The Brief

On a recent spring Saturday, about 20 people gathered in a parking lot of a building off of Florence Avenue in South L.A. They each stood by a brand new, bright orange electric bike.

“How often do we get to experience electric bikes in South L.A.?” said Adé Neff, founder of Ride On Bike Shop in Leimert Park. “Electric bikes are all over the city. But they're not within South L.A.”

Until now. Neff is part of a coalition of community-based groups that helped launch a new e-bike rental program called South Central Power Up.

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The program brings 250 e-bikes to South L.A., where, after a safety training, residents will be able to get an e-bike to take home for at least a month, and then they will be able to renew the bike for free, for the first six months of the program. After that, they’ll be able to rent them for a small fee that will be determined later.

It’s part of a growing trend to make e-bikes more widely accessible — e-bikes run at least a few hundred bucks, and more often are more than $1,000. And, most car trips we take are relatively short, so e-bikes can help replace those miles and have a significant impact on climate pollution as well as help folks save money on gas. The South L.A. program is modeled after similar programs in Pacoima and Wilmington.

Adé Neff, owner of a bike shop in Leimert Park and long-time L.A. bicyclist, is part of a coalition of community-based groups that helped launch the new e-bike rental program.

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The goal is to bring a climate friendly and money-saving mode of transportation to an area that lacks dependable public transportation, has disproportionate levels of air and climate pollution, and where high gas prices are particularly burdensome.

“We're offering opportunities to folks that will allow them to have more autonomy and agency over their travel and commute,” said Lena Williams, program director for People for Mobility Justice, one of the community-based groups spearheading the program.

Williams said they aim to serve street vendors and other entrepreneurs such as delivery drivers, and people who frequently use public transportation or walk or bike to get around, as well as folks who want to save on gas money, or just have some fun on a bike without the physical exertion of a traditional bike.

“There’s a place for e-bikes within our society and our communities,” said Neff. “I was on a bike for 10 years in L.A. — I didn't have an electric bike. And I was going from South L.A. to Santa Monica to Long Beach to Pasadena, downtown and by the time I got to my destination, I'm winded, I'm sweaty. Whereas, I can get on the e-bike and get to my destination and I'm not exerting that much energy.”

Lena Williams, program director for People for Mobility Justice, one of the community-based groups spearheading the South Central Power Up e-bike program.

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An e-bike tour of South L.A. 

But on this particular Saturday, the group is going for a ride on the new e-bikes to have some fun and learn about South L.A. and the long fight for environmental and social justice.

South L.A. resident Patrena Shankling, 62, came out to try the bikes with her 32-year-old son Lonnie, who joined from Bellflower.

“I want to get out of my car and get some exercise in,” said Shankling. “It's good for the environment, good for me, health-wise.”

She said she also wants to save money on gas.

South L.A. resident Patrena Shankling, left, and her son Lonnie, came out to try the e-bikes and have some mother-son time together.

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South L.A. resident and community advocate Blanca Lucio said she’s long used regular bikes to get around but this is her first time on an electric one.

“Tengo muchos años este usando bicicleta,” she said. “En mi comunidad, la gente siempre anda caminando, anda en el bus, entonces cuando yo llegué a vivir en sur centro, yo era la mamá que siempre llevaba a los hijos en la bicicleta, la dejarlos a la escuela.”

“I have for many years used a bicycle,” she said. “In my community, people are always walking, taking the bus, so when I came to South Central I was the mother who always took the children on the bicycle to drop them off at school."

She said e-bikes are one way to get around more easily and address air pollution, an issue that’s particularly important to her.

Community advocates Blanca Lucio, left, and Guadalupe Rivas hanging out before the e-bike tour on a recent Saturday.

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Zaakiyah Brisker grew up in South L.A. and only uses a bike to get around. She got rid of her car because of the financial stress of paying the car off, the registration, and maintaining the vehicle, but also because it’s better for the environment.

“When I started riding my bike, it was easier because I used to live in mid-city and all of the shopping that I would do would be in Culver City, which is a totally walkable neighborhood,” Brisker said. “Since moving back to South Central, it's been a challenge because this is not a walkable area. But I love riding my bike so much and I believe in the values of not harming the planet and not adding to climate change as much as possible, especially as it relates to hood areas like South Central.”

It’s one reason why Brisker is a communications associate at Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education, or SCOPE for short, a long-time civil rights organization in South L.A. and another partner on the project, and the launching point for our ride today.

South L.A. resident Zaakiyah Brisker stands beside new electric bikes that will be available to rent for free for community members through the new South Central Power Up program

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Turning points for justice in South L.A.

After a safety briefing and getting comfortable on the bikes in the parking lot, it’s time to head out on our ride.

The group listens to Williams discuss safely using the e-bikes.

