As Pete Hegseth faced a contentious Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of defense Tuesday, veteran servicewomen including Paula Coughlin were watching closely.

Ms. Coughlin, who narrowly escaped rape during the now-infamous Tailhook scandal of 1991, was a pioneering whistleblower in the movement to change Pentagon thinking and policies that long tolerated inaction and retribution against service women like her.

She was one of dozens of servicewomen and civilians who ultimately reported being sexually assaulted in a Las Vegas hotel hall by some 300 naval aviators attending a conference and flying high after the release of “Top Gun” and a Gulf War victory.

Trained as an anti-submarine warfare helicopter pilot, Ms. Coughlin resigned from the Navy after speaking up. Asked whether she’d recommend the service she once loved, for years her answer was “absolutely not.”

Then came widely hailed bipartisan legislation and President Joe Biden’s 2023 executive order that took the decision about prosecuting sexual assault away from commanders who might be, and often were, tempted to protect male friends and their unit’s reputation.

It was a step supporters had long argued would deter the crime – and dovetails with a recent drop in military sexual assaults reported by the Pentagon. After increasing during the first Trump administration, there were some 8,500 reports of military sexual assaults in the most recent fiscal year, which includes the months just before Mr. Biden’s executive order went into effect. This marked a nearly 5% decline from the previous year and a drop for the first time in nearly a decade, according to the Pentagon’s annual report on sexual assault. The latest report also points to a 20% drop in “unwanted sexual contact” of any sort.

“I was actually going to change my answer” on the recommending service question, Ms. Coughlin says. “But not anymore.”

Today, decades of work to have the crime taken seriously by the U.S. military – and for women to be taken seriously as full members of America’s warrior ranks – are in jeopardy, she and others argue, with President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Mr. Hegseth. He’s an Afghanistan and Iraq war veteran who has said “straight up ... we should not have women in combat roles,” as he put it in a November podcast episode.

John Bazemore/AP/File

U.S. Army 1st Lt. Shaye Haver (left) is congratulated before an Army Ranger School graduation ceremony, Aug. 21, 2015, at Fort Benning, Georgia. Lieutenant Haver was one of the first two female graduates of the Army's rigorous Ranger School, putting a spotlight on the debate over women in combat.

Such beliefs about the worth of their service are seen by many women as a barometer for how they would likely be treated in a military run by Mr. Hegseth. Rather than driven by desire or drunkenness, sexual assault is now often understood to be a crime of deep disrespect apt to flourish in places where men don’t think others belong. If Mr. Hegseth allows this disregard to take root, advocates like Ms. Coughlin worry it could supplant their decades-long efforts to bring about change.

Outside of his military record, a 2017 sexual assault allegation, as well as reports of heavy drinking, harassment, and financial mismanagement dogged the early days of Mr. Hegseth’s nomination. The assault accusation did not result in an arrest; it was investigated after a hospital nurse reported to police, per local legal requirements, that a patient had requested a rape exam.

Mr. Hegseth denies any crime, saying the encounter was consensual. In 2020 he agreed to pay an undisclosed sum, his lawyer said, to head off what he described as a spurious civil lawsuit. He has pledged to give up alcohol if he gets to lead the Pentagon.

Remarks Mr. Hegseth makes about women’s proper roles in a book published in June, “The War on Warriors,” have also stirred up controversy.

“We need moms, but not in the military,” writes Mr. Hegseth, who served as a major in the Army National Guard. Killing runs counter to female instincts, he argues, and seeing women wage war messes with men’s heads.

“Women in combat forces men to ignore those civilized instincts. If you train a group of men to treat women equally on the battlefield then you will be hard pressed to ask them to treat women differently at home,” he warns.

During the hearing Tuesday, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand told him that such statements are “brutal” and disparaging to those who have served. (View more Monitor coverage of the hearing.)

Under subsequent questioning, Mr. Hegseth committed to appointing a senior-level official dedicated to sexual assault prevention and response. He also said women “will have access to ground combat roles” as long as the military doesn’t lower the bar.

To this, he quickly added that one of the first things he plans to do at the Pentagon, should he be confirmed, is launch a review “to ensure the standards have not been eroded.” He made it clear in his testimony that he believes they have.

Despite the controversy, in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s Senate hearing a number of Republican Senators have voiced support for him. As part of his Capitol Hill charm offensive, Mr. Hegseth appears to have dialed down his remarks about women in the ranks.

He stopped by his former employer, Fox News, to say on a recent broadcast that female troops are “some of our greatest warriors.”

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth visits senators on Capitol Hill in Washington, Dec. 5, 2024.

Yet there are potential policy moves that Mr. Hegseth could make should he become defense secretary. The Defense Department dropped its ban on women in combat in 2013. Mr. Hegseth could potentially reinstate it. Currently, out of the roughly 2 million service members in the U.S. military, about 19% are women. Since it was opened to women a decade ago, more than 140 women have graduated from the U.S. Army’s elite Ranger School. 

Having to contemplate these scenarios and others harks back to “an implied vulnerability, an implied second-class citizenship for every military woman,” says Ms. Coughlin. “It’s just what we’ve been working against all these years.”

This is a story about that work.

“Bone-crushing” culture

The U.S. military ultimately referred 140, or less than half, of the alleged Tailhook perpetrators for disciplinary action, but filed no sexual assault charges.

In the hours after it happened, Ms. Coughlin recalls thinking that the offenders were “absolutely outliers” – that this was not a systemic problem. Her dad was a naval aviator, and she’d grown up close to his Navy friends and their families.

