Surviving the Trump Years: Katha Pollitt’s Guide for the Anxious and the Depressed

Surviving the Trump Years: Katha Pollitt’s Guide for the Anxious and the Depressed

Surviving the Trump Years: Katha Pollitt’s Guide for the Anxious and the Depressed

Plus John Nichols on Medicare-for-All and Rosa Brooks on the generals.

Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky
Pocket
Email

We’re six months into the Trump era—and how are you feeling about the world today? Katha Pollitt conducted an unscientific survey. She found anxiety and depression, but also wisdom about working together over the long haul: We will defeat Trump (if he doesn’t defeat himself first).

Also: One good result of the Republicans’ failure to repeal and replace Obamacare is the growing support for a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system—not just among the public, where it’s always been popular, but also among Democratic Party leaders. John Nichols comments.

Plus: It seems like the military is becoming everything in the Trump administration. The president just made a general his chief of staff, and has another heading the Defense Department—and yet another as his national-security adviser. That led us to a conversation with Rosa Brooks about “how the military became everything.” Her book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, is out now in paperback.

Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, and SoundCloud for new episodes each Thursday. Start Making Sense is hosted by Jon Wiener and co-produced by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Disobey authoritarians, support The Nation

Over the past year you’ve read Nation writers like Elie Mystal, Kaveh Akbar, John Nichols, Joan Walsh, Bryce Covert, Dave Zirin, Jeet Heer, Michael T. Klare, Katha Pollitt, Amy Littlefield, Gregg Gonsalves, and Sasha Abramsky take on the Trump family’s corruption, set the record straight about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s catastrophic Make America Healthy Again movement, survey the fallout and human cost of the DOGE wrecking ball, anticipate the Supreme Court’s dangerous antidemocratic rulings, and amplify successful tactics of resistance on the streets and in Congress.

We publish these stories because when members of our communities are being abducted, household debt is climbing, and AI data centers are causing water and electricity shortages, we have a duty as journalists to do all we can to inform the public.

In 2026, our aim is to do more than ever before—but we need your support to make that happen. 

Through December 31, a generous donor will match all donations up to $75,000. That means that your contribution will be doubled, dollar for dollar. If we hit the full match, we’ll be starting 2026 with $150,000 to invest in the stories that impact real people’s lives—the kinds of stories that billionaire-owned, corporate-backed outlets aren’t covering. 

With your support, our team will publish major stories that the president and his allies won’t want you to read. We’ll cover the emerging military-tech industrial complex and matters of war, peace, and surveillance, as well as the affordability crisis, hunger, housing, healthcare, the environment, attacks on reproductive rights, and much more. At the same time, we’ll imagine alternatives to Trumpian rule and uplift efforts to create a better world, here and now. 

While your gift has twice the impact, I’m asking you to support The Nation with a donation today. You’ll empower the journalists, editors, and fact-checkers best equipped to hold this authoritarian administration to account. 

I hope you won’t miss this moment—donate to The Nation today.

Onward,

Katrina vanden Heuvel 

Editor and publisher, The Nation

Ad Policy
x