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We get off to a rough start. As soon as we tried to cross Florence Avenue, an aggressive driver tried to nose through our line of bikes crossing the street — evidence of the dangers bikers face every day on L.A. roads, especially here in South L.A., which has some of the least infrastructure for bikes.

But we safely make it to our first stop — the corner of Florence and Normandie, the very spot where the 1992 unrest began.

Once we got off Florence and onto quieter neighborhood streets, everyone started to relax and have some fun. Soon, the party grew.

Juan Brown, 21, and his buddy decided to join us on their own bikes. They popped wheelies and did other tricks, riding alongside us as we and people watching from outside their homes cheered.

“I ride my bike every day,” Brown said. “For fun, to get around, everything. It's bike life all day.”

21-year-old South L.A. resident Juan Brown joined us for part of our ride.

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But he said dangerous drivers and the lack of infrastructure for bikes is a major, and sometimes deadly, challenge. He says he’s lost friends who have been hit by cars. But it hasn’t stopped him. He said that’s because of the community that biking provides.

Our next stop is Exposition Park, where we talk about how gentrification and housing costs around USC are impacting the community. Next, we head to a former oil drilling site that, after a decade of organizing, the community successfully got shut down.

A map showing the "hubs" where South L.A. residents will be able to pick up e-bikes as part of the South Central Power Up program.

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We end our ride at Village Market Place off Vermont, which sells fresh, locally grown produce and other goods at an affordable price. And, by the way, it’s powered by solar panels.

The ride was 12 miles altogether, but all of us barely broke a sweat.

Our group rides towards Exposition Park.

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Each stop we made on our ride showed how the climate problem is really a justice problem, like how the racism and disinvestment that sparked the L.A. uprising is the very same disinvestment that makes south L.A. worse off when it comes to climate impacts such as extreme heat. And how the climate crisis intersects with food insecurity, and housing costs driving displacement and exacerbating financial stress.

But each stop also revealed the opportunity to turn that around — such as the former oil drilling site, which has been bought by a community trust that has the goal of turning it into a park with permanent affordable housing. Or how growing food locally is a way to boost health and resilience. And the effort to get e-bikes here and get more people out of cars and spur deeper investment in bike infrastructure and public transportation.

The threads tying it all together were the folks who have long pushed for these changes in south L.A.

Without infrastructure, too soon for e-bikes?

Throughout the ride, the lack of safe street infrastructure was glaringly obvious. It’s a problem across L.A., but more so in South L.A, where potholes are rampant, bike lanes are few and far between, and protected bike lanes are nonexistent.

So is it too soon to be pushing e-bikes?

“The streets of South Central are notoriously dangerous, whether you're walking, biking, driving,” Williams said. “But I think there is something super, super important about actually just taking up space — people being seen in this way that says, ‘This is what we're doing. The streets are intended to be multi-modal and we want to show the ways that we can coexist.’”

The slow progress on improving bike infrastructure has been a challenge that the e-bike lending program in Pacoima, Electro-Bici, which has now run for nearly three years, has also faced, said Miguel Miguel, policy director with Pacoima Beautiful, the grassroots group that is heading the project there.

“We're creating a program in a community where a program like this, the infrastructure for it, wasn't ever really thought of,” Miguel said. “It's almost like we're trying to paint the wall right before we fix the drywall. So some of the challenges have been like, we're offering this service, but how do community members now utilize the actual transportation network to be able to go from point A to point B.”

The Electro-Bici program received 100 refurbished electric bikes from the New York-based Shared Mobility Inc., which has provided "e-bike libraries" in several U.S cities.

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The huge lack of even the simplest infrastructure such as bike racks to lock bikes at destinations like grocery stores is also a major barrier, Miguel said. But that hasn’t made the program a failure — far from it actually. Miguel said one big lesson learned has been that the “need” doesn’t always have to come before the “want.”

“This is an activity that community members have been asking for, for a while, but unfortunately there's some true income inequality issues that don't allow folks to have access even just to a regular mechanical bike,” Miguel said. “If we come into this first thinking we want to repair people's relationship with their inner child, we want to repair people's relationship with what it is to have a bike – I think that's what these programs are.”

Miguel said many of the folks who regularly use the e-bikes through Pacoima’s program are either on the older side or the younger side, and rather than only using it to get to and from work or run errands, they’re often using the bikes for exercise, or to go to the park, or just ride around with friends.

“This is an opportunity to have community members step aside from the day to day of working, of living in a city, and into just being a child for a while and just enjoy playing and healing through playing.”

Williams would agree.

“Biking is medicine. If we allow the fears to keep us from getting there, it's such a detriment to our experience,” Williams said.

So e-bikes may be great for saving money on gas and getting around sustainably (they can truly help lower climate pollution), but they’re also just plain fun. And having fun — experiencing joy — well, that’s an important piece of building resilience too.

