The Nation November 2024

NEW YORK MAYOR ERIC ADAMS WAS INDICTED ON September 26 on charges of bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy, and accepting illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals. Greater men have been forced out of office for lesser offenses, like former governor David Paterson, whose political career ended after he accepted free tickets to the World Series, or his predecessor in the governor’s mansion, Eliot Spitzer, who resigned when it was revealed he had patronized sex workers. And yet there is every chance that by the time you read this, Adams will still be mayor of New York, clinging to office if not to power. The real scandal is not the money Adams is alleged to have taken from Turkish donors or even the favors he supposedly granted in return—including flouting the city’s…

PRESIDENT BIDEN’S LEGACY IS BEING WRITTEN IN GAZA’S RUBBLE. OVER THE PAST YEAR, HIS administration has sent billions of dollars in weapons aid to Israel, enabling a campaign that has triggered a humanitarian catastrophe, one that the International Court of Justice is investigating as a plausible case of genocide. At a minimum, suspending offensive arms transfers to Israel is necessary to realign the United States’ actions with its stated values. This is about more than legality—it’s about avoiding a moral stain that will linger long after the bombs stop falling. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was overshadowed by the Vietnam War; Biden’s domestic ambitions risk being eclipsed by his blank check for Israel’s war crimes. If he doesn’t take action, his presidency may be remembered not for “building back better” but…

WE’VE NEVER SEEN THE AMERICAN PLUTOCRACY OPerate quite like this. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, spent the homestretch of the 2024 presidential campaign providing a degree of public and financial support to a candidate that’s all but unprecedented in the annals of pay-to-play American electioneering. Not since Howard Hughes secretly funneled cash to Hubert Humphrey, Robert F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon in 1968 has an unstable, flamboyant billionaire industrialist exerted such influence on a presidential race. According to the latest Federal Election Commission filings, in the last quarter, Musk gave $74,950,000 to America PAC, the pro-Trump organization he cofounded with like-minded tech billionaires. He also gave $289,100 to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Other right-wing billionaires have contributed tens of millions of dollars to Donald Trump–supporting PACs.…

I FILED THIS IN MID-OCTOBER, BUT THE OUTCOME of the 2024 election will presumably be known by the time you read these words. What’s already clear, though, is how rapidly Donald Trump’s Republican Party is accelerating toward a decisive point at which elections simply don’t matter anymore—the dream that the authoritarian American right cleaves to as it fantasizes about turning America into a more lavishly armed and funded version of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. That project, like much of the rest of the MAGA agenda, has fallen to the Trump movement’s designated heir apparent, JD Vance. The Ohio senator Trump tapped as his running mate has performed many stunning reversals and acts of intellectual self-cancellation in his new role as MAGA ideology czar, but the most distressing of these has been…

JOHN MORALES, THE FLORIDA TV METEOROLOGIST who went viral after fighting back tears as he warned about the megastorm Hurricane Milton, personifies a little-known fact: Local TV weathercasters are the most trusted figures in American news. Even as the popularity of “the media” has plummeted in recent decades, people still trust their local TV weathercasters. After all, those weathercasters talk their viewers through scary times by providing practical, life-saving information. “People have known me as the just-the-facts, non-alarmist guy,” Morales later said, adding, “I think it really shocked a lot of the people that have known me as a weathercaster for 33 years.” Given that level of trust, it makes perverse sense that the same liars and haters who vilify immigrants and people of color would eventually come for weathercasters.…

THE DEHUMANIZATION OF IMMIGRANTS BY REPUBlican politicians has become such a consistent feature of our political discourse that I fear people have stopped noticing it. In fact, it has become so commonplace for politicians, law enforcement, and media personalities to describe immigrants with bestial terminology—most people talk about their pets in more human terms than they talk about immigrants—that even I have become used to it. Every time Donald Trump or his running mate, Captain Eyeliner Vance, opens his foul mouth, I know something horrible about immigrants will spew forth. The two of them are saying everything necessary to induce violence against immigrants while trying to maintain plausible, January 6–style deniability should any violence be carried out. And the media is only too happy to amplify their hate. While their…