More To The Story: During the 2024 presidential campaign, a conservative playbook emerged. Created by the Heritage Foundation, this 900-plus-page document was a roadmap written for a future conservative president. And while some Republicans tried to distance themselves from Project 2025, the authors and the concepts they wrote about have been embraced by President Donald Trump.

Our guest on More To The Story this week is journalist David A. Graham, who did a deep dive into the concepts of Project 2025 for his book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America. He talks with host Al Letson about what’s already been implemented—like mass deportations, the replacement of federal workers with Trump loyalists, and the elimination of DEI initiatives—and what other policies might be coming. 

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Listen: The EEOC’s Identity Crisis (Reveal)
Read: The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America (Penguin Random House)
Read: Project 2026: Trump’s Plan to Rig the Next Election (Mother Jones)

In a Minnesota town outside the Twin Cities, Emily is a nurse who treats many immigrant patients. She can’t locate a patient who just had a test result that shows they might have cancer. The patient was recently detained by ICE; situations like these have forced the clinic to adapt, making house calls and triaging care.

“I'd love to know how well somebody's kidneys are functioning today,” Emily said, but “I'm gonna wait till three months because I don't want them to come in for a lab appointment that's not critical.”

Emily is one of many Minnesotans mounting a quiet, secretive resistance to the Trump administration's hard-nosed and often violent immigration agenda. Across the state, neighbors are helping neighbors and communities are building grassroot systems to support immigrant families. 

This week on Reveal, our Minnesotan reporters Nate Halverson and Artis Curiskis report on how Minnesota is teaching the country to resist federal agents who have arrested children, killed citizens in the street, and pepper-sprayed high schoolers.

More To The Story: This weekend, American football fans will be glued to their TVs to watch the New England Patriots play the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl. From the NCAA to the NFL, sports are a dominant aspect of American culture. But the sports industry is also rife with controversy. From financial scandals to transgender rights, DEI, and Bad Bunny, there’s no shortage of sports stories to tell. However, investigative sports journalism is a shell of its former self. That’s where Pablo Torre comes in.

A longtime sports journalist and now host of the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, Torre prides himself on digging into the important stories that are often unnoticed or underreported. On this week’s More To The Story, Torre sits down with host Al Letson to discuss what it’s like investigating the complicated world of sports. 

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Listen: How Sports Became a Battleground Over Trans Rights (Reveal)
Read: How Right-Wing Superstar Riley Gaines Built an Anti-Trans Empire (Mother Jones and Pablo Torre Finds Out)
Watch: What Is Riley Gaines Hiding? We Investigated (Pablo Torre Finds Out)

Donica Brady lost her job after the Trump administration cut grant funding to bring solar power across the country, including to tribal nations. She picked up multiple jobs to make ends meet. That, in addition to caring for children, whittled down Brady’s free time. So she invited reporter Ilana Newman over when she found a quiet moment—while skinning a deer—to talk about what the loss of solar funding meant to her and her community. 

“When the opportunity came up to work and help us get something established…it was huge,” she said.

Brady was one of many Indigenous people working to build energy sovereignty for tribal nations—work that continues despite the administration clawing back federal funds. 

This week on Reveal, we’re diving into how small communities across the country are navigating the current administration’s policies and how they show up in everyone’s lives, no matter where you are in this country. We’ve partnered with The Daily Yonder to share a story about the solar energy hopes of tribal nations; The Tributary in Jacksonville, Florida, to learn how local and state DOGE are complicating efforts to run the city; and Idaho-based reporter Heath Druzin to hear how the Trump administration’s immigration policy is rupturing the state’s Republican Party.

More To The Story: On January 24, a US Border Patrol agent shot and killed 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis after he was held down by multiple federal agents. The Trump administration alleged that Pretti threatened agents with a gun. But videos appear to show Pretti, who was carrying a licensed handgun, holding only his phone in his hand when he was tackled and agents disarming Pretti before he was shot and killed. Following Pretti’s death, thousands of protesters once again flooded the streets of Minneapolis. One of them was Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister who was a religious-right leader for decades. But Schenck began doubting the movement and his own role in it—especially once President Donald Trump came to power. Since then, he’s worked to undo his decades of activism that he believes helped pave the way for the Trump presidency. On this week’s More To The Story, Schenck sits down with host Al Letson to talk about what led him to the streets of Minneapolis, his emotional visit to Renée Good’s memorial, and why he’s become “guardedly optimistic” about the ultimate direction of this current political moment in America.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Listen: A Christian Nationalist Has Second Thoughts (Reveal)

Watch: He Spent Decades Building the Religious Right. Now He’s Marching to Undo It. (Mother Jones)

Read: Confessions of a (Former) Christian Nationalist (Mother Jones)

Read: Tom Homan Is Supposed to Fix Trump’s Minnesota Crisis. His Record Raises Serious Questions. (Mother Jones)

During an NCAA women’s swimming championship in March 2022, two seniors tied for fifth place. The race was unremarkable except for one fact: One of the swimmers, Lia Thomas, was a transgender woman. The swimmer she tied with, Riley Gaines, believed the NCAA never should have allowed her to participate.