The 1994 World Cup kicked off with a sold-out match. On a scorching afternoon in Chicago, some 63,000 spectators — including then-President Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey — were packed like sardines at Soldier Field to watch Germany vs. Bolivia. Their cheers and boos, as loud as thunder.

Today, it's easy to imagine a World Cup game drawing such American fanfare. But back then, it was a much different story.

"It was a big question as to how the U.S. would embrace it. Would people come to the games?" Mike Sorber, who played for the U.S. Men's National Team in 1994, told NPR.

Ahead of the 1994 World Cup, most Americans were unaware that the U.S. would be hosting the tournament. A survey from the time ranked soccer 67th among the nation's favorite sports (behind tractor pulling).

Despite this, the 1994 World Cup — the first held in the U.S. — took a surprising turn. Game after game, stadiums were filled to capacity, packed not only with tourists and die-hard fans but also with soccer novices who came out of curiosity and because tickets were relatively affordable, according to soccer historians.

Mike Sorber plays during an exhibition game at the Rose Bowl in 1994.

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" I think all the naysayers were surprised," said Sorber, who is currently an assistant coach for Major League Soccer's New York Red Bulls. "The atmosphere was electric. It was like a big party."

Soccer's momentum in the U.S. has only been growing since then, fueled by the launch of Major League Soccer and the success of the U.S. Women's National Team. When the World Cup returns to the U.S. in June, it will be greeted by a larger and more passionate fanbase than ever before.

How exactly did a sport that struggled to gain traction for decades go on to break the World Cup's record for largest attendance and win over Americans' hearts? To answer that, NPR spoke to Sorber, along with soccer journalists and fans, about the breakthrough World Cup.

Why did it take so long for the U.S. to embrace soccer?

How far back the soccer tradition in the U.S. goes depends on whom you ask and where they're from.

Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis and pockets of New York, New Jersey and New England all have deep soccer roots — often brought by European immigrants in the 19th century, according to Brian D. Bunk, who teaches the history of sports at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

As a result, the sport was largely associated with working-class and immigrant communities, Bunk added. Some also dismissed soccer over the perception that it lacked the physicality of sports like American football.

Colombian soccer fans wave their country's flag during the "Chicago Welcomes the World Cup" parade on June 15, 1994.

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"The argument that was often made against soccer is that it was an inferior form of football," Bunk said.

There were brief bursts of excitement for the sport in the late 20th century — such as when legendary Brazilian player Pelé came to play in the U.S. in the late 1970s — but they never lasted long.

By the 1980s, the future of soccer in the U.S. looked bleak. The North American Soccer League, which began in 1968, folded after the 1984 season. American soccer officials hoped a World Cup tournament at home could resuscitate interest.

" Let's face it: You need to have the product in front of you to see what the heck this is all about," said Michael Lewis, who has covered soccer for five decades. He's the editor of Front Row Soccer, a website that follows the soccer scene in New York and New Jersey.

FIFA also saw an opportunity. Soccer's global governing body viewed the U.S. "as the last and largest uncracked market for its sport," Pete Davies, who has written extensively about sports, told NPR's Fresh Air in 1994.

"And it want[ed] to get into that market," he added.

What led to the tournament's success in 1994? 

What the U.S. lacked in soccer prowess, it made up for with its ability to put on a massive sporting event (thanks to the nation's football stadiums and experience hosting the Olympics) — and a fun one at that.

" We have the sporting infrastructure — the stadiums — we have the hotels, the restaurants, the transportation systems," said Bunk, of the University of Massachusetts. "And so all of that stuff meant that the World Cup could go very smoothly."

Americans also proved they were up for a good time — and World Cup fans knew how to bring the party. Drums, whistles, trumpets, singing, dancing and face paint were the hallmarks of a World Cup game.

A Mexican fan, his face painted with Mexico's national colors, cheers in the stands at the Citrus Bowl stadium in Orlando, Fla., on June 24, 1994, prior to the start of the World Cup match between Mexico and Ireland.

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A soccer fan supporting Argentina plays a drum at the World Cup match between Argentina and Nigeria at Foxboro Stadium in Massachusetts in June 1994.

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That's what Kevin Tallec Marston, a research fellow at the International Centre for Sports Studies in Switzerland, remembers most vividly from the Belgium vs. Saudi Arabia match in Washington, D.C., which he attended as a teenager.

"It was not the kind of fandom that Americans would associate with going to an NBA game, going to an NFL game," he said. "Seeing these people from all around the world with their own cultures, their own chants, their own songs, their own instruments."

Univision played a major role in attracting both Spanish- and non-Spanish-speaking viewers alike, especially through World Cup announcer Andrés Cantor and his iconic "Goooooooooool!"