Ms. Coughlin, an admiral’s aide, told her boss, Rear Adm. Jack Snyder, the story the next morning. She was sure he’d want to know about criminal behavior. “Instead, he said, ‘Well, that’s what you get when you walk down a hallway of drunk aviators.’ ”

The commandant of the Marine Corps later told Ms. Coughlin that he’d met with an alleged perpetrator and his minister. “He said, ‘He’s a good Christian.’ And that I got the wrong guy,” she recalls.

Instead of introspection, or even action, Ms. Coughlin ran headlong into resentment. “It was, ‘Why are there women in the military, anyway? Who opened that Pandora’s box?”

When Rear Adm. Snyder failed to move her complaint up the chain of command, Ms. Coughlin went public and found herself on the receiving end of a culture bent on “totally destroying victims,” she says. Her security clearance was revoked and the vile vitriol – to which her parents were also subjected – felt never-ending. “It was bone-crushing. I changed my name and hid for a long time.”

A decade later – after she got married and raised a family – Ms. Coughlin reemerged into the world of advocacy.

Nancy Parrish, a Democratic strategist and activist, had watched Ms. Coughlin’s interviews on national television years earlier and was struck by her bravery. Like Ms. Coughlin, Ms. Parrish also thought that the Pentagon would fix the problem once it was on their radar.

Interchange Productions

Nancy Parrish, founder and CEO of Protect Our Defenders, holds a pen that President Joe Biden used to sign military sexual assault reforms into law.

That didn’t happen, and in 2012 Ms. Parrish invited Ms. Coughlin to take part in the rollout of the documentary “Invisible War,” about military sexual assault.

Ms. Coughlin agreed. As she did some preparation after long avoiding the topic, she said she was gutted to see that military assault rates remained high and unaddressed.

“One of the best steps towards healing is to take steps to keep it from happening to somebody else,” she says. “And so I threw myself back into it.”

“A form of torture”

It was in the year of the Tailhook scandal that retired Col. Don Christensen, former chief prosecutor of the Air Force, began his career as a judge advocate general, or JAG lawyer.

He was good at his job and gradually gained a reputation as a go-to defender for military men accused of sexual assault – not one he wanted. He saw the effect that the cases were having on women, and that there were too many men “well above the law.”

He switched sides and proceeded to prosecute dozens of sexual assault cases – more than any other JAG lawyer at the time.

In 2012, he won a conviction against a popular lieutenant colonel and fighter jet pilot, James Wilkerson, for assaulting a guest at his house party. The guest was Kim Hanks, a physician assistant at the U.S. base in Aviano, Italy.

Mr. Wilkerson was sentenced to a year in jail and kicked out of the Air Force, but months later his commander overturned the conviction and ordered him reinstated at full rank. The general’s reasoning boiled down to “he was a good family man and had a lot of love for the Air Force,” Mr. Christensen says.

Mr. Wilkerson was later demoted and removed from the military once again when it was discovered that he had fathered a child with a woman outside his marriage, a violation of military codes, including conduct unbecoming an officer.

The general’s decision to overturn the verdict of a military jury “was the last straw,” Mr. Christensen says. “I was like, ‘This is never going to change from the inside.’ And so I left to advocate for reform.”

Debby Christensen

Don Christensen, former chief prosecutor of the Air Force, poses for a photo in 2023 in Meade County, South Dakota.

Around the same time, Ms. Parrish, who had chaired the congressional campaign of Rep. Jackie Speier, was quietly bringing Ms. Hanks and other victims around Capitol Hill to share their stories with lawmakers.

“These were incredible people who just wanted to serve, who I saw as a tremendous loss to our country,” once they left the military, says Ms. Parrish, who fled an attempted date rape as a young woman.

“I could get away. I could never see this person again. But to have to work with your perpetrator everyday – it’s a form of torture.”

Ms. Parrish decided to start an organization, Protect Our Defenders, to bring together a pro-bono network of attorneys to represent victims and make law from the lessons they were learning about how to fix a broken military justice system.

As with gay rights, which expanded in the wake of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era, the hope, Ms. Parrish says, is that the military might serve as a cultural beacon for American society when it comes to addressing sexual assault, too.

Finding the “good guys”

Ms. Parrish became skilled at scoping out military conferences, finding the “good guys” and seeking their guidance. “I’d have conversations with some of them standing at the back of the room who supported our work but who could never say so publicly.”

When Ms. Parrish first began chatting with Colonel Christensen, “Obviously, we had a real meeting of the minds.” She arranged for him to meet with then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel about his experience in the Wilkerson case. She would later hire Mr. Christensen to be president of Protect Our Defenders.

Secretary Hagel urged Congress to strip the ability to overturn military verdicts from commanders and, championed by lawmakers like Representative Spier and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the measure was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2013.

Other policy reforms followed, including giving sexual assault victims their own lawyers, known as special victims counsels and, in 2015, preventing use of the “good soldier defense” – the Wilkerson case was a textbook example – as a previously legitimate legal avenue for arguing innocence.

The 2023 measure taking the decision about prosecuting sexual assault out of the hands of commanders who’d lobbied to keep that power was a move that many service members hailed as the most significant transformation of the military justice system in decades.

Courtesy of Protect Our Defenders

Darchelle Mitchell, a Navy service member who reported rape by a military co-worker, is concerned that Pete Hegseth’s nomination could signal a reversal in progress made to protect military personnel from sexual violence.

