Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2025 i The Nation

EVEN IF YOU’VE SPENT THE PAST MONTH HIDING under the covers, it would still have been hard to miss the arguments—including some spirited entries by my Nation colleagues—about the size of Donald Trump’s election victory, and what it says (or doesn’t say) about the existence of a Republican mandate. We can all agree on the following: When the votes were finally counted, (a) Trump got more of them than Kamala Harris; (b) but still not enough to claim a majority, as opposed to a plurality; (c) though clearly sufficient for a victory in the Electoral College (which, sadly, is still how we decide the winner in this country). Republicans also won control of the House and the Senate. It’s true that on election night, as Harris remained in her bunker,…

SHORTLY AFTER BEING REELECTED PRESIDENT, Donald Trump chose two close supporters, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, to create an advisory commission called DOGE (formally the Department of Government Efficiency), named after an Internet meme that’s the face of Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, tasked with finding ways to cut spending and roll back regulations. The effort will sit outside of government—the president can’t create a new department by himself—and won’t have the power to actually make cuts, since that’s reserved for Congress. Even so, Musk has promised to slash at least $2 trillion from the $5.4 trillion that the government spends each year (excluding the interest the government pays on its debt). Trump has vowed to preserve Social Security and Medicare, which account for nearly $1.5…

IN 2016, AMERICAN POLITICS WAS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN by the Obama-Trump voter, but in 2024 we have an even stranger phenomenon: the AOC-Trump voter. Trump won the first time thanks to many voters (making up an estimated 13 percent of his support) who had previously voted at least once—and often twice—for the first African American president. In his third presidential bid, Trump drew unexpectedly robust support in congressional districts that also supported strongly left-wing Democrats such as Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Strikingly, Trump improved his standing by more than 11 percent over 2020 in the district of another member of “the squad,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even as the congresswoman herself won by a landslide with 68.9 percent of the vote. The existence of AOC-Trump voters might puzzle those who view…

SHORTLY AFTER DONALD TRUMP WON REELECTION TO THE presidency, he announced a series of cabinet nominations that redoubled his past derangements of executive-branch governance, tapping a confederacy of thieves and shysters—from accused sexual assaulter Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense to loyal baksheesh recipient and Jeffrey Epstein helpmeet Pam Bondi as attorney general to vax-denying conspiracy monger Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as director of Health and Human Services. This is to say nothing of his standard-issue trolling nominees, like Tulsi Gabbard as head of the Directorate of National Intelligence or Elise Stefanik—the dictionary definition of whatever the opposite of a diplomat is—as ambassador to the United Nations. But for all the fireworks attending these big-name announcements, the real power in a second Trump term is likely to be wielded by…

She wasn’t fixed, necessarily, on happinesswhich she couldn’t, in any case, distinguishfrom luck. What she wanted was to flourish. Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs. He spoke earnestly, looking into her eyes for confirmation—of what? She listened as though there could be a secretwrapped in each of his words. His breath was a little bad.His eyes, round and small and withoutnoticeable lashes. Like the eyes of an eel, she thought. Yes, she answered. In a voice he canstill hear—as low and sureand fragile as lichens. A soundlike stars in the daytime sky. Yes,we’ll make it last. Which is when a squadron of Californiaquail burst from the coyote brush. Because if love doesn’t survive, why would you want to?…

THE BIG LIE DONALD TRUMP TOLD AFTER THE 2024 ELECTION WAS THAT HE’D won a “powerful mandate” from the American people. He hadn’t, and neither had his MAGA movement. The United States is, undoubtedly, a divided nation. But a majority of Americans who cast ballots in the 2024 presidential election actually agreed on one thing: They did not want Trump as their president. With almost all of the votes tabulated, we now know that around 50.2 percent were cast for someone other than Trump. That’s a small anti-Trump majority, but it’s enough to vex the incoming president, who has been at great pains since election night to foster the fantasy that he has achieved “a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this.” His right-wing allies…

THE IMMINENT RETURN TO THE WHITE HOUSE OF someone as opposed to progressive values as Donald Trump might seem like an odd moment to point to a silver lining, but bear with me. The Democratic establishment has once again screwed it up. The Very Serious People have been shown to be not very serious at all. They got the administration they wanted. They ran the campaign they wanted. And they failed again. This is perhaps even more true on foreign policy than in other areas, given that’s where the Biden administration was the most resistant to progressive influence and the most reluctant to break from decades-old orthodoxy. Not coincidentally, it’s also the area of Biden’s most calamitous and consequential failures, Gaza foremost among them. Now progressives have an opportunity to…

PART OF ME THINKS THAT I HAVE ONLY MYSELF TO blame for being even nervously optimistic about Kamala Harris’s chances this election. I know this country — and the racism and misogyny inherent in its founding that stretches into the present—and I am well aware of how, time and again, it has fought back, often violently, against multiracial democracy. And so I really had no justifiable reason for entertaining the idea that America would elect a woman—much less a Black and South Asian woman—as president. Maybe I loved this country so much I believed it might try to be better. That’s on me, I guess. I was never naïve enough to think that white women, a nearly consistent Republican bloc since 1952, would vote for Harris. In Arizona, Missouri, and…