"It created this sort of mythical element of what it was to watch the World Cup," said Tallec Marston, who, along with Front Row Soccer's Lewis, is a board member of the Society for American Soccer History.

But perhaps what electrified Americans most was the strong performance of the U.S. Men's National Team. It started with a hard-fought 1-1 tie with Switzerland, followed by a stunning 2-1 upset over powerhouse Colombia. (The victory was later marred by tragedy: Colombian defender Andrés Escobar, who had accidentally knocked the ball into his own team's net, was shot and killed shortly after returning home.)

That match was the first World Cup win for the U.S. men's team since 1950. The team's victory was witnessed by more than 93,000 fans at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

Sorber, a midfielder in the starting lineup, said he had played for large crowds before, but never for an audience so enthralled by the U.S. team. It was "euphoria," he said.

" All of a sudden, it really opened the eyes to the whole United States … that wow, this is what the future of soccer could be."

Steve Davis covered the 1994 games as a young sports reporter for The Dallas Morning News. "It sort of lit a fire under people," he said. "I would think some Americans became soccer fans that day."

The U.S. team went on to lose to Romania 1-0 and then to Brazil 1-0. Although the U.S. didn't win, Sorber said, the support and energy from American fans during those matches felt like a victory.

" You had a huge turnout," he said. "So again, that was a big moment in U.S. soccer history … to reestablish soccer, to build that foundation and get more awareness for the U.S. national team."

Post-1994

In total, over 3.5 million people attended the 1994 World Cup — the largest attendance in FIFA history to this day. Despite its success, soccer's American fanbase didn't grow overnight.

"Soccer's growth isn't linear," writer Davis said.

Two years later, the professional Major League Soccer (MLS) launched. Around that time, FIFA's World Cup video game franchise helped introduce soccer to an even broader audience. All the while, the U.S. Women's National Team emerged as a dominating force and accelerated the rise of women's soccer globally. Across the U.S., youth soccer exploded in popularity.

Brandi Chastain celebrates after kicking the winning penalty kick at the 1999 women's World Cup final against China on July 10, 1999.

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The arrival of international superstars to MLS, like David Beckham in 2007 and Lionel Messi in 2023, added fire to the nation's passion for the sport. MLS, which began with 10 teams, has since expanded to 30 clubs.

Together, these moments helped transform the soccer landscape in the United States. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar drew an average of 4.7 million American viewers per game, according to Nielsen. Each year, millions of Americans watch England's Premier League matches on TV and streaming platforms.

When it comes to America's favorite sports, soccer now ranks third, surpassing baseball, according to Ampere Analysis, a data firm focused on entertainment industries.

Davis, who is now the director of legacy programs for the North Texas FIFA World Cup Organizing Committee, said it's validating to see the sport he has loved and played since childhood resonate with more people at home.

"I did have some faith that it was going to grow," he said. "But I would be lying if I said I thought we'd be here in 2026, seeing how big it's become."

The challenges ahead 

Although this isn't the first time that the U.S. has hosted the World Cup, the upcoming tournament is expected to be vastly different.

"One of the key aspects of the '94 World Cup was taking football to the new horizon," said Tallec Marston, who co-wrote Inventing the Boston Game. "So it'll be interesting because we are no longer in a new frontier."

Hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico, this year's competition will introduce more teams and matches than ever before. It will also return to a far more diverse United States. In 1994, about 8% of the country's population was foreign-born. As of 2025, immigrants make up 15% of the nation.

Two men walk past a mural of a soccer player in Guadalajara, Mexico, on April 29. Mexico will co-host the biggest World Cup in history, along with the United States and Canada, from June 11 to July 19.

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"You're going to have a representation of countries and nations that we will have never seen before. And so that will be very exciting to see," Tallec Marston said.

The current U.S. Men's National Team has far more experience on the World Cup stage compared with the 1994 team. Since then, the team has qualified for every World Cup except one, in 2018. There's much excitement for this group of young players, many of whom are playing for top European clubs.

The controversies leading up to the games are also quite different. In 1994, the uncertainty was whether many Americans would attend the matches. This year, the question is whether they will be able to afford to — with dynamic pricing driving ticket costs sky-high.

The tournament will also take place during a politically volatile period in the United States. The ongoing war with Iran has led to questions about whether the Iranian team will participate.

The Trump administration's travel restrictions and harsh immigration crackdown have also sparked debate as to how many tourists will feel comfortable traveling to the United States. The administration is also requiring a bond of up to $15,000 for travelers from 50 countries that it deemed as having immigration risk factors, such as high overstay rates and screening and vetting deficiencies. Five nations that qualified for the World Cup — Algeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Tunisia and Cape Verde — are on the list.

For all these reasons, Lewis, who wrote Around the World Cup in 40 Years, about his experience covering eight men's World Cups, expects that "there'll be magic, but there'll be headaches too."

