Trump's Return

Donald Trump is back in the White House. Boston Review issue Trump’s Return explores how he got there, what’s next, and how to resist, featuring David Austin Walsh, Robin D. G. Kelley, Noura Erakat, Marshall Steinbaum, Jeanne Morefield, and more.

Walsh takes us inside Trump’s motley coalition of tech billionaires and “America First” nativists, examining its crackups and assessing its strength. With the right’s strategy of anti-“wokeness” now effectively spent, will these alliances hold? Steinbaum reads Bidenomics in light of the long arc of Democrats’ economic policy since the Great Recession, finding that it neglected the biggest problem: inequality. And Morefield exposes the lie at the heart of MAGA’s “invasion” narrative about the fentanyl crisis, showing how decades of bipartisan fixation on enemies abroad—and denial of the exceptional savagery of capitalism at home—have led to this moment.

Looking forward, Erakat follows the imperial boomerang from Palestine as it deepens political repression in the United States; Kelley plots a revival of class solidarity as the only path to durable and meaningful resistance; plus more on the colossal scale of money in politics, the labor vote, and the promises and perils of progressive federalism.

The issue also includes Gianpaolo Baiocchi on lessons from Lula’s extraordinary success in building a workers’ party in Brazil, Joelle M. Abi-Rached on the trauma of political violence and Syria’s future after the fall of Assad, Aaron Bady on the right’s resurgent natalism and liberal panic about falling birthrates, and Samuel Hayim Brody on the reality of settler colonialism and the mystifications of Adam Kirsch.