Darchelle Mitchell, a Navy service member who came forward with allegations of being raped by a military co-worker while her two little boys were in the house, was elated.

It is “a crack, finally, in that good old boy system,” she says. Military leaders “are having to change their mentality because the law is not just their law anymore.”

Years earlier, when her perpetrator was found not guilty by a military jury that included some of his sailor buddies, Ms. Mitchell’s father was beside her as her knees buckled.

A proud Army veteran in whose footsteps she’d wanted to follow, “He grabbed my elbow to lift me back up. And he says, ‘Never let them see that they broke you. You stand strong.’ And somehow, I pulled it together.”

She connected with Protect Our Defenders, the attorney network, “and all these people rallied around me. And when they rally, they rally,” she says. “They picked up the torch, and they fought for me. And that was one of the most beautiful things.”

Amid fears that Mr. Hegseth’s nomination could usher back in the old status quo, those who battled to break it down are ready, they say, to persist.

“You have to keep pressing, because if not, those who oppose reform will begin to reverse what you’ve done,” Ms. Parrish says. “That’s why the fight is never over.”

For Ms. Coughlin, this grueling work has given her a new perspective on her own experience – and the role she’s played bringing about change.

“I thought for many years that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she says. “It took a lot of mental fortitude to realize I was probably in the right place at the right time.”

Editor’s note: This article was updated Jan. 14, the day of initial publication, to say that the confirmation hearing occurred and to add content from the hearing.

Susan Walsh/AP

President Joe Biden, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken looking on, tells the audience to sit as he gets a standing ovation before delivering a foreign policy speech at the State Department in Washington, Jan. 13, 2025.

For Joe Biden, it’s been “America is back!”

For Donald Trump, “America First!”

The catch phrases that the departing and once-and-future presidents have used to describe their foreign policies don’t on their own suggest such very different approaches to the United States’ engagement with the world.

But as President Biden emphasized in a farewell foreign policy speech at the State Department Monday, his guiding principle of global engagement – not only as president but over a long political career – has been advancement of America’s power and interests through U.S.-led alliances.

He cited examples of how his administration rallied NATO and other international partners in defense of Ukraine, created new diplomatic and military partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region to confront China, and returned the United States to a leadership role facing the global climate challenge.

“Compared to four years ago, America is stronger, our alliances are stronger, our adversaries and competitors are weaker,” Mr. Biden said.

That reliance on alliances for power and policy projection sounds nothing like the president-elect. In the run-up to his return to the White House next Monday, Mr. Trump has rattled the world, and America’s neighborhood in particular, with a list of objectives – buying Greenland, seizing the Panama Canal, making Canada the 51st state – that treat friendly nations as weak interlocutors and impediments to be subdued.

And like Canada, as subordinate economies that warrant debilitating tariffs instead of symbiotic trade relations.

U.S. allies and partners might understandably experience whiplash as they observe the split screen of Mr. Biden’s ode to alliances juxtaposed with Mr. Trump’s vision of an expansionist America acting unilaterally.

In the eyes of some diplomats and foreign-policy analysts, the president-elect’s jarring pronouncements are a throwback to a long-gone century when a newly muscled adolescent America could more easily impose its will on the weaklings around it.

It’s the “Donroe Doctrine,” as the New York Post cheekily put it last week, a reference to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine that declared the Western Hemisphere America’s domain and off-limits to European powers.

But for others, Mr. Trump’s confrontational and unilateral approach to foreign policy may actually be more suited to an era of big-power competition and waning prospects for international cooperation and global integration.

Evan Vucci/AP

President-elect Donald Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, Jan. 7, 2025.

As evidence, some point to the role they say the president-elect’s threatening demands have played in bringing the Gaza war closer to a ceasefire and hostage release deal than at any point in months of the Biden administration’s shuttle diplomacy.

In his speech Monday, President Biden hailed his administration’s tireless diplomatic efforts and noted that the ceasefire deal that appears to be within hours of final approval is very close to what the U.S. has been promoting for almost eight months.

Yet others say that it is more Mr. Trump’s fiery threats of “all hell to pay” if a deal is not reached by Inauguration Day that have focused everyone’s attention.

Moreover, they say the Trump threats have not been aimed solely at an adversary like Hamas, but have also placed a level of pressure on ally Israel that President Biden ultimately seemed unwilling to apply. Israeli sources say Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, real estate developer and golf buddy Steve Witkoff, made it very clear to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the “hell to pay” if no deal is signed by Jan. 20 applied to him as well.

For critics of Mr. Trump’s hardball diplomacy, the incoming president’s promise of an imperial foreign policy not only threatens to stoke conflicts, but it also risks putting the U.S. on a par with other expansionist big powers – namely China and Russia. What happens to America’s moral authority to check China’s ambitions vis-à-vis Taiwan, for example, or to challenge Russia’s revanchist playbook for Central and Eastern Europe?

Some of the president-elect’s allies roll their eyes at such hand-wringing and advise the worry warts to instead consider Mr. Trump’s history, including as a businessman before entering politics, of taking maximalist and attention-focusing positions at the outset of negotiations.

“The United States is not going to invade another country,” Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma said Sunday on “Meet the Press” when pressed on Mr. Trump’s string of hostile musings. Even when he threatens military force, he said, the president-elect is simply making characteristically “bold” statements aimed at bringing “everyone to the table.”

In his State Department speech, President Biden also spoke of the negotiating table, and of his administration’s enhancement of America’s unique ability to bring countries together to reach shared objectives – at NATO, for example, or at international climate talks.