" I think the games themselves should be exciting and fun," he said. However, putting the problems to rest, Lewis added, will be "easier said than done."
Copyright 2026 NPR

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On March 1, the day after U.S. forces bombed Iran and began a war that's now more than nine weeks long, President Donald Trump posted 30 times on Truth Social.

Just after midnight, he posted about the bombing campaign, including a threat to retaliate if Iran itself retaliated ("THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT").

But he soon had a lot more on his mind; mid-morning, he posted a video portraying Senator Mitch McConnell as the floppy, deceased Bernie from Weekend at Bernie's.

He posted a Tiktok video praising his State of the Union — a speech he had given five days prior — then reposted that video, along with a screenshot of a post on the social media site X. Just after noon, he posted an update on the war ("we have destroyed and sunk 9 Iranian Naval Ships, some of them relatively large and important"). Mid-afternoon, he posted a string of Trump-friendly news coverage, including a New York Post article from September 2024 about how Lady Gaga's father endorsed Trump in the presidential race. Shortly thereafter, in the span of five minutes, he posted 10 times, all of them lists of screenshots of praise from X users for his State of the Union address. He later posted a video update about the war in Iran, followed by a video marked as being from an Instagram user called @truthaboutfluoride, purporting to show San Francisco as a run-down city filled with poverty.

During his first presidential campaign, Trump's constant stream of seemingly unvetted tweets was a sideshow that quickly became inescapable — the boasts, insults, and lies at times hijacked news cycles. Once he was elected, they presented a new frontier in American politics: a real-time view into a president's mind.

Ten years, one Twitter ejection, one Twitter return, and a move to Truth Social later, Trump's posts still make news — like when he announces a war or tries to pick a fight with the pope — but for many have become the background noise of American politics.

The president of the United States is now communicating with the public sometimes dozens of times a day on a social media platform that he himself created, and most Americans (and perhaps even journalists) never see most of those posts. Of course, most of those posts are not individually newsworthy. But looking at them together provides a picture of exactly what, in the aggregate, the president of the United States is thinking about and saying to the world at all hours.

To try to grasp that, NPR analyzed the first four months of Trump's Truth Social posts this year. What emerged is a portrait of an extremely online president with scattered focus — who, even while he dealt with fallout from his policies such as war in Iran and immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, was also busy insulting his critics, posting pictures of his proposed ballroom, and continuing to insist on the lie that he won the 2020 election. The president also has unorthodox posting habits that illustrate that, even as arguably the most powerful person on earth, he remains focused on how he is seen.

What the president is posting about

To quantitatively analyze the president's posts, NPR compiled the president's first four months of posts, using a data scraper maintained by CNN. We then classified each post based on its topic (tariffs, the war in Iran, Greenland) and the type of post it was (sharing a news story, reposting someone else, making a threat).

Trump posted 2,249 times in the first four months of 2026, an average of just under 19 posts per day.

The most common topic Trump posted about – at about 14% of his posts – was 2026 elections. These posts — more than 300 of them — consist largely of either candidate endorsements or posts touting a Trump-backed candidate's win.

However, Trump at times did not give a simple endorsement, instead adding attacks on an endorsee's opponents. For example, in endorsing Republican candidates for the Indiana state Senate, the posts became paragraph-long screeds as Trump attacked sitting senators as "RINOs" (Republicans in name only) if they voted against a Trump-backed redistricting plan.

The next most common topics after elections were Iran (247 posts) and the economy (177). He also posted dozens of times about alleged fraud in Minnesota's safety net programs, the SAVE Act, and his belief that the justice system was weaponized against him.

To the degree that his posts measure what he's thinking about, the president's social media feed suggests he is as preoccupied — or even more so — with his personal projects and vendettas than he is with pressing policy matters.

President Trump posted about the 2020 election 71 times in the first four months of 2026, more than he posted even about tariffs (57 times — all of which we coded as a subset of posts about the economy). Those 2020 election posts all promoted the lie that via massive voter fraud or other malfeasance, Joe Biden stole that election.

Trump posted 68 times about his various Washington, D.C., building projects, including his White House ballroom and a proposed massive arch across the Potomac near Arlington National Cemetery. That's slightly more than he posted about Venezuela, more than he posted about the SAVE Act he's promoting, and more than he posted about protesters and federal agents in Minneapolis, including federal agents killing two U.S. citizens.

He posted more than six times as often (105) about his various legal grievances than he did about healthcare policy (17).

Also notable are the topics that get little attention. While tariffs and the war in Iran do affect, for example, the farm economy, Trump posted just four times specifically about American farming during the first four months of the year — less than half as many times as he posted (nine times) about his anger at comedian Bill Maher.

As for the top types of posts, the largest category – at just under one-quarter of his posts – are social media reshares. These take several formats — some are screenshots of posts from X, and others are videos reposted from other social media sites, such as TikTok.

