke vaguely about the importance of storytelling—and of conquering hate—felt like it could have aired in any year or political era.
In her opening set as the night’s host, the comedian Nikki Glaser briefly addressed the crowd’s failure to influence the outcome of the 2024 presidential election: “You’re all so famous, so talented, so powerful. I mean, you could really do anything—except tell the country who to vote for.” Sandwiched in a monologue that saw her skewering familiar awards-night subjects, the comment underlined the trouble with celebrity advocacy in a polarized political climate. Unlike Gervais’s 2020 jab, Glaser’s joke took aim at a perceived disconnect between Hollywood elites and the masses. (Glaser also made one of the evening’s few unambiguous references to a Trump-aligned political figure: “The Bear, The Penguin, Baby Reindeer: These are not just things found in RFK’s freezer,” she joked.)
It’s unclear what, if anything, may bridge that gap. One of the night’s more interesting moments underscored the tension between awards-show glamour and the work of producing challenging art within Hollywood. Back in November, the actor Sebastian Stan said he was unable to take part in Variety’s Actors on Actors series because he’d starred in The Apprentice, a film critical of Trump, whom his industry colleagues were unwilling to discuss. But at the Golden Globes, Stan won Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for his work on another film, A Different Man.
While accepting the trophy, Stan shouted out both projects. “This was not an easy movie to make. Neither is The Apprentice, the other film that I was lucky to be a part of and that I am proud to be in,” he said. “These are tough subject matters, but these films are real, and they are necessary. We can’t be afraid and look away.” It was the closest anyone came to directly addressing the current moment, during an evening when Hollywood preferred to turn its gaze elsewhere.
The first former president to be convicted of a felony is now also the first convicted felon to be elected as president.
Donald Trump won reelection on November 5, paving the way for his return to the White House—as well as the end or postponement of the criminal cases against him. The extent to which those cases also paved the way for his return to the White House will be a topic of debate for years. One plausible argument is that the sense that Trump was being persecuted strengthened his support; another is that the failure to bring cases sooner and finish them deprived voters of complete information. Both may be true.
A judge indicated on January 3 that he would sentence Trump on January 10 for his conviction on charges related to paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, but would grant the president-elect an “unconditional discharge,” which avoids probation or jail time and does not require Trump to meet any further qualifications, such as steady employment or not reoffending. This rejects Trump’s attempt to have the case thrown out and means he remains a felon, but otherwise closes out the matter.
This was the only live criminal matter facing Trump. Federal cases against Trump related to attempting to subvert the 2020 election and hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago were both dismissed at the Justice Department’s request in late 2024. The documents case, long considered the most straightforward, was bottled up by a Trump-appointed judge on dubious procedural grounds. The election-subversion case took a detour to the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority ran down the clock before ruling that a president has very broad immunity for most acts done as president.
An election-subversion case in Fulton County, Georgia, is in indefinite limbo after a panel of state judges on December 19 removed District Attorney Fani Willis from the case, citing an “appearance of impropriety” in her relationship with a special prosecutor on the case.
What follows is a summary of the major legal cases against Trump, assessments of the gravity of the charges, and a prognosis for each. This guide will be updated as necessary.
New York State: Fraud
In the fall of 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil suit against Trump, his adult sons, and his former aide Allen Weisselberg, alleging a years-long scheme in which Trump fraudulently reported the value of properties in order to either lower his tax bill or improve the terms of his loans, all with an eye toward inflating his net worth.
When? Justice Arthur Engoron ruled on February 16 that Trump must pay $355 million plus interest, the calculated size of his ill-gotten gains from fraud. The judge had previouslyruled against Trump and his co-defendants in late September 2023, concluding that many of the defendants’ claims were “clearly” fraudulent—so clearly that he didn’t need a trial to hear them.
How grave was the allegation?