Critics counter that Mr. Biden’s paean to his administration’s vision of strength through alliances involves a bit of whitewashing. America’s partners in Afghanistan, including NATO allies, were bitterly left in the cold when the U.S. abruptly withdrew its troops in August 2021. European partners felt jilted by the Biden administration’s very America-first infrastructure legislation.

Still, to illustrate his theme, Mr. Biden told a story of how members of the Quad grouping of Asian-Pacific countries requested that their first meeting as an enhanced regional organization be held at his home in Delaware. When he asked why, the response was “that way people will know we are truly friends.”

Well, yes and no.

In the weeks before he takes office, the president-elect has also been receiving a steady stream of foreign leaders at his house at Mar-a-Lago. And while some of them have indeed come to the Florida table to express ideological kinship – like Argentina’s President Javier Milei – others have made the trek to gauge warily the implications of the imminent return of a confrontational America-first foreign policy.

Take Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau, who resigned last week. No one suspects he flew down to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago table in December to show the world how much the two leaders are true friends.

A fast-moving immigration bill is showing how deeply divided Democrats have become on the thorny issue on the eve of President-elect Donald Trump’s return to power.

Republicans made the first bill of the new Congress the Laken Riley Act, a bill designed to crack down on unauthorized immigrants accused of nonviolent crimes and give state attorneys general the power to challenge individual federal decisions on immigration. The bill is named after Laken Riley, a nursing student who was murdered at the University of Georgia in 2024 by a migrant who had been arrested multiple times for other alleged crimes. It passed the House last week with nearly one-quarter of Democrats voting for it, and has bipartisan momentum in the Senate.

The bill’s Democratic backers warn that their party better get on board.

“If we can’t scrape seven or eight votes out of our caucus, that’s one of the reasons why we lost,” says Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Senate sponsor of the bill. “I am very pro-immigration. That doesn’t mean we are pro for every immigrant.”

Senator Fetterman’s support, along with that of freshman Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who had voted for the bill last year in the House, set off a stampede of swing-state Democratic senators toward supporting the legislation, which needs at least seven Democrats to become law. Senate Democratic leaders, caught by surprise at the bill’s rapid movement, eventually agreed to allow debate on the bill so long as they could offer changes. Democrats unveiled a list of amendments Monday night; it remains to be seen which, if any, will be adopted.

A GOP advantage, but polling is nuanced

The past election showed that voters generally favored the GOP on the issue: Exit polls found that voters said they trusted former President Trump to handle immigration more than Vice President Kamala Harris, by 53% to 44%.

“Immigration was on the ballot. Being tougher on crime, on these particular issues, was on the ballot,” says Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida, who voted for the bill.

But those same exit polls showed a muddled picture. A solid majority of voters (56% to 40%) said that unauthorized immigrants should be offered a chance at legal status rather than face deportation. That suggests that if Mr. Trump seeks widespread deportations, as he and his aides have suggested, he could face political blowback. And only 12% of voters said immigration was their top issue this campaign, with 14% naming abortion, 32% the economy, and 34% democracy.

The biggest shift in voting this election actually came from Latino voters. Mr. Trump won 46% of the Hispanic vote, a 14-point jump from 2020 and the highest share of any Republican presidential candidate since at least 1972. Exit polls showed that Hispanic voters were about evenly divided on which candidate they trusted more on immigration, but two-thirds opposed deporting most unauthorized immigrants. Latinos were no more likely to name immigration as their most important issue than non-Hispanic voters – 13% said it was their top issue, while 37% chose the economy.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (far left) is joined by other Republican Sens. (from left) James Lankford, Ted Budd, John Barrasso, and Katie Britt, speaking to reporters in the U.S. Capitol about the Laken Riley Act. The bill is putting pressure on Democrats to define their position on unauthorized immigrants who have been accused of certain crimes.

But many Democrats recognize that they need to shift public perceptions of their immigration stances.

“They’re recalibrating and trying to meet the electorate where the electorate is rather than where some Democrats wish the electorate was when it comes to immigration policy,” says Fernand Amandi, a pollster who served as the top Hispanic-focused strategist on both of President Barack Obama’s White House campaigns.

Even many Democrats who oppose the bill say they think the party needs to closely examine what happened in the past election and acknowledge that immigration was an issue that hurt their party.

“The party is still sorting out what happened and what our messaging is going to be, and, of course, [its] positions on key issues, including immigration,” Rep. Chuy García of Illinois, who opposed the bill, said in an interview.

Mr. García saw his Hispanic-majority Chicago district swing 18 percentage points to the right in the last election. He said that inflation and cost-of-living issues were the biggest reasons for the swing, but the surge of new migrants bused into his community from border states also infuriated some constituents. “The messaging around the ‘chaos border’ and the surge in border crossings, along with the experience of having new arrivals in communities, made people resentful, made people think that they were being left behind one more time.”

Mr. García says he thinks some of his colleagues supported the bill because they felt “It’s easier to just go along and vote for it” than try to explain the problems with the bill to their constituents while facing attacks that they’re “favoring criminality.”

What the Laken Riley Act would do

The bill would require Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to detain unauthorized immigrants arrested for nonviolent crimes including “burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.” It would also empower state-level officials to sue the federal government to overturn decisions to release individual migrants – which detractors say could lead to a chaotic legal morass.

