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I’ve been reporting on US & global rightwing movements for 20 years, 4 years on the Trump beat. I read Trumpism from a religious studies background, attentive to the myths, stories, & rhetoric that enable it. This thread is my portrait of the movement, in pieces. 1/
First, where I think it stands: Trump’s crossed a line in his own mind—he’s become his own mark. Fascist rhetoric was his means to an end. Now he’s a believer. “Darkness Visible,” Vanity Fair, November 2020 2/ https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/how-qanon-crept-into-the-mind-of-donald-trump
Two takeaways from that piece: 1. Trump has crossed over into delusional paranoia. That's dangerous. 2. The paranoia's joined doesn't need him in power to threaten. In fact, QAnon seems to almost want Biden to win, to "confirm" its delusions. 3/
The beginning: In '15 I asked editors if I cld cover Trump as a convergence of strands w/in U.S. Right. Editors thought he was a joke. But in early '16 @NYTmag asked me to report on Trump rallies as religious rituals. 4/ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/donald-trump-american-preacher.html
Takeaways from that reporting: At an Ohio Trump rally, as I listened to an elderly couple fantasize about beating a CNN reporter, I realized that Trump capitalized on the joy of punching, real or imagines. It's the fantasy of the fist smashing through democracy's compromises. 5/
Liberals giggle, but Trump's believers want to feel it all, not just the manufactured hope of a political rally but also the lust, the envy, the anger of their more honest, if uglier, selves, transformed by the imagination of *his* grandeur into something greater. 6/
As @jeanguerre reports in her excellent book on Trump aide Stephen Miller, "Hatemonger," Trump's advisors explicitly recognize the reality of hate's power, & embrace it. Cuz they're evil? Sure, if you want to put it like that. But more because they know it works. 7/
A month after I published that in '16, Trump won Indiana--& pundits *swore* he couldn't win. I thought otherwise, & that the real threat is TrumpISM, not even the man himself. The threat wld be there either way. Now just as then. 8/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a44567/donald-trump-indiana-sharlet/
The day before the election in '16 I wrote this for @bookforum, a plea, as an HRC skeptic to other doubters, to vote against Trump anyway, because w/ the man himself wld come thousands of "little" Trumps at every level of governance, down to your town. 9/ https://www.bookforum.com/politics/thousands-of-little-trumps-22082
A month after the '16 election, I wrote this short piece about my daughter's first encounter w/ anti-Semitism, which was surging w/ Trump. But this was smaller--"just" schoolyard stuff. Trumpism infects everything. 10/ https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/bullies-in-the-schoolyard
After '16, I had a big project to work on: A @netflix documentary series based on my book THE FAMILY, on the fundamentalism at the heart of American power. We realized we needed to think hard about how the Christian Right had joined w/ Trumpism. 11/ https://www.netflix.com/title/80063867
Some notes from my production correspondence for the @netflix documentary: Throughout his books, Trump writes of a trinity of men who shaped him: His father, Fred, from whom he learned to be a tough guy; mob lawyer Roy Cohn, from whom he learned cunning... 12/
...and the midcentury megaselling preacher of the banal, Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking), from whom Trump learned a confidence so seamless it amounts to a divinity of self. (I hear Peale's influence strongly in Trump's covid-denial.) 13/
Such is the moment: The great convergence of American conservatisms, the brutality of Fred Trump, the corruption of Cohn, and the cross wrapped in a flag carried by Norman Vincent Peale. 14/
That was the beginning of our @netflix documentary series THE FAMILY, brilliantly directed by @djessemoss. Trump runs throughout it, from the opening credits through the Russian connection to our final ep, "The Wolf King"--*their* term for Trump. 15/ https://www.netflix.com/watch/80149278?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C1%2C8f38639b2b9a06c2cdf61879b9d33f10a72e7e2b%3A518c7a8c286f75f57ed39f6bcf31daf9c9789951%2C8f38639b2b9a06c2cdf61879b9d33f10a72e7e2b%3A518c7a8c286f75f57ed39f6bcf31daf9c9789951%2Cunknown%2C
Why do these elite Christian nationalists think of Trump as "the wolf king"? Because, as their leader explains it, Jesus came for the wolves as much as the sheep. They believe Jesus favors strongmen who will build his kingdom, piety be damned. Trump. 16/
When Michael Wolff published his Trump book Fire & Fury in '18, I used it as an opportunity to think briefly for @bookforum about why so many of my media colleagues, trained in traditional politics, missed the symbolic languages of Trumpism. 17/ https://www.bookforum.com/politics/the-value-of-michael-wolffs-fire-and-fury-22088
Just last week the anti-Black Lives Matter "back the blue" flag began replacing the American flag at Trump Rallies. I started writing about it as "A Flag for Trump's America for @Harpers in 2018. 18/ https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/a-flag-for-trumps-america/
That summer, an editor at @nypost, of all forums, asked me to write about the Russia Trumpist spy Maria Butina in the context of the Christian Right--another one of the convergences of Trumpism. 19/ https://nypost.com/2018/07/21/why-the-christian-right-has-embraced-putin/
For those who think their privilege will protect them from Trumpism--but more importantly for my then-9-year-old daughter--I wrote this thread, "What Do You Tell Your Kids About Crossing Borders?" after she & I were detained coming back from Canada. 20/ https://twitter.com/JeffSharlet/status/1023612034871685120