The matchup, and Gaines’ subsequent transformation into a leading anti-trans activist, has fueled a growing movement to “save women’s sports” from trans women—and a conservative crusade against trans rights more broadly. 

This week on Reveal, we examine Gaines’ rise and radicalization, as her rhetoric shifts from calling out NCAA policy to calling trans women  sexual predators.

Over the last year, the anti-trans movement has reached a tipping point. Trans girls are banned from girls’ school sports in the majority of states. The NCAA and US Olympic and Paralympic committees have banned trans women from women’s competitions. The Supreme Court is currently considering the issue, too.

Then we dive into the science to understand how gender-affirming hormone therapy affects trans women’s performance—and what questions science still has not answered around fairness in women’s sports.

Finally, we return to the swimming pool, as reporter Imogen Sayers speaks with Meghan Cortez-Fields, one of the last transgender swimmers to compete as a woman in the NCAA.

More To The Story: Over the last few weeks, Minneapolis has looked like a city under siege. The Trump administration has sent roughly 3,000 federal agents to Minnesota in what Todd Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has called the “largest immigration operation ever.” This all comes as protests have spread around Minneapolis and across the country demanding that ICE leave Minnesota and other states following the death of Renée Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and US citizen who was killed by an ICE officer as she observed federal agents. ICE and other immigration agents are operating in ways we’ve never seen before in this country. But their tactics and weapons are not entirely new. 

Investigative journalist Radley Balko is the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop and host of Collateral Damage, a podcast about America’s war on drugs. He’s been tracking police militarization for decades and how it's tied to America's long-running drug war. On this week’s More To The Story, Balko tells host Al Letson that how law enforcement is operating today is beyond anything he ever imagined.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Listen: Lessons From Trump’s “War” on Chicago (Reveal)
Read: How Trump Is Using Violent Tragedies to Divide America (Mother Jones)
Listen: A Dictator Deposed—What Now for Venezuela? (Reveal)
Read: Rise of the Warrior Cop (PublicAffairs)
Listen: Collateral Damage (The Intercept)
Read: The Watch

Journalist Mariana Zúñiga woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of explosions and military planes in Caracas, Venezuela. Her WhatsApp chats flashed the news: The ruling dictator, Nicholás Maduro, had just been captured by the US military. She was surprised and felt uneasy about what was to come.

In the days that followed, Zúñiga would go into the field, despite the dangers journalists face, to report on what the country feels like at this tumultuous moment. 

This week on Reveal, we speak with Venezuelans about witnessing this moment of history from up close and afar. For Freddy Guevara, an exiled Venezuelan opposition leader living in the US, there is little confidence in the country’s new leadership. 

“They are not moderate at all,” Guevara says. “They are super radical, and they believe they are smarter than everyone.” 

And historian Alejandro Velasco explains the role Venezuela’s most valuable resource—oil—has played in the country’s history and relations with the US.

More To The Story: A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. University of Chicago political science professor Robert Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his term. 

On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Listen: How Trump’s January 6 Pardons Hijacked History (More To The Story)

Read: Both the Left and the Right Are Targeted by Political Violence. Who Perpetrates It? (Mother Jones)

Read: Understanding Support for Political Violence in America (Chicago Project on Security and Threats)

Kansas City police Officer Matt Masters first used a Taser in the early 2000s. He said it worked well for taking people down; it was safe and effective. 

“At the end of the day, if you have to put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody, why risk that?” he said. “You can just shoot them with a Taser.”

Masters believed in that until his son Bryce was pulled over by an officer and shocked for more than 20 seconds. The 17-year-old went into cardiac arrest, which doctors later attributed to the Taser. Masters’ training had led him to believe something like that could never happen. 

This week on Reveal, we partner with Lava for Good’s podcast Absolute: Taser Incorporated and its host, Nick Berardini, to learn what the company that makes the Taser knew about the dangers of its weapon and didn’t say.