This emphasizes the technological differences between now and Trump's first term.

Near the end of his first term, the videos Trump posted were largely from Fox News or other right-leaning news outlets, or they were videos produced by the White House.

Now, there's an endless array of TikTok and Instagram videos and memes the president can repost, many of them from amateurs or generated by AI. Some have been outright offensive, as when he posted a racist video that depicted former President Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. The White House initially defended the video, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling reporters, "Please stop the fake outrage." Trump later said he hadn't seen the full video, telling reporters, "I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine." He did not apologize, and the post was later deleted.

Other posts have promoted conspiracy theories, as with a video that baselessly proposed that Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was involved in the 2025 killing of Minnesota Democratic State Rep. Melissa Hortman.

Occasionally, those videos have nothing to do with current events, or even Trump, but are the kind of inane posts littering many people's Facebook feeds. Around 11 p.m. one night in February, Trump posted a TikTok video of a person's pet corgi reacting to a can of Reddi-wip. A minute later, he reposted that video along with a screenshot of a supporter's X post ("Good Night Patriot Friends!"). A minute after that, he posted a 15-second video of Bruce Lee fighting, which he similarly reposted alongside another X screenshot seconds later.

Reposting material from X

This posting-then-reposting pattern is one of the more notable oddities of the president's Truth Social posts. It appears to be a makeshift way of reposting things from X. The president regularly grabs, for example, a video someone else has posted on X, posts it without attribution on Truth Social, then immediately quote-posts his own post along with a screenshot of the original X post.

Some of these reposts are about current events, but they cover many other topics as well – they include a variety of amateur-made videos praising Trump, attacking his enemies, and (incorrectly) concurring with his false claim that he in fact won the 2020 election. In recent months, Trump has reposted a video compilation of moments with his grandkids, a video about his loyalty to Michael Jackson over the years, a montage of Trump moments set to a choral arrangement of "Like a Prayer," and an apparently AI-generated video of Trump playing hockey against Canadian hockey players – and punching the bejeezus out of one of them.

The pattern of snagging content from X highlights two important facts about Truth Social.

One is that X appears to dwarf it in size. The Center for Campaign Innovation, a right-leaning political strategy organization, provided NPR with polling from around the 2024 election, finding that only 6% of people used Truth Social for news on even a weekly basis. That's compared to 30% who used X.

Trump may therefore go to X to get material because there are just more users there, and especially more big names like politicians, news organizations, and MAGA influencers.

Secondly, Truth Social's smaller size means it serves a different purpose for Trump than Twitter ever did, before Trump was kicked off of the platform after the January 6 riot. (His account was eventually reinstated.)

"I think really the best way to understand it is this is where you get your marching orders if you're MAGA," said Eric James Wilson, a Republican strategist and executive director of the Center for Campaign Innovation. "And too, it is direct communication from him, in the way that maybe a statement, an administration policy or a press release would have to go through multiple layers of, if not revisions, certainly approvals."

Leavitt told NPR in a statement that Truth Social is "the most powerful and popular social media platform in the world because it serves as President Trump's authentic voice."

One restriction has kept Trump from simply posting on X when he wants a bigger audience – according to details about a licensing agreement in a 2023 SEC filing, he is "generally obligated to make any social media post on TruthSocial and may not make the same post on another social media site for 6 hours." This gives the site "limited time to benefit from" his postings.

NPR emailed Truth Social's press team to check if this agreement is still in effect, but the email bounced back.

It's not entirely clear how many of the posts on the president's Truth Social account come directly from him. Leavitt also told NPR that some posts are made by staffers.

"President Trump posts at all hours because he is constantly working, but sometimes these posts are also published by staff who are simply catching up on the many articles and reading materials President Trump approves the day prior," she said in another statement.

It's not just news articles that the White House says Trump isn't personally posting; after backlash to the racist video depicting the Obamas the White House also said a staffer "erroneously" posted the video.

Old news

One of the most telling indicators of what's on Trump's mind can be found in the news articles he posts — more than 1 in 5 of the president's social media posts in the first four months of this year were news articles, op-eds, and videos. Those news pieces almost uniformly praise the president or promote administration-friendly storylines, including persecuting his perceived enemies.

On March 29, in a span of six minutes, his account posted 10 news pieces about criminal referrals against New York Attorney General Letitia James, who prosecuted Trump in a civil business fraud case.

A substantial number of the news stories Trump's account posts are not current. At least 1 in 4 of the news stories posted were more than 10 days old at the time he posted them (the dates of some TV news clips could not be easily verified).

In some cases, such as the article about Lady Gaga's father, the news pieces were months old. At other times, he posted several older articles in rapid succession about the same event. On March 16, Trump posted three January articles in a row about the crowd at the College Football National Championship game cheering for him.