We were released because we became *very* polite--& because we're white. I knew some would scoff at me for not, I don't know, fighting border agents. So I wrote this, about what I'd learned at scarier border crossings: 21/ https://twitter.com/JeffSharlet/status/1023618541713534976?s=20
And of course you don't do anybody, including yourself, any favors, by imagining you're powerless, either. A bit of hope from the end of the thread, after we got through the border: https://twitter.com/JeffSharlet/status/1023630624622628870?s=20
In fall '19, @vanityfair asked me if I wanted to return to the Trump rallies I'd reported on in '16, to see what had changed. Of course I didn't! But I went. And a lot has changed. For the worse. The much, much worse. 25/ https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2020/7/the-second-coming
Some takeaways: Yes, many Trumpers really do believe Trump is divine, "chosen by God," or even possibly divine himself. That belief is still probably a minority of Trumpers, but it's far from fringe, & it reaches all the way up. 26/
The belief that Trump is chosen by God licenses violence, in rhetoric, fantasy, and potentially in fact. Such believers don't have a political disagreement with non-supporters but a theological one. That enables them to see violence not only as justified but as sacred. 27/
Day after @vanityfair report went online Trump held his comeback Tulsa rally. It proved more potent than critics realized. I didn't laugh; I listened, & I heard Trump whisper election violence into the ears of the millions who watched on TV. 28 / https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/decoding-the-grotesque-symbolism-of-trumps-tulsa-rally
Then there was Trump's "12 more years" "joke" at RNC. Thing is, I'd been hearing him say it rallies for a long time. I knew his method: joking-not-joking-no, joking--and then it becomes an article of Trumpist belief. 29/ https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/at-repulibcan-national-convention-trump-authoritarian-joke-slips-closer-to-reality
This short piece for @VanityFair returned to origin of my decades of reporting on the Right: That "business" conservatism & Christian Right have always intermingled through what my introduction to the movement, the Family, calls "biblical capitalism." 30 / https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/trumps-brand-of-biblical-capitalism-may-make-him-unbeatable
Man, at that point I needed a break. So I took a drive. Rural NH and Maine. Mistake! Because that's the land of the Trump flag. For every cheap Biden sign I saw a dozen permanent pennants for Trump nationalism. 31/ https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/trump-partisan-battle-flag-is-the-new-stars-and-stripes
12 years ago, in my bestselling book on fundamentalism, The Family, I wrote a chapter called "The 'F' Word"--which refers, of course, to fascism. I was talking about the Family's post WWII recruitment of actual Nazis, leading war criminals, in fact, to advise GOP pols. 32/
But as much as the Family recruited genuine fascists & worked w/ them abroad, it never was quite fascist here. Of course, there's more than one kind of bad under the sun. American fundamentalism, I believed, was--so to speak--*our* cross to bear. 33/
I argued that American fundamentalism, for all its brutality, would prevent the U.S. from ever embracing traditional fascism. Fundamentalists wouldn't trade Jesus for a strongman. Sigh.... *I. Was. Wrong.* 34/
Trump is the fascism stoked by American fundamentalism abroad--in Chile, El Salvador, Indonesia, Somalia--come home. The long list of dictators embraced by US Christian Right culminates in its love affair with our homegrown cult of personality. Maybe it was inevitable... 35/
We are living in what appears to be an American tragedy. But the temptation of tragedy is the *illusion* of inevitability, the retrospective consolation that it could not have been otherwise. It can be otherwise. Always. 36/
Trump doesn't want you to believe that. He wants history to be fixed. That's why white supremacy fears history, the real deal, the kind in which we're always learning, driven by questions, not answers. I wrote about Trump's hijacking of history here. 37/ https://gen.medium.com/patriotic-education-is-how-white-supremacy-survives-d92a944e14a
That's my portrait of Trumpism to date. I've another piece coming out in @bookforum on the price of looking at hate, & something in-progress on what I call "police nationalism." But I'm hoping to be done. Let's make it so? 38/
My last pre-election metaphor before the election: Hodor. In '16, right before the election, at the age of 44 I had a very unexpected heart attack. I'm healthier now, shld live a long time--unless I have another (not quite as) unexpected one tomorrow. How to live w/ that? 39/
I got the answer from my mother. She died a long time ago, in '89, when she was about my age & I was 16. Breast cancer. Her goal was to live long enough to see me through high school. She didn't make it. But it was a good goal. Now, w/ my kids, it's mine. 40/
My kids are younger, so for me that means I need to make it to at least 59. (& I hope much longer!) That required making a lot of changes. I needed a metaphor. I found one on TV. Nothing fancy: Hodor. Hold the door. 41/
Old Hodor is a metaphor for us all now. I wrote this for left friends unwilling to vote for Biden. But maybe it's useful beyond them, for all of us, to think about endurance & survival, about the *why* of it as much as the how. 42/42 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/the-2020-election-is-about-survival
