Politics
Susan Crawford Wins Wisconsin Supreme Court Election, Despite Elon Musk’s Millions
A liberal candidate for a pivotal seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court overcame $25 million in spending from Elon Musk and defeated her conservative opponent on Tuesday, The Associated Press reported, in a contest that became a kind of referendum on Mr. Musk and his slashing of the federal government.
With turnout extraordinarily high for a spring election in an off year, Judge Susan Crawford handily beat Judge Brad Schimel, who ran on his loyalty to President Trump and was aided by Mr. Musk, the president’s billionaire policy aide.
Mr. Musk not only poured money into the race but also campaigned personally in the state, even donning a cheesehead. But his starring role seemed to inflame Democratic anger against him even more than it helped Judge Schimel.
The barrage of spending in the race may nearly double the previous record for a single judicial election. With about 95 percent of the vote counted on Tuesday evening, Judge Crawford held a lead of roughly 9 points.
“Today, Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our Supreme Court,” she said in her victory speech on Tuesday night. “Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.”
For Democrats, the result is a jolt of momentum. They have been engaged in a coast-to-coast rhetorical rending of garments since Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January and embarked with Mr. Musk on an effort to drastically shrink federal agencies, set aside international alliances and alter the government’s relationships with the nation’s universities, minority groups, immigrants and corporate world.
Coming on the heels of Democratic triumphs in special elections for state legislative seats in Iowa and Pennsylvania and the defeat of four Republican-backed state referendums in Louisiana, Judge Crawford’s victory puts the party on its front foot for the first time since last November. Her win showed that, at least in one instance, Mr. Musk’s seemingly endless reserves of political cash had energized more Democrats than Republicans.
The race could also have implications for control of Congress, where Republicans’ razor-thin edge was fortified on Tuesday when the party held on to two Florida seats in special elections. Democrats have quietly argued for months that a Crawford victory would pave the way for a liberal-tilting Wisconsin Supreme Court to order new congressional maps, which could help Democrats defeat one or two of the state’s Republican Congress members.
Judge Crawford, of Dane County, herself participated in a meeting with liberal donors in January that was pitched as a chance to put two House seats in play, a prospect echoed last week by Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chamber’s Democratic leader. And Republicans, led by Mr. Musk, sought to make that possibility the central focus of their campaign to defeat her.
Mr. Musk, describing the stakes of the contest in near-apocalyptic terms, seemed to personify the campaign on Judge Schimel’s behalf even more than the candidate himself. Never before had a single donor sought to influence an American judicial race to such a degree, and few had invested comparable sums in an election in which they were not themselves running. Through his super PAC, Mr. Musk underwrote an $11.5 million ground game that targeted voters with messages urging them to help Mr. Trump by supporting Judge Schimel. A separate organization with Musk ties spent $7.7 million on television advertising, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.
Mr. Musk also offered Wisconsinites $100 each to sign a petition in opposition to “activist judges.”
By Tuesday, his super PAC was offering voters $50 to post a picture of a Wisconsin resident outside a polling place.
The victory for Judge Crawford, 60, who won a 10-year term, maintains a 4-to-3 majority for liberals on the court, which in coming months is poised to deliver key decisions on abortion and labor rights. It may soon determine the legality of the state’s congressional district lines, which were drawn by the Republican-controlled State Legislature and have delivered six of eight House seats to the G.O.P. in the evenly divided state.
Liberals are likely to maintain a court majority until at least 2028. Conservative justices on the court face re-election in each of the next two years. Unless a liberal justice vacates her seat and is replaced by the governor, conservatives cannot flip a seat until 2028.
With control of the court on the line, the formally nonpartisan election was always going to be expensive and hard-fought, but Mr. Musk’s investment beginning in mid-February supercharged the stakes, attention and cash flowing into the state. The involvement of the billionaire, whose electric-vehicle company, Tesla, sued Wisconsin in January for the right to open dealerships in the state, turned what would have been a state contest into something approaching a national bat signal for Democrats to support Judge Crawford.
“This is a test, and the whole world is watching,” Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, told supporters at Judge Crawford’s closing rally on Monday. “This is a chance for us to show that in a moment that is so terrifying nationally that we still believe in democracy.”
Backed by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and the Democratic National Committee, and with visits from prominent liberals and Democrats including Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Judge Crawford raised $17 million in the fund-raising period ending March 17, a stunning figure for a state judicial candidate with little profile inside her state, let alone nationally.