ICE warned lawmakers over the weekend that the the bill is an unfunded mandate that could require it to detain as many as 60,000 people, far more than the 42,000 total detention beds they currently have funding for. The agency says it would need more than $3.2 billion for enough detention beds and new agents to be able to enforce the law – or it could be forced to release tens of thousands of other immigrants it currently detains, including some deemed public safety threats. The bill doesn’t currently include any funding to help ICE carry out these widespread detentions.

Plenty of Democrats are rallying hard against the bill.

“The Laken Riley Act is a gross violation of civil rights for the American people writ large. And what people need to understand is that if we start rounding people up just based on that accusation of a crime, remove people’s day in court, eliminate the basic constitutional rights that we are all afforded in this country – that’s the beginning of the end when it comes to the erosion of our civil liberties in America,” says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii warns that the bill would let 10-year-old migrants “be detained for shoplifting a piece of gum.”

“If we’re going to do immigration reform, it should be comprehensive. This bill is not it,” she continues.

“A balance that we need to find”

Democrats moved hard to the left rhetorically on immigration issues during the 2020 election cycle. After Joe Biden became president, the southern border saw a major surge in illegal crossings early in his administration. Then, as public concern mounted, the Biden administration looked to crack down on border security, placing new restrictions on asylum-seekers. Illegal crossings plunged.

Vice President Harris leaned hard into more hawkish language on border security and highlighted her fight as California attorney general against transnational gangs, while hitting Mr. Trump for torpedoing a bipartisan border security deal negotiated in early 2024 by Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Lankford.

Mr. Amandi, President Obama’s pollster, said that pivot was “done too late” to help the party.

It’s clear the election results jolted Democrats. Thirty-seven House Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Act last March; this time, the number rose to 48.

But Mr. Trump has also faced blowback for his immigration policies in the past. The Trump administration’s family separation policy proved immensely unpopular when enacted in his first term, driving a dip in his poll numbers, and he was forced to walk it back.

A number of the new votes in the House came from freshman Democrats from competitive districts. They include Rep. Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia, whose parents are immigrants and whose northern Virginia district has a large number of first-generation Americans.

He thinks Democrats, and the United States, need to find a more balanced approach to immigration. Still, the congressman says he opposes most of what President-elect Trump has proposed on immigration – a sign that once the new president starts governing, Democrats might find more common ground to unite against his policies.

“I’m not in full agreement at all with Trump on his immigration plan. I think that it’s not realistic to try to deport 15-million-plus people,” Mr. Subramanyam says. “I do think the pendulum swung quite a bit over the past four years or so on immigration, and now it might end up swinging back too far the other way. And I think there’s a balance that we need to find.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Shopkeeper Becky Owens, shown with her dog Grace, talks Dec. 14, 2024, about why she voted for both Republican Donald Trump for president and Democrat Thornell “T.K.” King for sheriff.

When Darien, Georgia, was at the southern edge of the British Empire, the battle-hardened Scottish Highlanders who lived here helped hold the line against the Spanish at the Battle of Bloody Marsh in 1742.

That battle, though much exaggerated in local lore, was a British victory that ended any Spanish claims in Georgia. Those soldiers, among the first colonists of what would be a future American state, represent values still held in much esteem today: determination, industriousness, pride in heritage.

These values still infuse ideas about what it means to be an American in a place like Darien, the seat of McIntosh County on the southern Atlantic coast. A few hundred residents trace their bloodlines to those early Georgians, and are known locally as “direct descendants.”

In 2024, Donald Trump won McIntosh County – with its shrimp boats docked amid vast marshes – earning nearly two-thirds of the vote. Many people believe his tough stances on trade could help a struggling fishing industry.

Some, too, liken his promises of tougher border enforcement and mass deportations to the actions of those early Scots, who stood up to the Spanish assault.

But voters in McIntosh County also elected a new sheriff – a Black Democrat named Thornell “T.K.” King. Mr. King, a retired State Patrol major, made his name giving away turkeys at Thanksgiving and presents for poor children on Christmas. He defeated a white candidate who was closely aligned with Mr. Trump.

“He has the right background, and he takes care of the community rather than just running a jail,” says Becky Owens, a local shopkeeper and ticket-splitter.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

A sticker-bedecked traffic sign alongside a dirt road in the tiny village of Meridian in McIntosh County, Georgia, provides context for America's political dynamics, Dec. 15, 2024.

She voted for both winning candidates. In them, she says she saw a glimpse of a country that relied on its founding values and focused on progress within local communities. That doesn’t mean progress under President-elect Trump will be easy, Ms. Owens says.

“I am very excited” about Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, Ms. Owens says.

“But I also know that to make sure we still have a country, some people will have to leave and some people might be hurt,” she says of the prospect of mass deportations. “Right now, too much of politics is trying to make everybody happy.”

“And there’s no Middle America where people aren’t hurting right now,” she adds.

Here in Darien, her own role will be working to relieve the many inequities that still exist. It’s a place where white people have long dominated local politics – and its wealth. McIntosh County is 66% white and 31% Black.

So Ms. Owens says she’s stepping up her work at Charlie’s Place, a soup kitchen that helps feed the approximately 150 residents who live below the poverty line. She believes that part of the mission of the United States for the next four years should be also to resolve historical injustices.

She sees this as critical to America’s long-held focus on the pursuit of happiness as a key part of citizenship, if not of life.

Ashley Lewis, however, is not so sure a second Trump administration will focus on everyone’s pursuit of happiness. Ms. Lewis points to President-elect Trump’s past derogatory statements about people of color and Democratic areas of the country.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Ashley and Iddarion Lewis steam a bushel of wild oysters in the village of Meridian in Georgia's McIntosh County Dec. 15, 2024.