Fraud is fraud, and in this case, the sum of the fraud stretched into the hundreds of millions—but compared with some of the other legal matters in which Trump is embroiled, this is a little pedestrian. The case was also civil rather than criminal. But although the stakes are lower for the nation, they remain high for Trump: The size of the penalty appears to be larger than Trump can easily pay, and he also faces a three-year ban on operating his company.
What happens now? On March 25, the day he was supposed to post bond, an appeals court reduced the amount he must post from more than $464 million to $175 million. Trump has appealed the case. In a September hearing, New York appeals-court judges seemed skeptical of the case against Trump and sympathetic to his arguments. They have not yet ruled.
Manhattan: Defamation and Sexual Assault
Although these other cases are all brought by government entities, Trump also faced a pair of defamation suits from the writer E. Jean Carroll, who said that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s. When he denied it, she sued him for defamation and later added a battery claim.
When? In May 2023, a jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll, and awarded her $5 million. A second defamation case produced an $83.3 million judgment in January 2024.
How grave was the allegation? Although these cases didn’t directly connect to the same fundamental issues of rule of law and democratic governance that some of the criminal cases do, they were a serious matter, and a federal judge’s blunt statement that Trump raped Carroll has gone underappreciated.
What happens now?
Trump appealed both cases and posted bond for the $83.3 million in March. His appeal in the $5 million case was rejected on December 30.
Manhattan: Hush Money
In March 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring felony charges against Trump, alleging that the former president had falsified business records as part of a scheme to pay hush money to women who said they’d had sexual relationships with Trump.
When?
The trial began on April 15 and ended with a May 30 conviction. Trump will be sentenced on January 10.
How grave was the allegation?
Many people have analogized this case to Al Capone’s conviction on tax evasion: It’s not that he didn’t deserve it, but it wasn’t really why he was an infamous villain. Trump did deserve it, and he’s now a convicted felon. Moreover, although the charges were about falsifying records, those records were falsified to keep information from the public as it voted in the 2016 election. It was among the first of Trump’s many attacks on fair elections. (His two impeachments were also for efforts to undermine the electoral process.) If at times this case felt more minor compared with the election-subversion or classified-documents cases, it’s because those other cases set a grossly high standard.
What happens now? On January 3, Justice Juan Merchan scheduled sentencing for January 10, but indicated that he would likely sentence Trump to an unconditional discharge, which means no jail or probation time, and no other requirements to meet.
Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago Documents
Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with 37 felonies in connection with his removal of documents from the White House when he left office, but Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed the case, finding that Smith’s appointment was not constitutional. Smith appealed. The charges included willful retention of national-security information, obstruction of justice, withholding of documents, and false statements. Trump took boxes of documents to properties, where they were stored haphazardly, but the indictment centered on his refusal to give them back to the government despite repeated requests.
When? Smith filed charges in June 2023. On July 15, 2024, Cannon dismissed the charges. Smith appealed that on August 26, but filed to dismiss charges on November 25.
How grave was the allegation?
These are, I have written, the stupidest crimes imaginable, but they are nevertheless very serious. Protecting the nation’s secrets is one of the greatest responsibilities of any public official with classified clearance, and not only did Trump put these documents at risk, but he also (allegedly) refused to comply with a subpoena, tried to hide the documents, and lied to the government through his attorneys.
How plausible was a guilty verdict?
This once looked to be the most open-and-shut case: The facts and legal theory here are pretty straightforward. But Smith drew a short straw when he was randomly assigned Cannon, a Trump appointee who repeatedly ruled favorably for Trump and bogged the case down in endless pretrial arguments. Even before her dismissal of the case, some legal commentators accused her of “sabotaging” it.
Fulton County: Election Subversion
In Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, District Attorney Fani Willis brought a huge racketeering case against Trump and 18 others, alleging a conspiracy that spread across weeks and states with the aim of stealing the 2020 election.