Judge Schimel, 60, of Waukesha County, a longtime Trump loyalist who last year dressed up as Mr. Trump for Halloween, embraced the president and Mr. Musk with gusto in the campaign’s final weeks. He wore the president’s signature Make America Great Again hat to campaign stops and appeared with both Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk on livestreams in late March.
Wisconsin Republicans made no secret of their effort to make Judge Schimel, who served one term as the state’s attorney general before losing re-election in 2018, an avatar of the Trump movement. Brian Schimming, the Republican Party of Wisconsin chairman, said his goal was merely to get 60 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters from last November to turn out for Judge Schimel by Tuesday.
Judge Schimel, like Judge Crawford, framed the race as an existential threat to the state and the nation.
“If we don’t restore the court, our Republic will not survive, right?” he told supporters last week at a rally in Stoughton, Wis. “Frankly, they’re taking away one of the branches, right, by legislating from the bench.”
In Mr. Musk’s foray into campaigning on behalf of Judge Schimel, he made a show of his wealth but frequently digressed from the contest at hand.
On Sunday night, he traveled to Green Bay, where he came bearing a pair of $1 million checks to voters, winners, he said, of a contest among those who had signed his petition. One recipient just happened to be the chairman of the College Republicans of Wisconsin, who joined a third person to whom Mr. Musk’s super PAC had given a $1 million check a few days earlier.
But Mr. Musk spent just a couple of minutes out of his two hours of remarks addressing Judge Schimel and the coming election. In what came across as an unedited TED Talk, Mr. Musk delivered extended monologues about immigration policy, alleged fraud in the Social Security system and the future of artificial intelligence, in addition to taking a series of questions from the audience that also did not address the court race.
When Mr. Musk did address the reason for his visit, he framed the election in maximally important terms — suggesting Wisconsin voters were the first domino in a process that could change the future of civilization.
“What’s happening on Tuesday is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives — that is why it is so significant,” Mr. Musk said. “And whichever party controls the House to a significant degree controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization. I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.”
Wisconsin Democrats and others tied to Judge Crawford’s campaign found the whole episode confusing. Mr. Musk, while popular with conservative voters because of his ties to Mr. Trump, had not emphasized public safety or even affinity with the president — issues that Democrats believed had the potential to help Judge Schimel sway Republicans to vote.
Instead, they believed, it was the latest evidence that the one general-election candidate Mr. Trump can truly drive to victory is himself.
Jess Bidgood contributed reporting from Stoughton, Wis.
It is one of the more baffling story lines of Donald J. Trump’s second term. The president has said he wants to personally visit Fort Knox to ensure that no one has stolen the government-owned gold bars that are stored there.
Mr. Trump has not explained why any gold might be missing from the nation’s heavily guarded reserves. His own Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has insisted that there is no reason to worry. “All the gold is there,” Mr. Bessent emphatically told Bloomberg in February, at one point looking directly into a camera and addressing the American people.
Mr. Trump’s interest in the gold reserves has been largely overshadowed by his family’s involvement in various cryptocurrency ventures, which has raised ethical concerns about potential conflicts of interest.
The president has a long history of embracing conspiracy theories, and is known to be a fan of golden and gilded things. It is difficult to say what exactly is behind his recent fanning of unfounded fears about Fort Knox, which have been floating around since at least the 1970s.
A White House spokesperson did not respond when asked to comment for this story.
What is certain is that gold is on many investors’ minds these days. Generally seen as a safe place to park wealth during tumultuous periods, the precious metal has risen to record prices recently, in part because of the global economic uncertainty that the president’s shifting tariff policies caused.
Some of Mr. Trump’s allies, including his eldest son, serve as pitchmen for gold investment companies that advertise heavily on their podcasts or radio shows.
And some of them have been using fresh concerns about Fort Knox to make a profit.
The Gold Conspiracy That Wouldn’t Go Away
If nothing else, Mr. Trump’s Fort Knox obsession has resurfaced one of the deeper cuts in the American conspiracy theory catalog.
One reason the government holds onto such large stores of gold is to confer a sense of financial stability, even though the country moved off the gold standard in the 20th century. According to the United States Mint, 147.3 million ounces of gold, about half of the government’s stash, is held at Fort Knox.
The Kentucky facility, known formally as the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, almost never allows visitors and is kept under famously heavy lock and key — an inaccessibility that may explain much of the intrigue around it.
One of the main early proponents of the idea that gold was missing from Fort Knox was a lawyer named Peter Beter, who earned a modicum of notoriety in the 1970s by spreading dark theories in a mail-order audio cassette series. Among other things, Mr. Beter believed that “organic robotoids,” controlled by Bolsheviks, had infiltrated the federal government.