She traces her lineage to the Gullah Geechee people, descendants of West and Central Africans enslaved on plantations along the Atlantic coast. To hear the way Mr. Trump “others” people – such as immigrants, protesters, and Black people – not only hurts, Ms. Lewis says, but also threatens to drive America’s historic injustices even deeper.

Still, she says, the health of the economy matters a lot. “Our main focus as a family is on inflation. But prices have gotten better, including gas,” says the mother of grade schoolers.

She and her husband, Iddarion, just bought 50 pounds of local oysters for $75. “That was fair,” she says. They held a party, cooking the oysters on a piece of tin roofing over a fire, covering them with water-soaked burlap sacks to steam.

“I don’t think of it as politics”

Newly elected Sheriff King is heaving steaming baskets of fried shrimp and whiting onto paper plates, cutting a humble profile in a cornmeal-dusted sweater.

All around him in this small town on the Georgia coast, children and parents are streaming in for his 13th annual Christmas giveaway, where toy trucks and stuffed animals are there to bring the little ones some holiday cheer. For years, Mr. King has spearheaded events during Thanksgiving and Christmas, offering help and a smile to the impoverished residents in one of Georgia’s poorest counties.

“It’s interesting,” Mr. King says. “My opponent tried to make an issue of this. He said, ‘What does giving away turkeys and gifts have to do with public safety?’ I didn’t really know what he meant.”

Mr. King – a former state trooper and shrimp boat captain – says his campaign channeled the values of the Gullah Geechee descendants. He won the office of McIntosh County sheriff by focusing on perseverance, respect, and resourcefulness.

For many, his victory offers hope for building a community with shared values and mutual respect in this era of polarization and vitriol.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Former state trooper and shrimp boat captain Thornell "T.K." King (left) serves locally caught fried whiting and shrimp to families attending a Dec. 23, 2024, Christmas party and gift giveaway for lower-income residents in Darien, Georgia. In November, McIntosh County voters elected Mr. King their sheriff.

But it’s complicated. In some ways, Ms. Lewis’ unease is rooted in the history of how her ancestors survived in McIntosh County. It was not by winning battles to preserve an empire.

Through the past century, Black residents here have quietly demanded their rights and their due – a kind of Southern protest, coated in manners and grace, but at its core, a demand.

“The U.S., as it relates to Trump and identity, is such a big and volatile place, with lots of different regions and different people from different backgrounds, and some people like to think that all of this collective striving leads to harmony,” says Georgia Southern University historian Bennett Parten, author of “Somewhere Toward Freedom.”

“But the reality is that there are winners and losers, and people like Trump have found a way to prey on that competition – pitting one group against another,” says Dr. Parten. “In a sense, history is a seesaw between paying attention to our baser instincts and then, like Lincoln did, calling us to our better angels.”

The office of McIntosh County sheriff, in fact, also has a long, complicated, and very Southern history.

From the 1950s to 1970s, Tom Poppell, a white-haired charismatic sheriff, basically ruled the county from behind a set of sunglasses.

His father was the sheriff for over a decade before he took over in 1948. And when Mr. Poppell died in 1978, his wife took over as interim sheriff.

For 30 years, Sheriff Poppell was essentially above the law, historians say. He’d oversee looting operations on disabled tractor trailers on Highway 17. He once said that the way to control Black people was to keep them hungry.

But he also hired Black deputies and gave assistance to Black community members as well as white. “If you weren’t careful, he’d be your friend,” one saying went. “He just wrote his own law,” said another, according to local accounts.

Sheriff King’s father was among those early Black deputies hired by Sheriff Poppell.

“For most of this century, there was a strange racial calm in the county, consisting in part of good manners, in part of intimidation, and in part because the Sheriff cared less about the colors black and white than he did about the color green,” writes Melissa Fay Greene in “Praying for Sheetrock,” her award-winning history of McIntosh County’s civil rights era.

For his part, Mr. King is loath to talk politics. Yes, he ran as a Democrat, but in some ways that is because party affiliation is required for the office he will occupy, he says. “I don’t think of this as politics. I think of this as building a better community.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

The British flag flies over Fort King George State Historic Site in Darien, Georgia, Dec. 15, 2024. The town of Darien was formed in the 18th century, after the fort failed and Gov. James Oglethorpe asked Scottish families to move to what was then the border of the British Empire.

A reenactor ponders his role in history

From 1721 to 1736, Fort King George was the southernmost outpost of the British Empire in North America.

Long hidden under a massive sawmill, the fort’s artifacts were unearthed in the mid-20th century by local historians. With a grant from the state, a replica of the original fort was built on McIntosh Road in Darien. The Union Jack flies over the old frontier outpost.

Resting with his musket on a Sunday afternoon about a month before inauguration, a redcoat reenactor, Michael Bagley, says the fort ultimately failed because of what those back then called the “miasma” – or “bad air.” Depression, loneliness, and drunkenness were other factors, historians say.

Not long after the fort was abandoned, Gen. James Oglethorpe, considered Georgia’s founder, recruited nearly 200 Scottish Highland families to build a town near its ruins. This became Darien.

SOURCE:

Map data from OpenStreetMap

|

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Mr. Bagley cheerily acknowledges that his presence at Fort King George is full of contradictions and ironies.

He was born in Canada. His passion for historical reenactment helped him meet a woman who became his wife. They moved to Columbus, Ohio, and he became a U.S. citizen. As a reenactor, he specializes in the Queen Anne era and the War of 1812.

