Alex Nguyen
Alex Nguyen reports on how political power shows up in everyday life, tracing the links between national politics, work, race, and culture. He is a reporter at Mother Jones, covering daily political news with a sharp focus on how policy fights affect workers, immigrants, and people on the margins. His recent coverage ranges from Trump-era battles over immigration and foreign policy to the ways technology firms, sports organizations, and law-enforcement agencies wield power over ordinary people. He writes fast-turn news stories anchored in specific events, legal cases, and workplace conflicts, giving political abstractions clear stakes. Previously, he worked as an editorial fellow at Mother Jones and as a breaking news intern at the Daily Beast.
Politics through labor, race, and culture
Nguyen’s defining thread is the way he uses breaking political news to show how labor, race, and culture intersect with power. His work on fights over working conditions at major events, including coverage of how life improved for World Cup workers in Los Angeles, treats workplace disputes as core political stories rather than side issues. In his reporting on Trump’s use of World Cup visas to pressure and punish, he treats global sport as another arena where immigration policy and nationalist politics collide.
He covers battles over state and national political figures such as Ken Paxton and Graham Platner by focusing on the consequences for the people who live under their decisions, not just the personalities. Stories on protesters facing long prison sentences and communities caught up in immigration enforcement show how race and class shape who bears the brunt of punitive policy.
Even when he writes about cultural flashpoints - a World Cup star turned “babygirl” meme, or public fascination with Trump’s performances - he ties them back to who holds power and who is being mocked, excluded, or controlled.
Immigration, policing, and the machinery of enforcement
Nguyen spends significant time on the systems of immigration and law enforcement, treating agencies like ICE, the military, and police contractors as political actors in their own right. His reporting on an ICE contractor arrested for shooting a protester, and on protesters at the Prairieland detention facility facing decades in prison, makes clear how enforcement decisions turn political rhetoric into bodily risk. Stories arguing that ICE will not change under Trump and detailing “petro-imperialism” pushing the United States and Iran toward the brink show how he links domestic enforcement to foreign policy and resource politics. Coverage of armed incidents at Mar-a-Lago, security lapses, and Justice Department subpoenas of New York Times journalists after an Air Force One security report highlights how secrecy, surveillance, and punishment shape the information environment. Across this work, he treats police, immigration officers, and contractors not as neutral implementers of law, but as part of a machinery that enforces political priorities on specific bodies and communities.
Technology, surveillance, and corporate power
Nguyen also follows how technology and corporate decisions become tools of governance, especially when they target workers and young people. His coverage of an OpenAI hacking fiasco, described as exposing a “deeply insufficient” system to protect the public, shows his interest in how technical safeguards fail when put under real-world stress.
Stories on Meta allegedly using AI to drive discriminatory layoffs put labor and algorithmic decision-making in the same frame, treating employment practices as another front in the politics of inequality.
He reports on candidates literally shooting at Flock surveillance cameras as a way to challenge expanding surveillance infrastructures, connecting local acts of resistance to broader worries about constant tracking. Coverage of Mark Zuckerberg’s enthusiasm for getting young people hooked on online gambling examines how platform design, regulation, and youth vulnerability collide in a high-stakes policy space. By approaching tech stories with the same lens he uses on traditional politics, he shows how code, data, and platforms can be as consequential as legislation.
Sports, spectacle, and the uses of nationalism
Sports and spectacle appear in Nguyen’s work as stages where nationalism, immigration, and economic power play out in public view. His reporting on Trump’s involvement in World Cup politics, including efforts to weaponize visas and claim credit for the tournament, treats the event as a test of how far executive power and nationalist messaging can reach into global institutions. Stories arguing that “even FIFA and Trump can’t ruin this World Cup” and that US Soccer does not need a “big, orange thumb on the scale” show how he tracks attempts to politicize fandom and national pride. When he writes about workers around major events or about audiences reacting to star players and AI-generated personas, he returns to the question of who gets paid, who gets seen, and who gets used as a prop.
This approach sets his sports-adjacent coverage apart from standard game or personality stories, turning matches, ceremonies, and stadiums into sites where immigration, labor, and culture collide under political pressure.
Across these threads, Nguyen stands out from a generic politics reporter by insisting that every story of power has a ground-level scene - workers at a stadium, protesters outside a detention center, journalists facing subpoenas, young people targeted by gambling platforms. He writes quickly on the news of the day, but returns to recurring subjects: immigration enforcement, protest and punishment, tech-driven inequality, and the ways leaders use spectacle to distract from material harm.
The result is a politics beat built around lived consequences, where labor, race, and culture are not sidebars to the story but its main terrain.
4 more politics journalists.
A.D. Quig
A.D. Quig follows money and power through Chicago and Cook County government, showing how political decisions, taxes and public spending affect residents and businesses. At the Chicago Tribune, she covers city and county politics, municipal finance, tax policy, budgets and the structures shaping mayoral and council authority. She joined the Tribune in 2022 after covering politics for Crain’s Chicago Business and The Daily Line. Her work examines council power, ethics rules, police leadership, tax incentives, public agencies and pandemic aid. She has reported on data center tax breaks, property tax errors, federal relief spending and the fiscal effects of major development proposals. Quig combines insider government reporting with public accountability journalism. She uses public records, data and budget documents, follows committees and staff negotiations, and explains complex decisions in plain language with precise numbers and a direct link to everyday consequences.
Adam Daly
Adam Daly covers politics for amNewYork with a focus on the inner workings of city and state government and the low-profile forums where power is exercised and negotiated. He reports on commissions and panels that shape how New York is governed, treating charter reform and government efficiency as central political terrain. His coverage of moves to replace an Adams-era charter commission with a new government efficiency panel foregrounds mandate, authority, and what “efficiency” means in practice for agencies and services. He tracks who gains and loses influence when one commission supplants another and which constituencies are being answered to. Daly explains dense procedural questions in clear, reader-facing terms, using specific institutional details and occasional wordplay to connect jargon-heavy reforms to public spending, service delivery, and mayoral power.
Adam Pack
Adam Pack covers Capitol Hill through power struggles, investigations and ideological fights, focusing on how Congress intersects with Donald Trump’s agenda. He is a politics writer on Fox News Digital’s Capitol Hill team, covering Congress, federal elections, legislative battles, election rules, war powers, primaries and intraparty fights. He previously wrote for the Daily Caller News Foundation. His reporting examines deadlines, vote counts, bill language, campaign spending, court rulings, oversight reports, culture clashes and emerging issues such as AI-backed political groups. He has covered FISA reauthorization, defense spending, the SAVE America Act, housing policy, redistricting, candidate absences, primary spending and disputes over sex, gender, religion and race-based caucuses. He reports primarily through news features and investigative-style pieces built around documents, committee reports, court records, unearthed video and specific legislative details. He often co-writes complex Capitol Hill stories and publishes “FIRST ON FOX” exclusives.
Adam Sullivan
Adam Sullivan is a veteran politics reporter for WCAX who connects elections and party disputes to everyday life. He covers statewide races, party primaries, federal representation, political rhetoric, extremism, and accountability across the Upper Valley and neighboring states. His reporting includes Becca Balint’s victory over Molly Gray in the Democratic U.S. House primary to replace Congressman Peter Welch. He also reports when political controversies affect public safety, political culture, towns, and institutions, including a New Hampshire Libertarian Party post endorsing violence against elected Democrats. Sullivan follows cultural stories with civic consequences, such as Noah Kahan’s appeal to fans to stop stealing a Strafford road sign linked to his music. He writes straight news centered on concrete events, official reactions, political context, community impact, and what comes next.