By 1974, concerns about the gold reserves grew so intense that a congressional delegation and a few news outlets, including The New York Times, were invited to Fort Knox for a rare inspection. A reporter for The Times described the effect of seeing a vault 6 feet wide and 12 feet deep, stacked with 36,236 glistening gold bars, as “awesome.”
Another wave of concern crested in 2011, when then-Representative Ron Paul, the Texas Republican, introduced a bill calling for an inventory of the reserves. At a subcommittee hearing, Mr. Paul said people had become worried that “the gold had been secretly shipped out of Fort Knox and sold.” He added, “And, still others believe that the bars at Fort Knox are actually gold-plated tungsten.”
U.S. House of Representatives
The inspector general of the Treasury Department at the time, Eric Thorson, told Mr. Paul that audits were performed yearly, with “no exceptions of any consequence.”
U.S. House of Representatives
More recently, Mr. Trump’s first-term Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, had a chance to check on the gold in August 2017, with Mitch McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, in tow. Photos were taken of the men among the gold bars.
“Glad gold is safe!” Mr. Mnuchin wrote on Twitter, now known as X.
Questions About Ft. Knox Bubble Up Again
The latest concerns appear to have taken off on Feb. 14, when the website ZeroHedge, which occasionally promotes conspiracy theories, tagged Elon Musk in a post on X. The post asked him to make sure the gold at Fort Knox is there.
“Surely it’s reviewed at least every year?” Mr. Musk replied.
“It should be. It isn’t,” ZeroHedge responded. (Mr. Bessent, the Treasury secretary, would later say that the gold is still audited annually.)
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican and the son of Ron Paul, chimed in, calling for an audit. “Let’s do it.”
The next day, Alex Jones, the “InfoWars” conspiracy theorist, said on his talk show that when he was a child, his great-uncle told him some of the gold was missing, and that the “deep state” was involved in the “crime of the century.”
Mr. Musk responded to this post as well. “It would be cool to do a live video walkthrough of Fort Knox!” he wrote.
Then came Glenn Beck, the conservative radio and TV host, who posted an open letter to Mr. Trump the next day, asking if he could take a camera crew to Fort Knox to “restore faith in our financial system.”
The chatter about the gold reserves was growing louder.
By Feb. 20, Mr. Trump was telling a press gaggle on Air Force One that he planned to go to Fort Knox to “make sure the gold is there.”
How the Conspiracy Theory Has Been Integrated Into Sales Pitches for… Gold
Since then, the idea that the government’s gold reserves may have gone missing has been integrated into the sales pitches of companies that trade in gold coins and gold investment accounts. The companies advertise heavily on Trump-friendly TV and internet shows.
InfoWars, The Dan Bongino Show, The Ben Shapiro Show, Triggered with Don Jr.
A number of “gold I.R.A.” companies have suggested that a future audit of Fort Knox could determine that gold is missing, setting off a crisis among Americans about the stability of the economy. Amid such chaos, the companies argue, privately held gold would be a lucrative safe haven for investors.
One of the companies, Birch Gold Group, is endorsed by the president’s eldest son and bills itself as “Donald Trump Jr’s gold company.” A recent article on Birch Gold’s website stated that the idea of an “empty Fort Knox” had gone “from conspiracy theory to mainstream concern.” A discovery that gold was missing from Fort Knox, the article stated, would be the “quickest way down for the U.S. dollar.”
“It is only those without physical gold exposure that feel the need to panic, perhaps with good reason, about the greenback’s admittedly dismal prospects,” states the article, which is accompanied by an offer for a “FREE gold IRA info kit.”
The younger Mr. Trump lauded his father’s plans to visit Fort Knox in a Feb. 24 episode of his online talk show, on which he regularly makes pitches for Birch Gold. “If it’s empty,” he said, “I would imagine there’s hell to pay.”
On Feb. 27, Lear Capital, a gold company that Mr. Beck promotes, posted, “As calls for a Fort Knox audit grow louder, investors should stay informed and consider their exposure to gold as part of a diversified portfolio.”
On Instagram, Rogan O’Handley, a conservative influencer who goes by the handle DC Draino, posted a plug for Donald Trump Jr.’s preferred gold company.
“If Fort Knox is empty, do you know what Gold prices will do?,” Mr. O’Handley wrote. “Get a **Free** info packet from Birch Gold – LINK IN MY BIO – to learn more about @birchgold’s tax-advantaged precious metals retirement plans.”
