Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2025 i The Nation

A FEW WEEKS INTO DONALD TRUMP’S SECOND ADministration, the logic of his actions is becoming clear. It’s the logic of the chainsaw. Many have pointed out the affinity that Trump and Argentine President Javier Milei have for each other. Milei has made the demolition of the administrative state a key part of his rule—slashing budgets, eliminating ministries, and firing tens of thousands of government workers. And the chief symbol of this campaign? A chainsaw, which Milei likes to wield in political appearances across the country. Milei justified this shock treatment by pointing to Argentina’s flailing economy. For Trump, the justification is in the act itself. Gutting the federal government has been a far-right wet dream of radical conservatives since Ronald Reagan. With Trump, there is no logic but destruction. People…

IN EXCHANGE FOR BEING PERMITTED BY MY INDULgent editor to call this column “The Last Days of Discourse,” I agreed to explain the joke—and to prove that it was not mere wordplay for its own sake. As many of you may have already picked up, the name comes from Whit Stillman’s 1998 movie The Last Days of Disco, a charming film about a group of young people in the early 1980s, when that dance craze was going out of style. But as with Stillman’s other films, it also has deeper concerns: about what it means to live at the end of an era, and what we may hope for under decadent conditions. The current media landscape appears at a distance to be multifarious, but on closer inspection reveals itself as…

DONALD TRUMP PROBABLY DOESN’T KNOW IT, BUT he owes a great deal to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the noxious leader of the French far right, who died on January 7 at the age of 96. Back when Trump was nothing more than a blowhard nepo-baby developer and fixture of the gossip columns, Le Pen was creating a model of far-right national populism that has since swept much of the globe. He did more than any other single figure to pioneer its artful mix of violent rhetoric (above all directed against immigrants), brazen mendacity, dog whistles to neofascists, and careful outreach to mainstream conservatives. Trump loyalist Steve Bannon has been an admirer of Le Pen’s movement, while his direct imitators in Europe include Austria’s Jörg Haider, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, Britain’s Nigel…

In june 2021, in a nissen hut in the middle of wiltshire, England, less than 30 miles from Stonehenge, Odhrán Mullan was looking through the archives of Real World Records. A project manager for the record label, which was created in 1989 by the musical polymath Peter Gabriel, Mullan spotted a tape that immediately sparked his interest. “Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan—Trad Album” was all it said on the cover. “I was always browsing, and I would spend a lot of afternoons after lunch there,” Mullan says. “I knew that would be the ultimate find—a Nusrat unreleased thing.” Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the best-known qawwali singer of all time, died in 1997, two days after the 50th anniversary of Pakistan’s independence. After a career that spanned more than three decades, he…

AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT, YOU CAN PROBably find an aging crank holed up in the local public library, complaining of aches and pains, feverishly working on a book they claim will change the world. Most of their efforts will never see the light of day. But sometimes the crank is Karl Marx, and the book being written is Capital. Upon beginning work on his magnum opus in the Reading Room of the British Museum in 1851, Marx wrote to his longtime friend and frequent collaborator, Friedrich Engels, that he would be “finished with the whole of the economic shit in five weeks.” As it happened, however, it would be a good 16 years before Volume I—the only part of Capital that would appear during Marx’s lifetime—was finally published, and even…

FAMA IS A FICKLE DEITY. AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH century, Henri Bergson was one of the most famous people in the world, and certainly the most famous philosopher. Enormous crowds attended his lectures at the Collège de France in Paris—there are photographs of people thronging the street outside the college, scaling ladders and even standing on windowsills to try to catch a scrap of la leçon du maître. When he visited New York in 1913 to speak at Columbia University, so many turned out to hear him that Broadway experienced its first traffic jam. just how much Bergson’s philosophy, although as hard to pin down as the poetry of Mallarmé and as shimmeringly elusive This is hard for us to understand today, since Bergson is forgotten by all…

THERE IS A STRAIGHT LINE FROM THE 2017 “UNITE THE RIGHT” RALLIES IN CHARlottesville to the far-right-led “Stop the Steal” movement to lies about Haitians eating cats and dogs to Donald Trump’s first day in office upon his return to power. No president in the post-civil-rights era has been as racially aggressive as the now-47th president. Nearly every day since he squeaked his way back into the White House, operating under what can properly be called Trump’s White Nationalist Manifesto, his effort to prevent immigrants of color from entering the country and to roll back the rights of people of color already here has been evident. With the white nationalist ideologue Stephen Miller by his side, Trump is acting to address “anti-white feeling,” i.e., a far-right narrative with no basis…

IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S FIRST OFFICIAL REsponse to the devastating setbacks it suffered in the 2024 presidential and congressional elections, members of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) elected Ken Martin as their chair on February 1. Martin, the well-regarded chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), won after speaking frankly to committee members about the party’s difficult circumstances. “We got punched in the mouth in November,” he said. “A lot of people in this country right now are going to need us to walk and chew gum at the same time—meaning we’re going to have to fight the extremes of Donald Trump while we make a case in both red and blue states about why they should trust us with their votes. When the Trump agenda fails Americans—which it certainly…

