Apocalypse Today, Tomorrow & The Next Day
This morning, I was on a People for the American Way board call and Jamie Raskin started the day off with an inspirational talk. At one point he responded to a question from someone looking for hope. Raskin quoted Thomas Jefferson: “A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles... If the game runs sometime against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.”
We all have seen how Trump lives in a dystopian apocalyptic world of his own making. It’s a shame he dragged an entire political party into its vortex. And it’s really tragic for the country, that something like a third of the population got sucked right into it, making America nearly ungovernable. Yesterday Trump was surely thinking about how the forces of law and order are closing in on him and how he could actually wind up in the prison cell he’s miraculously avoided his entire life. He’s desperate and the latest revelations about how his media company, Trump Media, parent of Truth Social, has been surreptitiously financed by the Kremlin, are likely not making it easier for the 76 year old to sleep well at night.
Even MAGAts understand that money laundering is a crime and that $8 million wired through from the Kremlin through third parties (Paxum Bank, Anton Postolnikov, Aleksandr Smirnov, Rosmorport) to Trump Media is a problem. “Even if Trump Media and its officers face no criminal exposure for the transactions,” reported Hugo Lowell, “the optics of borrowing money from potentially unsavory sources through opaque conduits could cloud Trump’s image as he seeks to recapture the White House in 2024. The extent of the exposure for Trump Media and its officers for money laundering remains unclear. The statutes broadly require prosecutors to show that defendants knew the money was the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity and the transaction was designed to conceal its source. But money laundering prosecutions are typically based on circumstantial evidence and can be based on materials that show that the money in question was unlikely to have legitimate origins, legal experts said… The obscure origins of the $8m loans caused alarm at Trump Media and, in the spring of 2022, Trump Media’s then chief financial officer Phillip Juhan weighed returning the money, according to Wilkerson. But the money was never returned.”
This morning, Ashley Parker, was looking at how Trump has infected the Republican Party so thoroughly that it is now left with an apocalyptic state of mind. She began by reminding her readers that “Speaking to conservative activists this month just outside of D.C., former president Donald Trump promised to be ‘your warrior’ and ‘your justice,’ vowing: ‘And to those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.’ The same day, speaking to a group of conservative donors in Florida, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (R) warned, ‘Joe Biden and the Democrats are destroying our people’s patriotism and swapping it out for dangerous self-loathing.’ And speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California on March 5, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) argued that his state offered a refuge from a Democratic-led ‘dystopia, where people’s rights were curtailed and their livelihoods were destroyed.’ The trio of comments from 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls— either declared or expected— underscore the dark undertones and apocalyptic rhetoric that have pervaded much of the Republican Party in the era of Trump.”
[M]uch of the rhetoric from the declared and potential Republican candidates so far is remarkable for its dystopian tone. In many high-profile moments, these Republicans portray the nation as locked in an existential battle, where the stark combat lines denote not just policy disagreements but warring camps of saviors versus villains, and where political opponents are regularly demonized.
They warn that Biden and a “radical,” “woke mob” of liberals are determined to “destroy” and “ruin” the nation.
Frank Luntz, a pollster and communication analyst who said he “came of age in the days of Ronald Reagan,” said that in the current Republican Party, gone is the era of Reagan’s sanguine optimism.
“Trump has turned Republican politics on its head, ” Luntz said. “We were so much more positive and hopeful, and it was Republicans who looked to the future with excitement and energy, but those days are long gone.”
Now, Luntz added, the cycle of darkness is self-perpetuating. “Pessimism and negativity breeds more pessimism and negativity,” he said. “You get darker and darker and go deeper and deeper into a hole, and you cannot emerge.”
…While Trump is the undeniable champion of the vilify-your-opponent style of politics, he is hardly its only practitioner.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served as White House press secretary under Trump, delivered the Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union speech last month and used the prime-time spotlight to portray “the radical left’s America” as descending into mayhem where the federal government “lights your hard-earned money on fire” and “children are taught to hate one another on account of their race.”
“The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left; the choice is between normal or crazy,” Sanders said, ominously warning that “the Biden administration is doubling down on crazy.”
…The risk of such rhetoric, some experts say, is that it strips political discourse and debate of its empathy and even humanity.
“At its worst, it divides and excludes,” said Alison McQueen, associate professor of political science at Stanford University and author of Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times. “It casts one set of people as heroes and saviors and another set of people as beyond the pale and evil. It’s good and evil rhetoric, and once you see your opponents as evil or the belligerent side in a war, that seems to legitimize treating them in ways we’d otherwise find very objectionable.”
…At the Conservative Political Action Conference gathering on March 4, Trump warned of another global conflagration— “You’re going to have World War III, if something doesn’t happen fast”— and attacked members of his own party from the years before he became its standard-bearer: “We had a Republican Party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots and fools.”
At one point, Trump declared, “This is it— either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.”
Some of the Republican Party’s rhetoric has taken on a particularly menacing tenor following the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“It’s authoritarian purity,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist and senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. “It’s what happens when you have to intensify the rhetoric to get the same response, and so it’s a downward spiral.”
He added, “Trump realized that there was gold in the hills if he could stoke fear and anger and amplify it. And most of those who thought that was the wrong direction for the party either left or were chased out, so then you spiral, you get darker and darker.”
In her 2024 presidential announcement speech last month, Haley warned that under the Biden administration, “a self-loathing has swept our country.”
“America is on a path of doubt, division and self-destruction,” said Haley, who earlier in her political career was known for a more moderate message.
A Haley spokeswoman noted that in the same speech, she also offered many optimistic and hopeful notes, recounting that her parents always taught her and her siblings “that even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America.”
“They were right then— and they’re right now,” Haley said.
McQueen noted that other periods in American history— the Puritans arriving in New England, the Civil War and the post-9/11 era— have featured similarly dark and foreboding political language.
The grim undertones pervading Republican messaging are simply a sign of the current moment, she said.
“When I look at the resurgence of dark, apocalyptic rhetoric among Republican politicians, what it signals to me is that the country is gearing up for a presidential race and that some of the Republicans are willing to use the Trump apocalypse playbook again, because Trump used this in his first presidential campaign to great effect,” McQueen said.
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