"To understand Trump’s relationship to the WWE and his appeal to its audience is to see a microcosm of the 2016 election. For Trump’s supporters, as in Wrestlemania, showmanship and symbols are often what matter. Where progressives saw an uncivilized brute bloviating about his sexual prowess, lying on cue, and viciously dressing down his opponents, Trump supporters saw something familiar and playfully spectacular. In Trump’s world, as in the wrestling world, absurd ‘alternative facts’ are not falsehoods but story lines, fueling an entertainment-driven narrative. Through this lens, Trump is a hero in the mold of Hulk Hogan or Stone Cold Austin: a domineering titan promising to vanquish the forces of evil, to crusade against political correctness, to make aggressive masculinity fashionable again. Riffing off political analyst Salena Zito’s famous statement that the press took Trump, ‘literally, but not seriously,’ whereas his supporters took him ‘seriously, but not literally,’ Trump donor - and, briefly White House communications director - Anthony Scaramucci put it this way: ‘don’t take him literally, take him symbolically.’"
Political Tribes by Amy Chua - 2019
"The prosperity gospel is one of the fastest-growing movements in the United States. It teaches that being rich is godly and that God will make people rich if they pray (and tithe) correctly. The number of poor and working class African and Hispanic Americans who belong to prosperity churches is growing exponentially. Three out of four Hispanic Christians in the United States believe that ‘God will grant financial success and good health to all believers who have enough faith.’ A Mexican American student of mine - whose family members are now in danger of being deported by the Trump administration - recently wrote to me: ‘In my opinion, the Prosperity Gospel explains how much of my Hispanic family can be anti-Obama and pro-Trump, despite that being so obviously against their self-interest. It’s a coping mechanism for poor people who feel hopeless in this world. Just a few weeks ago, my mom sent me a video of one of her favorite pastors snapchatting from Trump’s inaugural ball. My mom was so excited to see Trump welcoming in men she considers to be ‘holy.’ For me, this is frustrating to no end.'"
"So, for example, the Paris climate negotiations, COP 21, though not as strong as they should be, were at least a step in the right direction, perhaps the basis for further action in the future. But the summit did not establish a treaty with verifiable goals- only an informal agreement. The reason was very clear: a treaty couldn't get through the Republican Congress. So here you have a political organization that is essentially saying, 'Let's race to the precipice as fast as possible.' Donald Trump is being condemned for all sorts of things by liberal commentators, but not for the most important thing: his policies on the climate. He's calling for more fossil fuels, more coal plants, ending EPA regulations, possibly getting rid of the EPA altogether. He wants to dismantle the Paris agreements and stop giving support to developing countries for addressing climate change. That really is saying, 'Let's race to the precipice.' It's very serious. and the precipice is not far off. We're already close to- if not past- the limits that were proposed in the Paris discussions, a temperature increase of 1.5 centigrade."
Global Discontents by Noam Chomsky - 2017
"Just like Trump himself, contemporary evangelicalism has been profoundly shaped by celebrity and television. Trump’s path to evangelical strongman was not paved by a career in politics talking about faith, family, and freedom, the playbook followed by his predecessors and many of his onetime rivals, like Texas senator Ted Cruz, or now-Housing and Urban Development secretary Ben Carson. It was paved by a career starring in reality television and, importantly, studying Christian television and befriending some of its biggest stars. Trump is more like a televangelist than a politician - which is exactly why he was able to break the politician mold for evangelical voters who had come to believe that other presidential candidates, for all their faith talk, had ultimately failed to deliver government guided by ‘Christian’ or ‘biblical’ values. Previous Republican candidates cultivated relationships with televangelists in a quest for the votes of their considerable audiences. But more than any other Republican candidate, Trump’s politics were defined by televangelism itself. Although televangelists operate out of tax-exempt churches, at their core their ministries are businesses, bringing in millions of unaccountable cash, used for enriching the pastor with extravagances like mansions portrayed as parsonages, or private jets held to be essential tools for spreading the gospel. Televangelism has created an audience, for both church and politics, that is enthralled with showmanship and captivated by powerful personalities and flamboyant tales of miracles and supernatural successes, from cancer healed by prayer to bank accounts suddenly flush with heaven-sent cash."
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"At one level, Trump's antics ensure that attention is focused on him, and it makes little difference how. Who even remembers the charge that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Clinton, depriving the pathetic little man of his Grand Victory? Or the accusations that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower? The claims don't really matter. It's enough that attention is diverted from what is happening in the background. There, out of the spotlight, the most savage fringe of the Republican Party is carefully advancing policies designed to enrich their true constituency: the Constituency of private power and wealth, 'the masters of mankind,' to borrow Adam Smith's phrase. These policies will harm the irrelevant general population and devastate future generation, but that's of little concern to the Republicans. They've been trying to push through similarly destructive legislation for years. Paul Ryan, for example, has long been advertising his ideal of virtually eliminating the federal government, apart from service to the Constituency- though in the past he's wrapped up his proposals in spreadsheets so they would look wonkish to commentators. Now, while attention is focused on Trump's latest mad doings, the Ryan gang and the executive branch are ramming through legislation and orders that undermine workers' rights, cripple consumer protections, and severely harm rural communities. They seek to devastate health programs, revoking taxes that pay for them in order to further enrich their Constituency, and to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed some much-needed constraints on the predatory financial system that grew during the neoliberal period. That's just a sample of how the wrecking ball is being wielded by the newly empowered Republican Party. Indeed, it is no longer a political party in the traditional sense. Conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have described it more accurately as a 'radical insurgency,' one that has abandoned normal parliamentary politics."
