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Forty-Five has become 47, and Donald Trump is now the first president to serve two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland. With protective tariffs anathema to Uncle Jumbo, as Cleveland was known to family and friends, the two wouldn’t have agreed on all counts, but our twenty-second and twenty-fourth president was also a downsizer cartoonishly obsessed with small government. (Handing out nearly six hundred vetoes in total, he earned the additional nickname “His Obstinacy.”) When denying aid to drought-stricken farmers in Texas, Cleveland proclaimed, “The lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.”
Once reelected, Trump said nothing as nakedly hostile to the idea that a state should provide for its citizens, preferring nationalist banalities and “work smarter, not harder” paeans to efficiency that will supposedly be delivered by Elon Musk’s cost-cutting campaign. “Sunlight is pouring forth over the entire world,” Trump announced at his inauguration, accompanying “a tide of change” sweeping America. At the time of this writing, a month or so into his presidency, Trump’s war on “flagrant scams,” as he declared at this year’s CPAC, has looked mostly like the evisceration of the institutions he was elected to helm once again.
Then again, homecomings are often ugly business, and in “Homeland Insecurity,” The Baffler’s authors consider various unhappy returns. J.W. McCormack heads back to Knox County to answer the burning question: Why is the professional wrestler known as Kane the mayor of this corner of Tennessee? Martin Dolan recounts a summer back home spent serving winners and losers alike behind the bar of the Saratoga Race Course, and Britni West attempts to preserve the scrappy cowboy nature of her family in the mountain west in the issue’s exhibit. Adéwálé Májà-Pearce considers his upbringing within and without Nigeria and that class of natives alienated from their countrymen courtesy of colonial education and a culture of flattering foreign powers.
Elsewhere in national chauvinisms, Wen Stephenson visits a development-obsessed Nepal after decades away, finding a country whose financial ascendancy is outpaced by its increasing vulnerability to climate change. André Naffis-Sahely examines ethnic cleansing in Bhutan, which would prefer to be known for its self-selected slogan of being “the happiest country in the world.” Rebecca Nathanson details how the right-wing French group Némésis riles up anti-immigrant sentiments in the name of feminism. And Alexander Wells takes the reader on a tour of Budapest’s House of Terror museum, a physical embodiment of Viktor Orbán’s ambition to rewrite Hungary’s national myths along authoritarian lines.
What to do when you can’t go home and you don’t want to stay here? For those leftists longing for a less antisocial version of the billionaire’s doomsday bunker, Caitlin L. Chandler presents an account of learning survival skills and talking theory at the Island School of Social Autonomy. Or you could denounce domestication altogether, rewild yourself and the lands around you, as the eco-saboteur profiled by Christopher Ketcham alleges to have done—an assault on civilization itself, or at least its fences on public lands, one stroke of a Sawzall at a time.
Published: April 2025
Pages: 136