Leavitt told NPR in a statement: "The President is extraordinarily well read, and he likes to share stories or content that he finds interesting on his account."

The problem with bluster

In the first four months of the year, President Trump made 98 posts we classified as "announcements" — which we defined as the president purporting to give the public new information.

These covered a range of topics — there was the video announcing the U.S. had bombed Iran. There was the announcement of a new DHS secretary nominee — Markwayne Mullin. There were announcements about disaster aid to states affected by a massive winter storm. There were notifications of upcoming interviews or press conferences. Not all of these announcement posts turned out to be accurate, however, as with an April 17 post declaring the Strait of Hormuz to be "COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS AND FULL PASSAGE."

He also made 29 posts we classified as "threats." These range from the specific ("If Canada makes a deal with China, it will immediately be hit with a 100% Tariff") to the vague ("I wonder what would happen if we 'finished off' what's left of the Iranian Terror State"). The president hasn't followed through on all of these threats with concrete action.

Altogether, that's 127 of Trump's most newsmaking posts — around one per day. Those posts have introduced an unprecedented unpredictability into presidential policymaking. His tariff policy posts, for example, have created widespread uncertainty in the business world.

This can make life in a Trump White House particularly difficult, especially in the realm of foreign policy. John Bolton, who served as National Security Advisor in Trump's first term, tells a story about Trump's chaotic posts.

"My deputy was there when [Trump] was shown — this is in 2019 — overhead pictures of a failed Iranian missile launch," Bolton says. "And he said to the intelligence briefer, can I keep this picture? And she said, 'Well, yes, but it's very sensitive, Mr. President.' He said, 'Okay.' And about 20 minutes after they left, he tweeted the picture out with some of the markings still on the picture."

As NPR later reported, the photo was revealed to be classified. Experts told NPR that tweeting the picture potentially helped America's adversaries, including Iran and Russia, because it revealed U.S. satellite capabilities.

Since his time in the first Trump administration, Bolton has been willing to sharply criticize the president. In October, the Trump Department of Justice obtained indictments against Bolton on 18 charges alleging that he unlawfully retained and transmitted classified documents. Bolton pleaded not guilty.

Bolton sees Trump tweeting the picture as part of a larger pattern: to attempt maximum bluster and in the process reveal more than he intends to. Trump's recent posts about the war in Iran are another example.

"The very ferocity of his tweets or the outrage you can hear just tell the Iranians 'If we just stay, if we just be patient a little while longer, he's just going to flip right out entirely, and he wants out. So we're going to drag it out and get every concession we can from him,'" Bolton said. "I don't understand why he can't see that."

Pundits have theorized that with his threatening posts about Iran, President Trump is practicing the "madman theory" of foreign relations. H.R. Haldeman, who served as chief of staff to President Nixon wrote that Nixon's strategy was to make the U.S.S.R. and the government in North Vietnam think that the fervently anticommunist president was willing to go to even extreme lengths, such as dropping a nuclear bomb, to end the Vietnam War.

"Nixon had credibility. He was strongly anti-communist," Bolton said, adding that communist adversaries might have thought, "Good God, that guy is crazy enough that he would drop a nuclear weapon."

"Just being generically crazy does not give you an advantage," Bolton added.

A president's id on display

To some degree, the president's posting can be seen as an extension of his communications strategy of simply communicating a lot. Trump regularly does lengthy press gaggles in the Oval Office, and he also has the unprecedented habit of fielding calls directly from reporters who have his phone number.

However, with posts, unlike interviews, the president is not having a conversation. Rather than being prompted by a reporter, the president in his posts seemingly reveals what is on his mind at any given time. On April 2, the day he announced that Pam Bondi would be leaving her post as attorney general, President Trump was also thinking about Bruce Springsteen. He insulted the singer in two posts shared at 7:58 a.m. and 9:21 p.m. that day.

Indeed, the president's insults and tirades have become so commonplace that they at times don't get much notice. Some of these posts go on at length. On April 9, he wrote a more than 2,700-character post that insulted a series of right-wing commentators but also veered into the topics of Iran, election results, media outlets he dislikes, and his approval rating.

This kind of naked fury from the president of the United States toward his perceived opponents ("NUT JOBS," "TROUBLEMAKERS," "low IQs," "nasty") might once have made headlines.

In 2026, it's a Thursday.

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Truth Social

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Screenshot by NPR

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NPR also analyzed the length of Trump's posts this year through the end of April. He wrote 93 posts of 1,500 characters or more in that time period, accounting for around 4% of all his posts. About half of those are endorsements, in which the president praises his chosen candidates and at times rails against the opponent ("DEFEAT Third Rate Congressman Thomas Massie, a Weak and Pathetic RINO"). Many of these endorsements appear to be variations on boilerplate language as Trump endorses a string of candidates in a short timeframe.