On another section of Birch Gold’s website, a “Message from Donald Trump Jr.” raised the possibility that his father’s administration could “revalue America’s gold reserves on the national balance sheet from their outdated book value of $42” — the price per ounce the government assigns for bookkeeping purposes — “to current market prices.”
This, he wrote, “could cause a surge in gold prices.” He added, “The potential upside for gold investors is substantial.” A gold I.R.A., he added, would be a great way to benefit. He did not mention that Mr. Bessent had publicly stated that he had no plans to revalue the gold reserves.
Above the message was a digitally altered photo of the president at a desk, showing off an important-looking signed document, a wall of gold bricks behind him.
Mr. Trump has still not visited Fort Knox.
The Trump administration is asking all federal agencies to find ways to terminate all federal contracts with Havard University amid an ongoing standoff over foreign students’ records at the Ivy League school.
The General Services Administration is planning to send a letter Tuesday instructing all federal agencies to review the estimated $100 million remaining in federal contracts with Harvard and potentially “find alternative vendors,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by Fox News.
The remaining federal contracts include a $527,000 agreement for Harvard ManageMentor Licenses, which was awarded in September 2021, a $523,000 contract for Harvard to conduct research on energy drinks and the health outcomes of other dietary intakes overtime, which was awarded in August 2023, and a $39,000 contract for gradate student research services, which was award in April 2025, a source familiar with the matter told Fox News.
TRUMP ACCUSES HARVARD OF BEING ‘VERY SLOW’ TO TURN OVER FOREIGN STUDENT INFO
Protesters outside Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., April 25, 2025. (JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)
The New York Times first reported about a draft of the letter.
In the letter, GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum said Harvard “continues to engage in race discrimination, including in its admissions process and in other areas of student life.”
He said Harvard has shown “no indication” of reforming its admissions process, despite the Supreme Court ruling that university’s long-standing policy discriminates on the basis of race.
For applicants in the top academic decile, admissions rates were 56% for African-Americans, 31% for Hispanics, 15% for Whites and 13% for Asians, according to the lawsuit. Gruenbaum said Harvard “now has to offer a remedial math course, which has been described as ‘middle school math’ for incoming freshmen.” He said that was a direct result “of employing discriminatory factors, instead of merit, in admission decisions.”
Gruenbaum also cited possible violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 regarding Harvard’s hiring, promotion, compensation, and other personnel-related actions. He said discriminatory practices “have been exposed at the Harvard Law Review, where internal documents that have been made public detail the pervasive and explicit racial discrimination in the publication’s article selection and editor appointment process.”
“GSA is also aware of recent events at Harvard University involving anti-Semitic action that suggest the institution has a disturbing lack of concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students,” Gruenbaum wrote. “Harvard’s ongoing inaction in the face of repeated and severe harassment and targeting of its students has at times grounded day-to-day campus operations to a halt, deprived Jewish students of learning and research opportunities to which they are entitled, and profoundly alarmed the general public.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Harvard University for comment Tuesday.
President Donald Trump speaks during the Memorial Day wreath-laying in Arlington National Cemetery on May 26, 2025. (Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
Harvard has already sued in federal court seeking the restoration of about $3.2 billion in federal grant funding already frozen by the administration since last month.
In a separate suit, the university was granted a temporary restraining order on Friday that temporarily blocks the government from canceling the school’s certification in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. The program permits the university to host international students with F-1 or J-1 visas to study in the U.S. Harvard said the revocation would impact more than 7,000 visa holders – more than a quarter of its student body.
A brief federal court hearing was held Tuesday morning in federal court in Boston on the matter. A judge scheduled another hearing for Thursday to allow both parties more time to present their case.
President Donald Trump said in a TRUTH Social post on Monday that he is “considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land.”
“What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!” he wrote.
JUDGE TEMPORARILY PAUSES TRUMP MOVE TO CANCEL HARVARD STUDENT VISA POLICY AFTER LAWSUIT
The president also accused Harvard of being “very slow” in handing over documents about foreign students and of having “shopped around and found the absolute best judge (for them).”
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem said last week that she revoked Harvard’s certification after the university refused to comply with multiple requests for information on foreign students while “perpetuating an unsafe campus environment that is hostile to Jewish students, promotes pro-Hamas sympathies, and employs racist ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ policies.”
A pedestrian with an umbrella walks by Harvard Yard as a Nor’easter hits the New England area in Cambridge, MA on May 22, 2025. (Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The requested records include any and all audio or video footage in Harvard’s possession regarding threats to other students or university personnel, “deprivation of rights” of other classmates or university personnel, and “dangerous or violent activity, whether on or off campus” by a nonimmigrant student enrolled at Harvard in the last five years.
