Category: Politics

Blue States Gave Trump and Vance an Opening

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Donald Trump and J. D. Vance have a story to sell you: Amid a scramble for housing in the United States, the real problem is the presence of immigrants. Americans “cannot ignore the impact that the flood of 21 million illegal aliens has had on driving up housing costs,” Trump argued at the Economic Club of New York’s luncheon in September. Vance has made this argument even more fervently—on X, in recent interviews, and in other venues. During the vice-presidential debate, Vance declared that “25 million illegal aliens competing with…

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Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’

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To support The Atlantic’s journalism, please consider subscribing today. In April 2020, Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private, was bludgeoned to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, in Texas. The killer, aided by his girlfriend, burned Guillén’s body. Guillén’s remains were discovered two months later, buried in a riverbank near the base, after a massive search. Guillén, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up in Houston, and her murder sparked outrage across Texas and beyond. Fort Hood had become known as a particularly perilous assignment for female soldiers,…

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Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini

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To support The Atlantic’s journalism, please consider subscribing today. Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description…

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The Question Hanging Over Harris’s Campaign

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Contra Donald Trump’s claims, Vice President Kamala Harris is not a Communist. For one, no evidence suggests that she seeks the collectivization of the means of production, or even that she is especially hostile to corporate America. When outlining her vision for an “opportunity economy,” Harris speaks of “a future where every person has the opportunity to build a business, to own a home, to build intergenerational wealth.” This is rhetoric that brings to mind George W. Bush’s “ownership society,” not the liquidation of the kulaks. Granted, we’re not obliged…

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Kamala Harris’s Muted Message on Mass Deportation

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As the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, veers into open xenophobia, Vice President Kamala Harris faces a crucial decision about how to respond when she appears today on Univision, the giant Spanish-language television network. Trump’s attacks on immigrants in the past few weeks have grown both sweeping and vitriolic: He is blaming migrants for a lengthening list of problems, even as he describes them in more dehumanizing and openly racist language. As he amplifies these attacks, Trump has also explicitly embraced the kind of eugenicist arguments that were used to…

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Elon Musk Bends the Knee to Donald Trump

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Have you ever watched a crowd go wild for a PowerPoint slide? After a few introductory hellos yesterday in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump gestured to a screen showing the same graph on illegal immigration that he had been talking about when he was nearly assassinated in July and delivered his real opening line: “As I was saying …” The audience loved that. The rallygoers had waited in line for hours in the hot sun to get into the field, and this was their reward. They had made it through warm-up…

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