The rest of these long posts are anything but boilerplate – they are often attacks ("Pope Leo is WEAK ON CRIME") and occasionally announcements ("I am nominating Kevin Warsh to be the CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM").

Trump had more of those ultra-long posts in April than in any other month. And if you take out endorsements, it's even more stark. In April, Trump posted 22 extra-long posts about things other than endorsements — slamming Supreme Court justices, repeatedly promoting his ballroom, and railing against particular media outlets. That's twice as many such posts, or more, as he had in any other month.

To the degree, then, that the length of his posts correlates to Trump's anger, or perhaps enthusiasm, April was a particularly enthusiastic month for the president.

The president's Truth Social account primarily gets wide attention when the president either makes an announcement or writes something particularly coarse or offensive.

That was the case on Easter morning this year, at around 8:00 a.m., when President Trump threatened Iran.

"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F*****' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah," he wrote.

A threat of massive violence — and potentially war crimes — along with an obscenity and a tongue-in-cheek praise to Allah, all on one of Christianity's holiest days, together were stunning choices for a president whose core supporters are white evangelical Christians.

In a recent NPR focus group of Georgia swing voters — people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024 — no one reacted positively to that post. Participants were identified by their first names as a condition of their participation. One voter named Joe said that posts like that one inspire fear.

"It's not presidential. They're supposed to be doing diplomatic negotiations. You know, he's the agent of chaos when it comes to this kind of thing. It just – it scares me," he said. "He's a loose cannon, in my opinion, when it comes to this kind of stuff."

Brent Jones contributed to this report.

Copyright 2026 NPR

A swarm of earthquakes has hit the Imperial Valley city of Brawley, the most significant ranging in magnitude from 2 to 4.7 — with scores more registering at lower magnitudes.

In all, the U.S. Geological Survey has reported some 355 quakes over the past day. At least 40 quakes strong enough to make the 2.0 and higher magnitude list are among those.

No injuries or significant damage have been reported. A ShakeAlert was issued for the 4.7 magnitude quake. The early warning system alerts nearby residents to prepare, warning that strong shaking will start imminently.

Area residents report taking the quakes in stride.

"It felt all right. We were having a good day," Dave Ramirez, who works at a local truck stop, told LAist. " Nothing really crazy."

Here's a look at how earthquake magnitudes compare.

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Courtesy Incorporated Research Institutes for Seismology, IRIS.

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What we know so far

The first, a magnitude 3.4, struck around 4 p.m. Saturday. The latest was a magnitude 2.7 that hit after 7 a.m. Sunday.

The biggest so far was a magnitude 4.7 that rattled the area shortly after midnight Sunday.

City leaders at Brawley, a city about 115 miles east of San Diego, say in a statement that they continue "closely monitoring ongoing earthquake activity and aftershocks affecting the region."

Swarms are common to the area

The jolts are concentrated around the Brawley Fault Zone, an area known for frequent earthquake swarms connecting the Imperial and San Andreas faults.

Lucy Jones, a seismologist with Caltech, said the phenomenon is not unusual for the region because of its geological makeup.

"Instead of having one big fault, there's a lot of small crossing faults," Jones said. "Probably hundreds of times we've seen swarms like this."

Will they trigger a bigger quake?

Even at magnitude 4.7, Jones doesn't believe the swarm will set off the San Andreas.

"Aftershocks don't have to be on the same fault, but it has to be close enough that the stress change that produced the first earthquake can make it there," Jones said. "And how much it can make it there depends on the length of the fault. It's something that's true for all earthquakes."

Here's what the activity looks like on a seismogram

Listen to our podcast to get ready:

A Frontier Airlines plane bound for Los Angeles on Friday night struck and killed a pedestrian who was crossing the runway, according to Denver International Airport.

The collision happened around 11:19 p.m. local time as the aircraft prepared to take off to California.

"Smoke was reported in the cabin and the pilots aborted takeoff," Frontier said in a statement.

"Passengers were then safely evacuated via slides as a matter of precaution."

The airline said it was "deeply saddened" by the event.

ABC News reported that the person struck was "at least partially consumed" by one of the craft's engines, leading to a brief fire.

Denver International said the person was not believed to have been an onsite worker.

"DEN can confirm the pedestrian jumped the perimeter fence and was hit just two minutes later while crossing the runway," the airport said in a statement.

"The pedestrian is deceased, and is not believed to be an employee of the airport nor have they been identified. The airport has examined the fenceline and found it to be intact."

The airport said 12 people reported minor injuries, with five of those individuals taken to local hospitals for treatment.

The Airbus A321 was at the time carrying 224 passengers and seven crew members. Airport authorities said the majority of those passengers have since taken off for Los Angeles on a new Frontier flight.
Copyright 2026 NPR