Cost-of-Living Crisis As the dust settles on the 2024 elections, stunned Democrats are struggling to understand why the country voted the way it did. In the run-up to November 5, survey after survey showed that Americans were concerned about the cost of living, but many economists and pundits shook their heads in disbelief. They blamed a “vibecession.” Imagine you are struggling to pay your grocery bills, and then an economist in the country’s top income bracket comes along and says your hardship is just vibes. It is this lack of compassion, this unwillingness to descend from the world of elegant models and aggregate numbers to try to understand conditions on the ground, that ended up making many economists complicit in Donald Trump’s victory. James Baldwin once said that anyone who…

WITHIN JUST A FEW HOURS OF PRESIDENT JOE Biden’s welcoming President-elect Donald Trump to a cozy two-hour meeting in the Oval Office—which honestly made me queasy—Trump made any right-thinking American queasy, too. He quickly nominated Democrat turned quisling Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence, accused pedophile Matt Gaetz to be US attorney general, experience-free Fox host (and accused rapist) Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, and womanizing, serial-lying, dead-baby-bear-defiling, worm-in-his-head anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be head of Health and Human Services. And that was after he’d nominated Christian nationalist Mike Huckabee to be ambassador to Israel. (Though Gaetz, barely a week after his nomination, took himself out of the running, as tales of his having sex with a minor at drug-fueled parties proliferated.) What to do? Well,…

Without a doubt, 2025 is going to be tough—but these visionaries give us hope in this uncertain time. THE 2024 ELECTION SEASON ENDED MISERABLY, AND the year ahead will be brutal as the Trump administration implements the president-elect’s anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, anti-trans, anti-science, and anti-labor agenda. This year’s Progressive Honor Roll does not deny that there are mean things happening in the land. But there is also hope on the horizon, in the form of progressive leaders and movements, breakthrough victories for labor unions and the champions of public education, courageous protests by students, and brilliant artistry from songwriters and documentarians. We celebrate them as examples of what the great thinker Rebecca Solnit taught us to search for: hope in the dark. These are some of the visionaries who will lead…

WITH ALL EYES ON THE OUTCOME OF the 2024 presidential election, it’s been easy to overlook or downplay the many signs of acute decline in American politics. Donald Trump’s victory is still sending shockwaves through the established political system, so it’s tempting to dismiss his deranged decade-long reign on the right as an aberration, born of incoherent moral panics, misplaced economic anxiety, and declining media literacy. But in reality, the Trump distemper never existed in isolation. It was a fundamental expression of a host of unresolved pathologies—many within the Democratic Party, too—and not an inexplicable detour from a serenely ordered status quo. The final count shows that Trump again came up short of a majority of the popular vote. Still, it never should have been this close. Throughout his campaign,…

WHENEVER I HEAR THE WORD “CEASEFIRE” ABOUT Lebanon, I reach for my stopwatch. During the first phase of the civil war there, in 1975–76, we would give numbers to each successive cease-fire. Our tally ran out of steam after 100. Each time, something—a Christian boy dating a Muslim boy’s sister, a car theft, a drug deal gone wrong, flying a party flag in the wrong neighborhood—would kick-start a fresh wave of violence. One of Beirut’s early front lines was a street between Christian and Muslim neighborhoods. Western journalists—of whom I, as a young stringer for various publications and radio networks, was barely one—left the St. George Hotel bar long enough to observe exchanges of fire, pick up a few quotes, gather some color, and file in time for dinner. Then…

BECAUSE OF OUR CRAZY PRODUCTION SCHEDULE, I’m writing my annual end-of-year donations column a week after the election, and I have to admit I’m having a hard time summoning up my usual holiday cheer. “Bah, humbug” is more like it, and “grr” and “oh hell.” By the time you read this, I’m hoping we’ve recovered from gloom and doom and are ready to spread some comfort and joy—and maybe even some hope. Silver lining: At least you won’t be donating to candidates. That means you can splash out on these important groups and do some good. 1. Baltimore Beat. Everyone complains about the death of local news. In 2023, an average of two and a half local papers closed every week, up from two per week in 2022. No wonder…

11m Number of undocumented immigrants that Donald Trump has vowed to deport 4.8% Portion of the US workforce that is undocumented 3.7M Number of pending cases in the Justice Department’s Immigration Court as of October 2024 1.6m Number of asylum applicants who are awaiting a hearing date or a decision $88b Cost of Trump’s deportation plan $1m Amount donated to a Trump super PAC by private prison companies $35m Amount by which ICE’s budget could increase to pay vendors like private prison groups for electronic monitoring equipment…

“ALL ARE MOMENTS WHEN WRITERS HAVE TICS, A PARTICULAR REPERTOIRE OF moves that recur,” the novelist Isabella Hammad writes in her new nonfiction book, Recognizing the Stranger. She then identifies her own tic: anagnorisis, the creation of recognition scenes. These “the world of the text becomes momentarily intelligible to the protagonist and thus also to the audience…. Everything we thought we knew has been turned on its head, and yet it all makes sense.” This, for Hammad, is what recognition entails: the unveiling of something long obscured, alongside the realization that perhaps, deep down, one has subconsciously known it all along. I first heard Hammad speak a year ago, at an event that many of us Arab writers now view, in hindsight, as a similarly revelatory moment—a prelude to the…