He quietly watches as a pirate reenactor claims that politics, not profiteering, drove pirates like him to hide from maritime law in the Georgia marshes. Mr. Bagley quickly pooh-poohs the reenactor’s claims: “They were in it for the money,” he says.

Despite the red coat, implying loyalty to a crown, the former punk rocker and current information technology security specialist is also a Democrat. And Mr. Bagley says he is still trying to come to terms with Mr. Trump’s victory. What does that mean and what does it say about the American people? he wonders.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Historical reenactor Michael Bagley, a Democrat, talks Dec. 15, 2024, in Darien, Georgia, about the history of what became McIntosh County. President-elect Donald Trump won the county by nearly two-thirds of the vote.

In his view, if Americans fall too much in thrall to despotic behavior, “We know what can happen,” he says, “because we’ve seen it before.”

Mr. Bagley believes the best course of action right now is to do what he’s doing: sitting back, period rifle in hand, and waiting it out. He just worries he’ll be like the last two soldiers stationed at Fort King George before the English finally abandoned it: relegated to history’s dustbin.

More optimistically, he says, he will continue as a reenactor, reminding Americans that history provides a sense of distance as well as hope. It informs today’s struggles but doesn’t define them.

“I think we have gotten stuck with top-down kind of candidates, and what we need are bottom-up candidates,” Mr. Bagley says. “Top-down candidates protect the status quo and basically invite corruption. It results in too much infighting and enabling, and doesn’t really help solve our problems.”

For Ms. Owens, Ms. Lewis, Sheriff King, and Mr. Bagley, the second Trump administration represents, in different ways, a nation that seesaws between advance and retreat, between progress and reversion, and a necessary wrestling with the core question “What does it really mean to be American?”

“Every four years, we get to renew what society looks like, and in that there’s always the promise of what early America was – to start fresh and new,” says Professor Parten at Georgia Southern. “It’s a symbolic regeneration of our politics.”

A teary-eyed woman guides a dog with sad brown eyes into a crate as the woofs of other canines fill the room.

“Mommy loves you,” the woman reassures the dog.

This isn’t what the woman wants. It doesn’t seem to be what the dog, Vino, wants either. But the woman recently lost her home and has to move into a camper – without Vino. A Path 4 Paws, a rescue organization in Las Vegas, has offered to help find him a new family.

Minutes earlier, Marleen Szalay, a volunteer, had coached the woman through filling out intake paperwork with Vino’s best interests in mind. With enough information, “We’ll be able to get him in the right home,” she says.

As the Sunday morning progresses, a van full of dogs coming from the organization’s sanctuary arrives. Volunteers lead the animals into the adoption center and prepare them to meet prospective new owners. This is the scene every Saturday and Sunday, and on a good weekend, A Path 4 Paws will find “loving homes” for 20 dogs, Ms. Szalay says.

A Path 4 Paws is just one in a constellation of animal welfare organizations that exists in communities across the United States. Some organizations play a behind-the-scenes role, providing extra capacity, foster homes, and a pathway to adoption for animals of all shapes and sizes. Others address a root cause of overpopulation by spaying and neutering animals. Many organizations are run by people like Ms. Szalay – dedicated volunteers whose passion for animals’ well-being motivates their unpaid work.

Here in Las Vegas, The Animal Foundation – a high-volume shelter that receives about a third of its funding from local governments – regularly works with dozens of animal rescue organizations. Betsy Laakso, the shelter’s director of community engagement, says they are “paw partners” who help save the lives of vulnerable animals.

“Our relationship with them is pretty vital,” she says. “It helps us with the population of animals coming in here and is one more positive pathway that we can give the animals.”

Jackie Valley/The Christian Science Monitor

A volunteer for A Path 4 Paws walks a dog. The group tries to find homes for canines in need.

And that population is booming. Through the end of October, The Animal Foundation alone had taken in 21,899 animals – more than two-thirds of whom were deemed to be strays – and transferred 2,323 to other rescue organizations last year. Large dogs are sitting at the shelter the longest, waiting an average of two weeks to get adopted, according to Animal Foundation data.

A Path 4 Paws, which relies entirely on donations, regularly picks up dogs from the shelter and independently tries to secure new homes for them. That’s where the volunteers come into play, fostering the dogs, ushering them to veterinary appointments, running the adoption center on weekends, and, of course, providing frequent cuddles. One person even donates carpet squares to be used in the crates.

The organization routinely has 150 dogs at its sanctuary in a rural area outside Las Vegas. Owners surrender them for reasons such as moves, financial difficulties, or health conditions affecting their ability to care for the animals. Other dogs wind up at shelters, which reach out to rescue organizations when they’re overflowing.

An adoption fee covers the cost of ensuring the dogs are spayed or neutered, dewormed, microchipped, and up to date on their shots, Ms. Szalay says, adding that the organization’s veterinary bills still end up being thousands of dollars each month.

“So many people help us in so many weird, different ways,” says Ms. Szalay, a former hotel executive who decided helping dogs would be her retirement purpose. She calls the work “rewarding” but also “heartbreaking.”

The volunteers running Bunnies Matter, another animal rescue organization in Las Vegas, feel much the same. On a Saturday morning, they’re arguably doing more hopping than the domesticated rabbits in their care as they facilitate adoptions, clean pens, provide snacks, and give attention.

