From the Editors: Trump’s Return

Donald Trump is back in the White House. His campaign claims—immigrants are stealing, murdering, and collecting public benefits; the United States is a hapless victim of other countries’ treachery—are not true. But they are powerful. This issue demystifies them and imagines a path forward.

David Austin Walsh examines Trump’s coalition of America First nationalists and Silicon Valley billionaires. These diverse interests have thus far successfully united around opposition to “wokeness,” much as the specter of communism bound the old “fusionism” of social and economic conservatives. Whether these fractious alliances will hold remains to be seen.

Jeanne Morefield takes a longer view. What explains the appeal of Trump’s immigrant “invasion” story, now codified by executive order? She blames an exceptionalism decades in the making, embraced by “every mainstream narrative about American politics—Democratic and Republican, liberal and reactionary.” Focusing on the border obscures the role of Big Pharma in creating our fentanyl crisis. And it erases the principal cause of American pain: our particular brand of racial capitalism that makes life in the United States fundamentally different from life in every other wealthy nation in the world.

Our Election Chronicles further illuminate the consequences of this exceptionalism: the staggering scale of money in politics, and the difficulty of reducing it through any flavor of campaign finance reform; organized labor’s disconnect from the lives of so many working people; the link between U.S.-backed violence in Gaza and political repression at home; and the Democrats’ momentous failure to rein in inequality. Confronting these obstacles, Robin D. G. Kelley argues, requires a movement with the power “to dispel ruling-class lies about how our economy and society actually work.”

What does that look like? In his review of Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism, Samuel Hayim Brody identifies the sleight of hand that characterizes so much of our public discourse. Rather than engaging an idea, Kirsch tries to make it disappear. We must instead take movements for justice seriously.

Gianpaolo Baiocchi shows what that can achieve. Reviewing a new biography, he takes inspiration from the extraordinary rise of Lula, who founded a workers’ party as a young metalworker and is now serving a third term as Brazil’s president after defeating Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro. Baiocchi credits the movement’s success to Lula’s ability to “speak plainly to the needs of ordinary working people” and “articulate a progressive, pro-democracy project in a way that always broadens the umbrella.” His lesson for this moment: “opposition parties need something more than a technocratic defense of the status quo.”

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