Unholy by Sarah Posner - 2020
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"(Frank) Amedia is part of an increasingly powerful network of televangelists, pastors, musicians, writers, and self-promoters who fuse elements of prosperity theology with the core belief of a more recent charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The NAR, which like the prosperity gospel is deeply controversial and even heretical to many conservative evangelicals, holds that modern-day prophets and apostles receive direct revelations from God. They are ‘anointed’ to mobilize their followers to engage in spiritual warfare against demonic enemies, all aimed at enabling Christians to ‘transform’ every one of America’s communities and take dominion over the seven ‘mountains’ or ‘spheres’ of societal influence - religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. Like the prosperity gospel, the NAR has had a ripple effect throughout charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity in America and around the world, drawing in followers through television, podcasts, magazines, conferences, social media, and the overlapping, mutually reinforcing marketing efforts of its most prominent adherents. . . As a global movement who top ideologues often boast of its multicultural following, this burgeoning Christian movement seems to be an unlikely fit with Trump’s MAGA. But in many crucial ways, Trump and this fact-free, faith-based movement dovetail perfectly: their promotion of revelation over reality, spontaneous utterances over facts, baseless promises of wealth and success, and aggressive, accountability-free fund-raising."
"As much as the Christian right of the twenty-first century is now fixated on abortion and sexual politics, the backlash against the efforts of the federal government to desegregate tax-exempt private schools is embedded in the movement’s DNA. The white evangelical attraction to Trump was not in spite of his extended birther crusade against Barack Obama, his racist outbursts in tweets and rallies, and his administration’s plans to eviscerate federal protection of racial minorities from discrimination in housing and education by eliminating their ability to show discrimination based on the disparate impact of policy, as opposed to having to prove discriminatory intent. The Christian right movement was born out of grievance against civil rights gains for blacks, and a backlash against the government’s efforts to ensure those gains could endure. When Trump offers paeans to ‘religious freedoms’ - the very clarion call of the Bob Jones University defenders - or sloganeers ‘Make America Great Again,’ he is sending a message that rings true for a movement driven by the rhetoric and organizing pioneered by (Paul) Weyrich and (Robert) Billings. Trump’s white evangelical admirers do not just see a leader who is making it safe to say Merry Christmas again, or holding the IRS back from penalizing pastors who endorse him from the pulpit. In Trump’s words and deeds, they see an idealized white Christian America before civil rights for people of color - and a meddling government - ruined it."
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"But my search for information about January 6 led to a discovery: these were not irrelevant groups. That’s why Trump did not renounce them. They were his allies, and they had the blessing of the most powerful person in the world. That meant they had been my allies, as well.What had I done? How could I have missed what was undeniable? Like with Charlottesville, I dismissed the violence on January 6 as trivial, all because of my allegiance to MAGA. I knew Trump’s rhetoric had always been incendiary; it was a feature, not a bug, of the movement. Now I asked myself a very uncomfortable question: would I have downplayed the violence to the parents, children and loved ones of the US Capitol Police? I was complicit, having remained silent over Trump’s inflammatory, inciting language. The protestors and police who died during and after the attack on the Capitol would still be alive if not for Trump.I felt rage, confusion, shock, and, most acutely, shame. I deserved to be inextricably linked to the domestic terrorist groups I had once yawned at."
My Maga Odyssey by Rich Logis - 2024
Trumpocalypse by David Frum - 2020
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“Its supporters like to call it ‘nationalist’ – but it is anything but ‘nationalist.’ The new movement’s version of ‘nationalism’ attaches them not to the multiracial American nation with its capital in Washington, DC, but to a multinational white race with a capital in Moscow. The most fundamental concept in the politics of the new movement is the divide between friend and enemy, but for the new movement, the divide cuts through nations, not between them. Fellow citizens can be enemies; faraway co-racialists can be friends. This replacement of nation by race may explain why so many Trump supporters felt untroubled by Russian help for the Trump candidacy– or the flow of foreign money to Trump personally.”
