The Baffler #78 Apr. 2025

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.