CNN ANCHOR JIM ACOSTA WAS FATED TO BE A BArometer of his network’s relationship with Donald Trump. During Trump’s first term, Acosta’s tough questioning at press conferences gave CNN credibility as a news outlet that was willing to uphold the principle of accountability, uncowed by the president’s bullying. In 2018, Trump denounced Acosta as a “rude, terrible person,” and the White House revoked Acosta’s press pass. CNN sued Trump and his top aides on behalf of Acosta, successfully forcing the White House to give the reporter back his press pass. If Acosta’s jousting with Trump was once celebrated by CNN, it has now become a source of shame. With Trump winning not only a second term but also, unlike the first time, the popular vote (however narrow the margin), CNN…

President Donald Trump has promised that his administration will conduct deportations on a staggering scale. On the campaign trail, he pledged to remove 15 million people from the country, potentially including legal immigrants and US citizens. Voters seemed to bristle at higher immigration, in part perhaps because people tend to greatly overestimate how many immigrants are actually in the country. But when Americans cast their votes, they also made clear that the economy was their top concern. Unfortunately for them, if Trump achieves even part of his mass deportation goal, it will almost certainly wreck the economy. The American Immigration Council simulated what would happen if the government deported the 11 million undocumented immigrants who lived here as of 2022 and found that the gross domestic product would drop by…

DONALD TRUMP’S FIRST TERM AS PRESIDENT GAVE THE REPUBlicans control over the most dangerous body of the most dangerous branch of government: the Supreme Court. With the help of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, along with timely retirements and untimely deaths, Trump was able to secure a 6–3 hard-right majority on the court and use it to make the Republicans’ least-popular policy dreams come true. In the brief years since, the court has undermined labor rights, stripped back voting rights, and reduced pregnant people to the status of second-class citizens whose bodies can be controlled by Republican state legislatures eager to use them for labor without compensation. The Democrats might have used Joe Biden’s four-year interregnum to begin to claw back the Supreme Court from the Republicans’ grip. Particularly during…

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY RESPONDED TO THE TRAUma of Donald Trump’s reelection this past November in precisely the same way it did to his shocking win in 2016: by dismissing the notion that it needs to rethink its core assumptions about politics, the economy, foreign policy, or any other element of its intellectual and governing legacy. In 2024, as in 2016, there were stern disavowals of the excesses of “identity politics” (though in the 2024 version of this lament, the preferred term of art was “wokeness”); there were allied calls to rediscover the plight of ordinary working Americans, besieged by narrowing life chances and, in recent years, spiraling inflation—yet without much in the way of specific plans to provide relief. And tellingly, there were morale-boosting appeals to disregard the verdict of…

AS DONALD TRUMP RESUMED THE PRESIDENCY and spent his first day authorizing 26 new executive orders and rescinding 78 more from the Biden administration, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer weighed in with this forceful declaration on social media: “It is time to look to the future. The challenges that face America are many and great. The Senate must respond with resolve, bipartisanship, and fidelity to the working and middle class of this country.” As the tin-pot edicts piled up throughout Trump’s first week, rescinding infrastructure outlays and prescription-drug price controls while upending antidiscrimination protections in federal offices and seeking to abolish birthright citizenship, Schumer’s House counterpart, Hakeem Jeffries, rallied to the crisis with this grammatically challenged lurch into milksop spirituality: “Presidents come and go. Through it all. God is still…

IN HIS RAFT OF DAY 1 EXECUTIVE ORDER SIGNINGS, President Trump revived an old hobbyhorse from his previous term: “traditional” architecture. In a brief memo, he declared that the General Services Administration (or GSA, the agency that, among other things, is in charge of government buildings) and other federal agencies have 60 days to submit recommendations to advance the policy that Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government. Such recommendations shall consider appropriate revisions to the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture and procedures for incorporating community input into Federal building design selections. For the uninitiated, the GSA’s “Guiding Principles for Federal…

By the Numbers 29 Number of people who have died in the Los Angeles wildfires since January 7 16K Number of structures destroyed in the Los Angeles fires 57k Number of acres burned in Southern California between January 7 and January 27 1,824 Number of wildfires in the United States this year, as of January 29 1M Approximate number of structure firefighters in the United States 11K Approximate number of wildland firefighters 25% Estimated vacancy rate of wildland firefighter positions in the US CALVIN TRILLIN DeadlinePoet Presidential Leadership A horrible crash lit up the sky.Trump’s job was then to unify.That calls for grace he can’t supply.He cast the blame on DEIAnd presidents of days gone by.For four years more we’ll have this guy.Sigh.…

At a time when incumbent parties around the globe are losing to upstart challengers, Mexico’s leftwing Morena party stands out as an exception. Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s mañaneras—daily press conferences that fused governance with storytelling—revolutionized political communication, creating a direct, unfiltered dialogue with the public. This approach has now been embraced by Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, as she builds on AMLO’s legacy and looks to create her own path. Nation editorial board member Waleed Shahid spoke with Ezra Alcázar, a political strategist and writer who works at Fondo de Cultura Económica, a prestigious Spanish-language publishing house (he is also the anchor of El Desfiladero on Canal Once), and Alex González Ormerod, a historian and journalist who leads The Mexico Political Economist, to explore how Morena’s communications strategy…

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