Good morning. Trump and Musk are fighting, and it’s ugly. Plus, we have a new podcast about health care for trans youth — and the latest news from the Supreme Court, Harvard and Ukraine. Also, FYI: Draco Malfoy is back. Trump vs. Musk
Together, President Trump and Elon Musk retook the White House, slashed the federal government and reshaped U.S. alliances. They professed to be the best of friends along the way. Yesterday, that relationship imploded in public. Perhaps, for two mercurial billionaires with large personalities and little tolerance for dissent, it was inevitable. Musk has spent the last few days lamenting the size and cost of Trump’s domestic policy bill in Congress. During a televised Oval Office meeting yesterday, Trump said, “I’m very disappointed in Elon.” Then each man brought the brawl to his own personal social media site.
As the two fought, Tesla’s stock price plummeted. Shares ended the day down more than 14 percent, which erased about $150 billion from the company’s market valuation. The stock of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, fell by 8 percent. Just a few weeks ago, noted Maggie Haberman, who covers Trump for The Times, “Musk giggled and told a story about sleeping over at the White House residence and eating a tub of caramel ice cream.” Yesterday, she added, he and the president showed they’d had “a relationship of convenience.” More on the feud
‘The Protocol’
Health care for transgender youths is deeply personal and important to thousands of American families. It’s also one of the most divisive cultural and political issues of our time. Twenty-seven states have banned surgery, hormone treatments or puberty blockers for minors. The Supreme Court will decide soon whether those bans are constitutional. The Times just published a special six-part podcast on the history of these treatments and the contentious debate. It reflects two years of work by Azeen Ghorayshi, who has reported on the intersection of gender and science for a decade, and Austin Mitchell, a senior audio producer. Jodi, who oversees Times newsletters, spoke to Azeen about the project’s ambition, how she got people to open up, the biggest surprises in the reporting and how her own work has been weaponized. How was this project different from your prior work on this beat? What were the big unanswered questions you set out to explore? With this audio series, the interviews are more like long, in-depth conversations. People can connect more easily when they hear others in this way, and it can help challenge assumptions. The big question we were trying to answer was, How did we get here? The science and the politics have gotten so entangled, but something this reporting made clear is that politics has been baked in all along. The show is titled “The Protocol,” after the Dutch Protocol, which grew out of the pioneering treatments in the Netherlands in the 1990s and 2000s. Why start there? Before people can understand the complex issues being raised about this care, they need to understand why the treatment was developed in the first place. I’m incredibly grateful that we were able to hear about that from both the doctors who led the first treatments and the kids — now adults — who received the care. We spoke with the very first patient to receive puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria — he’s now 51 — and to another patient involved in the early Dutch research who is now 31. Both described in vivid detail what the care meant to them at the time and how it has shaped their lives. I think listeners will really benefit from hearing their accounts of these events far in the rearview mirror, away from the noise of the current moment. The Dutch Protocol became the basis for all pediatric gender care worldwide. And, now, it has become the subject of criticism, too. You talked to a lot of trans people and their families for this project. What did you learn that you didn’t know before? It’s really striking how much has changed. The early patients described not even knowing that there was a word, “transgender,” for what they’d experienced as long as they could remember. They stumbled across the treatment almost by chance — a family member reading something in a magazine or seeing a TV segment. Young people today are so fluent in these ideas, and also more likely to have nonbinary or fluid gender identities. How did you get these folks to share such personal stories? Just genuinely being curious about their lives goes a long way. I think particularly when the public narratives don’t match people’s experiences, they feel very compelled to share. Back in 2023, after you wrote about a Missouri clinic where a whistle-blower claimed youths were being harmed, you were criticized by trans-rights advocates and some parents whose children received care at the clinic. There was an article headlined “You betrayed us, Azeen.” How have you dealt with such intense, often personal, attacks? It’s hard, of course. It’s my job to report the truth as best I can. I also understand that people have so much at stake. I care deeply about what the critics of our coverage have to say, and I have had many direct conversations with them about it. I also frequently hear from readers, including trans and nonbinary people, who thank me for our coverage of what is a complex and nuanced issue. This community is not a monolith. I try to take all of this in and reflect on it. The Supreme Court could rule any day now. Tell us a little bit about the case and what’s at stake. The justices will decide whether states can ban this care for people under 18. The case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, hinges on the question of whether trans people qualify for special status under the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Adam Liptak, who has covered the court for The Times for decades, told me that he expected the justices to say no. He also said that the “blast radius” of this ruling could be large — perhaps affecting how sex and gender are defined and protected in the United States. What motivates you? How did you first start covering trans health care, and why have you stuck with it so long? Back in 2015, when I was at BuzzFeed News, I wrote a story about intersex people and the surgeries often performed on them as infants. That led me to the issue of this new field of medicine to treat trans kids. There was a lot of new research, a galvanized group of advocates and big unanswered questions about the long-term outcomes. At the core was a really compelling human story about how people understand themselves and how medicine can play a role in shaping that. Now, America is at a turning point. So I feel a responsibility to tell the story of what this care actually is — where it came from, whom it was meant to help, what it means to people and what the problems in the field are. One surgeon who has helped hundreds of people transition tells you in Episode 5, “There’s not two sides to this story.” How does that sit with you? I think she was reacting to the black-and-white politics of the moment. We have a president saying there are men and women, and nothing else. Advocates say this care is lifesaving; opponents condemn it as abuse. Another doctor I interviewed in the show said that the politics were backing everyone into a corner and shrinking what people feel able or willing to say. This show is about breaking through the whole idea of “sides.” Click below for the first episode and here for the rest of the show.
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