From the Campaign Trail in Montana

“Are you here for the Jon event?” a young volunteer asked me as I arrived. The Jon event was taking place at lunchtime in late October, in a mid-sized function room on the campus of Montana State University, in the city of Bozeman. MSU was founded as an agricultural college by federal land grant in […]

The Torturer

CO-WRITTEN WITH JULIANO FIORI People say that this guy isn’t a concrete threat, said “Raíssa Leal, a 25-year-old student, as she left another event and headed home to her favela community in Jacarepaguá. “But his supporters are.” Indianara Siqueira, a veteran transgender rights activist attending a recent protest, reeled off a list of incidents she’d […]

Sly Jazz

The National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, in Upstate New York, lays out the sport’s history like an allegory of the long American century, its tragedies and glories. A gallery with the feel of a mausoleum enshrines the finest 1 per cent of players. They came from farms and small towns and urban slums, […]

Alt-right rally in Washington, DC, August 2018

There was great anxiety over turnout among the organisers of the white power rally “Unite the Right 2,” the follow-up to the infamous event in Charlottesville last year. Key members of the movement, also known as the alt-right, were snubbing the event. “We do not want the image of being a bunch of weird losers […]

Francisco Cantú – The Line Becomes a River

Carlos Fuentes imagined a Border Patrol Agent so racist that he feared a suntan. “Agent Dan Polonsky” prefers to work nocturnally; he likes to watch himself urinate through the otherworldly lens of his night-vision goggles. Polonsky “detested the illegals. But he adored and needed them. Without them, damn it, there would be no budget for […]

The Secret Base

“So amazing that we’re ordering hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of new airplanes for the Air Force,” Trump said at a public military briefing in Hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico last October. “You can’t see it,” he claimed of the F-35, an extraordinarily costly and glitch-ridden project. “You literally can’t see it. So it’s hard to fight […]

The Wall

At the south-east edge of San Diego, a lonely district dominated by cross-border trucking abruptly gives way to desert scrubland. Three layers of fence abutting the Mexican city of Tijuana become two; if you follow a dirt road east for a mile, the second fence of steel mesh also ends, leaving just the original eight-foot […]

The Macho Gringo

“I must say that one of the actors I hate most in the world is John Wayne”, Homero Aridjis digressed. “A macho hero, killing Indians, pushing women around – I can’t stand this character: the macho gringo.” And the macho gringo is now occupying the White House. (In the words of Octavio Paz: “the macho […]

Inauguration

Kevin McCarty and Brandon Bourg were light-hearted and beaming, having made it up from Lafayette, Louisiana, to their nation’s capital. Close friends, twenty-four and twenty-one, an oil worker and a law student, neither of them bad-looking (gym-bulky), they held the hottest tickets in town for young Trump supporters like themselves: to the “Deplorables’ Inaugural Ball”. […]

Mar-a-Lago, Christmas Morning

There’s the service entrance, with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office cruiser, and deputies with whistles controlling traffic, and the Sheriff’s Office watchtower, and across the street from it the new, extra parking lot, where the guests of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s private club in Florida, queue up to have their vehicles searched for bombs by […]