Noem is also asking for any and all disciplinary records and audio or video footage of any protest activity involving nonimmigrant students. DHS said that Harvard’s responses so far have been insufficient.
Fox News’ Sarah Tobianski contributed to this report.
PALM DESERT — They came to the baking desert to honor one of their own, a political professional, a legend and a throwback to a time when gatherings like this one — a companionable assembly of Republicans, Democrats and the odd newspaper columnist — weren’t such a rare and noteworthy thing.
They came to bid a last farewell to Stuart Spencer, who died in January at age 97.
They came to Palm Desert on a 98-degree spring day to do the things that political pros do when they gather: drink and laugh and swap stories of campaigns and elections past.
And they showed, with their affection and goodwill and mutual regard, how much the world, and the world of politics, have changed.
“This is how politics used to be,” Democrat Harvey Englander said after sidling up to Republican Joel Fox. The two met through their work with the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., a spawn of the Proposition 13 taxpayer revolt, circa 1978.
“We had different views of how government should work,” Englander said as Fox nodded his assent. “But we agreed government should work.”
Spencer was a campaign strategist and master tactician who helped usher into office generations of GOP leaders, foremost among them Ronald Reagan. The former president and California governor was a Hollywood has-been until Spencer came along and turned him into something compelling and new, something they called a “citizen-politician.”
Hanging, inevitably, over the weekend’s celebration was the current occupant of the Oval Office, a boiling black cloud compared to the radiant and sunshiny Reagan. Spencer was no fan of Donald Trump, and he let it be known.
“A demagogue and opportunist,” he called him, chafing, in particular, at Trump’s comparisons of himself to Reagan.
“He would be sick,” Spencer said, guessing the recoil the nation’s 40th president would have had if he’d witnessed the crass and corrupt behavior of the 45th and 47th one.
Many of those at the weekend event are similarly out of step with today’s Republican Party and, especially, Trump’s bomb-the-opposition-to-rubble approach to politics. But most preferred not to express those sentiments for the record.
George Steffes, who served as Reagan’s legislative director in Sacramento, allowed as how the loudly and proudly uncouth Trump was “180 degrees” from the politely mannered Reagan. In five years, Steffes said, he never once heard the governor raise his voice, belittle a person or “treat a human being with anything but respect.”
Fox, with a seeming touch of wounded pride, suggested Trump could use “some pushback from some of the ‘old thinking’ of the Stu Spencer/Ronald Reagan era.”
A flag flown over the U.S. Capitol in Spencer’s honor was displayed at his memorial celebration, along with White House schedules from the 1984 campaign.
(H.D. Palmer)
Behind them, playing on a big-screen TV, were images from Spencer’s filled-to-the-bursting life.
Old black-and-white snapshots — an apple-cheeked Navy sailor, a little boy — alternated with photographs of Spencer smiling alongside Reagan and President Ford, standing with Dick Cheney and George H.W. Bush, appearing next to Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Wilson, a spry 91, was among the 150 or so who turned out to remember Spencer. He was given a place of honor, seated with his wife, Gayle, directly in front of the podium.)
In a brief presentation, Spencer’s son, Steve, remembered his father as someone who emphasized caring and compassion, as well as hard work and the importance of holding fast to one’s principles. “Pop’s word,” he said, “was gold.”
Spencer’s grandson, Sam, a Republican political consultant in Washington, choked up as he recounted how “Papa Stu” not only helped make history but never stinted on his family, driving four hours to attend Sam’s 45-minute soccer games and staying up well past bedtime to get after-action reports on his grandson’s campaigns.
Stu Spencer, he said, was a voracious reader and owned “one of the greatest political minds in history.”
Outside the golf resort, a stiff wind kicked up, ruffling the palm trees and sending small waves across a water hazard on the 18th green — an obvious metaphor for these blustery and unsettled times.
Fred Karger first met Spencer in 1976 when his partner, Bill Roberts, hired Karger to work on an unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign. (In 2012, Karger made history as the first out gay major-party candidate to run for president.)
He no longer recognizes the political party he dedicated his life to. “It’s the Trump-publican Party,” Karger said. “It’s no longer the Republican Party.”
But politics are cyclical, he went on, and surely Trump and his MAGA movement will run their course and the GOP will return to the days when Reagan’s optimism and dignity and Spencer’s less-hateful campaign style return to fashion.
His gripped his white wine like a potion, delivering hope. “Don’t you think?”
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