When? Willis obtained the indictment in August 2023. The number of people charged makes the case unwieldy and difficult to track. Several of them, including Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, struck plea deals in the fall. On December 19, an appeals court removed Willis from the case, citing her relationship with a former special prosecutor on the case. She has appealed, and the case’s future is murky.
How plausible is a guilty verdict?
This is a huge case for a local prosecutor, even in a county as large as Fulton, to bring. The racketeering law allowed Willis to sweep in a great deal of material, and she has some strong evidence—such as a call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” some 11,000 votes. It’s now unclear whether the case will continue with Willis removed.
Department of Justice: Election Subversion
Special Counsel Smith also charged Trump with four federal felonies in connection with his attempt to remain in power after losing the 2020 election.
When? A grand jury indicted Trump on August 1, 2023. The trial was originally scheduled for March but was frozen while the Supreme Court mulled whether the former president should be immune from prosecution. On July 1, 2024, the justices ruled that a president is immune from prosecution for official but not unofficial acts, finding that some of Trump’s postelection actions were official and sending the case back to the trial court to determine others. Smith obtained a new indictment on August 27, which retains the same four felony charges but omits references to corrupting the Justice Department. On November 25, Smith filed to drop charges because of Trump’s reelection.
How grave was the allegation?
This case rivaled the Fulton County one in importance. It is narrower, focusing just on Trump and a few key elements of the paperwork coup, but the symbolic weight of the U.S. Justice Department prosecuting an attempt to subvert the American election system is heavy.
How plausible was a guilty verdict? The question is now purely speculative and academic.
Additionally …
Once upon a time, cases were filed in more than 30 states over whether Trump could even appear on the 2024 ballot under a novel legal theory about the Fourteenth Amendment. Proponents, including J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe in The Atlantic, argued that the former president was ineligible to serve again under a clause that disqualifies anyone who took an oath defending the Constitution and then subsequently participated in a rebellion or an insurrection. They said that Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election and his incitement of the January 6 riot meet the criteria.
The Supreme Court conclusively disagreed. The justices ruled unanimously on March 4 that states could not remove Trump from the ballot, and appear on the ballot he did. Trump is set to be sworn in as the 47th president on January 20, 2025.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Some people view reading as though it’s homework, making a list of the books they intend to get through in a given month or year. But perhaps a better approach is to view reading as a mental workout. As Ilana Masad wrote recently, “There are many ways to advance your skill and capacity as a reader: Some of us are naturally drawn to detailed nonfiction, and others must learn to love it; some may have a taste for meandering, multigenerational epics, while their friends must train to build up the attention span they need.”
Instead of deciding how many books you’d like to read this year, it might be worth considering which “muscles” you’d like to strengthen in your brain. Today’s newsletter explores reading, puzzles, and other forms of exercise for the brain—including the physical kind.
On Mental Workouts
The Most Controversial Game on the Internet
By Elaine Godfrey
Wyna Liu, the editor of the New York Times game Connections, discusses her process and the particular ire her puzzles inspire.
Walking for a better brain: When a 70-year-old man walked the length of the United States in 1909, he sparked a conversation that ultimately changed medicine’s ideas about the value of exercise in old age. (From 2014)
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I attached a macro lens to my phone and a world opened up that I had never seen before,” Robin H, 73, from Orinda, California, writes. “I took this photo while admiring the beautiful symmetry of this cactus at the UC Botanical Garden. When I got home and looked at my pictures I saw there was a tiny aphid on the plant which had been invisible to the naked eye. It reminds me of the beauty and fragility of our world.”
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
Editor’s Note:Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.
Mike Johnson keeps the speaker’s gavel after Donald Trump persuades holdouts to switch their vote. And we are days away from Kamala Harris presiding over the certification of Trump’s win.
Join moderator Jeffrey Goldberg, Peter Baker of The New York Times, Leigh Ann Caldwell of Washington Post Live, Francesca Chambers of USA Today, and David Ignatius of The Washington Post to discuss this and more.
