The Headlines - Inside Musk's Latest Political Donations, and Greenpeace Takes a Hit

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Plus, beef tallow’s unlikely comeback. On Today’s Episode: Musk Donates to G.O.P. Members of Congress Who Support Impeaching Judges, by Maggie Haberman, Theodore Schleifer and Annie KarniJudges Fear for Their Safety Amid a Wave of Threats, by Mattathias Schwartz and Abbie VanSickleTrump Is Said to Sign Order Aimed at Dismantling Education Department, by Michael C. Bender, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Zach MontagueWhite House Plans to Pause $175 Million for Penn Over Transgender Policy, by Alan Blinder and Michael C. BenderFed Holds Rates Steady and Predicts Higher Inflation, Slower Growth Ahead, by Colby SmithJury Orders Greenpeace to Pay Pipeline Company More Than $660 Million, by Karen ZraickHow Beef Tallow Made a Comeback, by Caroline Hopkins LegaspiTune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. 

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, March 20th. Here's what we're covering. As the clash between the Trump administration and the courts intensifies, Elon Musk has now stepped into the fray with his checkbook. Yesterday, Musk made the maximum allowable donation to seven Republican lawmakers who have all either called for judges who've ruled against the administration to be impeached or endorsed other actions in that vein. The drumbeat to aggressively challenge the judiciary has been growing louder in recent days as the White House has been facing off

with a federal judge over deportation flights. The judge has been pressing the government's lawyers about whether the administration ignored his order to stop the flights. In response, Trump, Musk, and some Republican lawmakers have been framing the judge as a liberal activist who needs to be thrown out. Those attacks on the judiciary, which is supposed to have equal power to the executive branch, have raised fears that the country's system of checks and balances is cracking. For lawmakers, Musk's campaign donations show how ready he is to throw his billions

behind those willing to support even the president's most radical moves. Beyond those most recent contributions, which were capped at $6,600 per lawmaker, Musk can direct an unlimited amount of money to political candidates through his super PAC, which has been supporting pro-Trump candidates across the country. The standoff between the Trump administration and the courts also appears to be raising the threat of violence against judges. After Trump's calls to impeach the federal judge in the deportation case, social media lit up with threats, taunts, and images of judges being handcuffed. And in recent weeks, there have been a flurry of attempts to intimidate judges across the country,

including bomb threats and swatting attacks, where heavily armed police storm people's homes after false 911 calls. The U.S. Marshals Service even put out a bulletin warning of a new tactic seemingly designed to intimidate judges. People are sending Domino's Pizza deliveries to their houses as a way of showing that they know where they live. Later today, President Trump is expected to sign an executive order aimed at dismantling the Department of Education. The administration has already made deep cuts to it, but now Trump will instruct the Secretary of Education to shut down the agency altogether. It's not clear how that would happen.

By law, only Congress has the authority to close it, and no modern president has ever tried to unilaterally eliminate a department. Many of the programs the department runs support low-income students and students with disabilities, and multiple polls show closing the department is unpopular. About two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is ramping up its targeting of universities. Yesterday, the White House said on social media that it's suspending $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania because the school allowed a transgender woman to

compete on its women's swim team three years ago. The university said it hadn't received any official notification from the government, but the cuts would be the latest in the Trump administration's efforts to punish colleges for policies that don't align with the president's agenda. It previously paused a large amount of funding for Columbia over how the university handled what it said were anti-Semitic protests on campus. At the Federal Reserve, officials are predicting higher inflation and slower growth for the U.S. economy. Forecasting right now, you know, forecasting is always very, very hard. And in the current situation, I just think it's uncertainty is remarkably

high. In the Fed meeting yesterday, Chair Jerome Powell conceded that President Trump's on-again, off-again, on-again tariffs could affect efforts to get inflation back down to the Fed's goal of 2 percent. You know, I think we were getting closer and closer to that. I wouldn't say we were at that. I do think with the arrival of the tariff inflation, further progress may be delayed. With Trump's new economic policies as the backdrop, Powell announced that the Fed is holding interest rates steady for now.

And investors seem to welcome that decision. Despite the looming uncertainty, stocks ended the day higher than they started after several recent nosedives. In North Dakota, a jury has ordered the environmental group Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million for its role in oil pipeline protests nearly a decade ago. The case centers on the Dakota Access Pipeline.

In 2016, concerns about its potential environmental effects set off high-profile protests on and around the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Thousands of demonstrators set up camp there. At times, some protesters turned to vandalism or violence, and the pipeline company Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace over it, accusing the group of funding and supporting efforts that delayed construction and harmed the company's reputation. Greenpeace denied that, but jurors sided against the group. It was a pretty full courtroom. There were a lot of Greenpeace staff members and supporters and members of pretty full courtroom. There were a lot of Greenpeace staff members

and supporters and members of their legal team. There were a number of activists who had been involved, Standing Rock protests, who had also come to watch the verdict. Karen's rake has been covering the trial for the times. She says the verdict wasn't unexpected. The jury pool pulled from an area where a lot of people have connections to the oil industry.

The large financial penalty will primarily affect one specific arm of Greenpeace, Greenpeace Inc., which organizes public campaigns and protests. The group has warned it could now go bankrupt. But Karen says the verdict is an alarm bell for activists in all kinds of fields because it feeds into a growing trend of tougher penalties for protests. One of the people watching in the courtroom was Martin Garbus, who's a noted First Amendment lawyer. He's been working on these issues for many decades. I spoke to him afterwards

and he told me that this was the worst First Amendment case decision he had ever seen. He said that it could really have a chilling effect on any protest group because the risks would just be too high that any group involved in a protest could be blamed for anything that happened there. And finally, I'm Caroline Hopkins-Legaspi. I'm a reporter on the WellDesk at the Times. And one of the things we do is keep an eye out for nutrition trends that we see popping up all over the place. Then we'll turn to experts and ask, you know, whether there's any truth behind these health claims. My favorite cooking fat is, drum roll please, tallow.

Lately I've been taking a closer look at beef tallow. Beef tallow is rendered beef fat. It's basically just fat that's taken from the tissue that surrounds a cow's organs. Just plain potatoes, salt, and beef tallow. I'd started to see it advertised on bags of tortilla chips, potato chips. I also saw restaurants advertising their switch to frying in beef tallow. This steakhouse is called meat. I got my fingers crossed they don't use seed oils for the steak. Let's go find out. A big part of the reason people

have been embracing beef tallow is that there's been growing criticism about the alternative, which is seed oils. Seed oils include canola oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil. Seed oil is one of the components of processed foods. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, he is claiming that they're poisoning Americans, that they're causing chronic disease. You taste these. It's a completely different experience. Last week, R.F.K. Jr. went on Fox News, sat down at a Steak and Shake restaurant and celebrated that Steak and Shake had begun to fry its French fries in beef tallow instead of seed

oil. We're very grateful for them for RFKing the French fries. They turned me into a verb. But he spoke to a number of cardiologists, dieticians, nutrition experts. And what I overwhelmingly heard from every single one of them is that beef tallow is not a healthier alternative to seed oils. And beef tallow is not something that people

should be embracing as a health food. You're raising the amount of saturated fat you're eating, which in turn can cause high cholesterol and heart disease. But even more than that, what I heard from these experts I spoke with is that embracing beef tallow is kind of a misguided health trend. Ultimately, you know, instead of arguing over the best cooking oil to use when we fry our food, the healthier trend might be actually limiting fried food altogether. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, five years after the beginning of COVID, a new book argues that there's

no clear evidence pandemic lockdowns in the U.S. saved lives. An interview with the book's authors. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.