Dave Schweiger, president of Bunnies Matter, says the rescue group started with six bunnies that had been dumped in his neighborhood. The six quickly turned into 24 bunnies. When Mr. Schweiger sought help, he couldn’t find any.

Eventually, the donation-funded group moved into space provided by the city at a park. The small building with wall-mounted air conditioners has 23 pens housing roughly 40 bunnies total – all of whom had been dumped or injured. The group’s volunteers have even more bunnies at their homes.

Jackie Valley/The Christian Science Monitor

Dave Schweiger, president of Bunnies Matter, holds a bunny available for adoption in Las Vegas.

Mr. Schweiger says the goal is to find them homes but not before educating potential adopters about all that pet ownership entails. In 2023, the group adopted out 119 rabbits.

“The biggest problem is people not thinking they’re forever pets,” he says.

Rescue groups can provide an additional “pressure valve release” by providing more homes for animals in their communities, says Stephanie Filer, executive director of Shelter Animals Count, a national database. But success hinges on cooperation among various entities.

“We are best as an industry when we are all collaborating and working well together for the benefit of the animals,” she says.

In Las Vegas, cooperation is also occurring on the population-control front. It’s on display in late July at the Heaven Can Wait Animal Society, a nonprofit focusing on spay and neuter services. Cats under anesthesia, slated for the minor surgical procedure, sleep soundly in a row.

On its highest-volume days, the clinic can spay or neuter 100 community cats brought in by volunteer trappers, partner nonprofit groups, foster programs, local residents, or the animal shelter, says Kelly Sheehan, the organization’s communications and development manager.

“We can’t do what we do without them,” she says.

The Community Cat Coalition of Clark County is one of the volunteer organizations routinely bringing cats to the nonprofit clinic. C5, as it’s known, traps community cats that are part of street colonies and returns them after they have been spayed or neutered.

Keith Williams, president of C5, performed system and data analysis for the aerospace industry before retiring. He approaches his nonprofit’s work with the same numbers-oriented mindset. “If we can go upstream and deal with the root problem, which is vastly too many being born, then the burden on the rescue world will be diminished,” he says.

For volunteers, success also means saying goodbye. Jill Jones, a volunteer at A Path 4 Paws, gives a cattle dog named Art ample belly rubs on a patch of artificial turf. He squirms in delight. Will this be their final interaction? For Art’s sake, she hopes so.

“You get attached to them, but then it’s nice when you don’t see them because they got a home,” she says.

Within weeks, Art and Vino had both found homes. They posed for photos, tongues hanging out in canine smiles, with their new families.

REUTERS/David Ryder

A California scrub jay stands near new plants growing in an area burned by the Palisades Fire, in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles, Jan. 14, 2025.

Even before the fires in Los Angeles have been extinguished, trackers of philanthropy have noted a raft of new funding initiatives springing up alongside established charities. Some are raising millions of dollars for long-term rebuilding. Others are offering small, emergency no-interest loans to help cover immediate needs.

This bump in local giving reflects an increasingly common response in cities and towns recovering from disasters. Generosity has more than a monetary impact. It often helps communities turn from a sense of loss to possibility.

“More than one official I spoke with said they are grateful and optimistic to see how this crisis is bringing out the altruistic side of residents in the City of Angels,” noted Wendy Paris, a Santa Monica-based journalist, in Inside Philanthropy. In a city of extraordinary economic and social disparity, wrote Sonali Kolhatkar, an author and resident of Pasadena, in the Los Angeles Times Tuesday, the fires are a reminder that “We don’t exist in isolation.”

The increasing frequency of disasters involving nature has deepened a sense of vulnerability arising from climate change. Yet that sense of vulnerability has also led to creativity and resilience in communities rebuilding after disasters.

After a tornado destroyed 95% of Greensburg, Kansas, in 2007, the town saw an opportunity to reinvent itself. City leaders worked with residents and local businesses to embrace energy efficiency “to create a strong community devoted to family, fostering business, working together for future generations,” they declared in a vision statement.

Clearing debris can lead to a renewal of civic ideals. In September 2024, Asheville, North Carolina, sustained severe damage when Hurricane Helene swelled the river that ran through the city center. For a community-based group called Beloved Asheville, the task of rebuilding has created new opportunities for equality and shared gratitude.

The group’s focus echoes a lesson learned from a similar disaster 20 years ago. The editors of the book “Creating Katrina, Rebuilding Resilience: Lessons From New Orleans on Vulnerability and Resiliency” observed that “a human- or community-centered approach focuses on identifying and reducing inequalities in agency.”

In one of the most successful recent examples of disaster recovery, the Missouri city of Joplin rebounded almost entirely in two short years after being struck by a tornado in 2011.

Churches, government agencies, and local civic organizations banded together. “The spirit and the power of this community, with its faith in God, has had amazing effects,” said Jay St. Clair, then a member of the Joplin Area Long Term Recovery Committee, in a 2013 interview with The Wall Street Journal. “It was just a real work of unity and cooperation.”

Last week, as the fires in Los Angeles rapidly grew, Gov. Gavin Newsom suspended some of California’s landmark environmental laws to expedite recovery and mitigate further environmental damage. That work is yet to start and may take years.

But as others have learned, and as Los Angeles is now discovering, resilience needs no delay. It can start with generosity that leads to new ways of thinking about communities and the values that shape them.

“In a lot of ways,” late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel said Monday night from his studio in Hollywood, the city’s crisis has been “a beautiful experience because, once again, we see our fellow men and women coming together to support each other. People who lost their own homes were out volunteering in parking lots helping others who lost theirs.”