“To defeat Trump and to prevent new Trumps, the United States (and other advanced societies, too) must control their borders and strengthen their nationality and their social-insurance systems to foster the sense of belonging that has ebbed away as our societies become more diverse, more interconnected, more plutocratic. I get the merits for the case of covering the ten million ors so illegal residents of the United States. The majority of those people have resided in the United States for more than a decade. What is to happen when those people get sick? Even more awkwardly: What is to happen when they grow old? Are we really to contemplate a future in which millions and millions of elderly US residents will be shrugged off in illness or frailty because they entered the country illegally back when Bill Clinton was president? Yet if we include those uninvited, unauthorized residents of the United States in the most valuable benefit offered by the national community, are we not also inviting tens of millions of more to break the law after them? It will be a hugely expensive project to cover even the population already illegally present. About half the illegal population of California, for example, earn incomes low enough to qualify for Medi-Cal, should it become available to them. If the American health-care system is to be stabilized, not only must costs be controlled, but eligibility must be defined and enforced. The path to citizenship that Democrats want for illegal residents must begin with demonstrated proof that large illegal immigration flows have been stopped forever. Canada is a country generally regarded as uniquely welcoming to immigration. Yet in July 2011, the second-highest Canadian federal court ruled that illegal aliens have no right to health-care coverage– and this decision remains the law to the time of writing. The Canadian policy of refusing health care to unauthorized immigrants is so uncontroversial within Canada that, as far as I can tell, nobody seems ever to have bothered to conduct a public poll about it. It just seems obvious to all concerned: you come to Canada legally, you get health care as part of the deal; if not, you don’t. If a society has an ethic– ‘This we will do for you whether you can afford it or not, just because you are one of us’ – then it must have a meaningful definition of ‘one of us.’”
“In one term, Trump managed to do immense damage to the world, to the United States, and to his own party – damage that will take a long time to repair, but damage that is not beyond repair. Should there be a second term, however, some things will be wrecked forever – and among those things will be the Republican Party as an institution. The Republican Party enabled Trump’s corruption and authoritarianism through four years. It backed him against the most emphatically justified impeachment in US history. Soon it will renominate Trump for president. Its strategy for reelecting him depends on visibly preventing minorities from voting and welcoming foreign interference in US elections. Its most plausible scenario for success is to win the Electoral College against the popular vote for the third time in twenty years. What will be the character of such a political party after such a history? Not a democratic political party that’s for sure. It will have degenerated into a caudillo’s personal entourage, a cult of personality that exists to enable and protect the maximum leader. They will not be conservatives; they will be Peronists. And their degradation will degrade the political system in a way that cannot be repaired. No two-party system can remain a democracy unless both parties adhere to democratic values, not just one. Even the best-intentioned, most public-spirited people had to make deals with the devil to accomplish anything in the Trump years. At first, the compromises might seem modest: some flattery, maybe, or a little lying to cover up some bizarre presidential behavior. Sooner or later, though, the Trump official would find himself or herself in the kind of situation so memorably described by National Security Advisor John Bolton: ‘I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up’ (referring to EU ambassador Gordon Sondland and chief of staff Mick Mulvaney). But only the very deft or the very lucky will emerge from the Trump administration with altogether clean hands. Outside the government, many people volunteered to champion Trump’s case in the media. They had less power than the insiders. They will bear even more of the blame because of their greater conspicuousness. Some of them had large personal reputations before they signed up – more or less reluctantly – to the pro-Trump cause. Some of them are – or were – friends of mine. Why did they do it? Some followed Trump because they saw opportunities for advancement, or because they had families to feed, or because they worried what their friends would think if they did not. Some went along because they did not respect their profession, their audience, or themselves. It was only TV after all, and as presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway self-revealingly remarked in January 2017, ‘People realize that no one on TV is under oath.’ The most committed of them volunteered for Trump because – whatever Trump’s other faults – he offered them revenge on political or cultural enemies.”
“Trump’s core supporters were never fooled by him. The DC lobbyists and Beltway operators who profited from the Trump years, the third-tier political hacks who were appointed to top-tier jobs, the Fox News and social media grifters who scammed a living out of cultural resentment, the donors whose taxes dropped by millions: they all accurately perceived Trump’s defect as a man and a leader. Trump’s defects actually made life easier for them. A more intelligent president would have been harder to manipulate. A more upright president might have calmed the social tensions so lucrative to enflame.”
“If (a conservative young man’s) elders and leaders succeed now, he will inherit a political system from which the idea of ‘law’ means only ‘jargon we use to get our way and weapons we use to harass our opponents.’ He will inherit a constitutional system in which that constitution has forfeited its legitimacy because it was abused to impose the wishes of a privileged few upon the permanently disadvantaged many.”
“Those laws and treaties guarantee every asylum claimant an individual hearing–which is why a nation’s asylum system comes crashing down when asylum seekers start showing up by the hundreds of thousands and then the millions, as they have done in Europe and the United States since the middle 2010s. The new mass wave of asylum seekers yearn to escape poverty, lawlessness, the loss of farms to environmental degradation. But they are seldom fleeing individual persecution of the kind to which the asylum system was intended to answer. The large and growing problems of Central America and West Africa call for humane international solution, but the migration of millions of their people to other countries is not that solution – and if we are not realistic about that truth now, we will stock reactionary movements compared to which the Trump episode will seem a pale dawn glimmer of a red and terrible day. . . The right to live in the United States is a huge prize.”