Opinion | At the Waco Rally and Beyond, Trump's Movement Now Commands Him - The New Yor... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...d-trump-waco-rally-speech.html
trump movement maga populism culture crisis elitiism
shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 23
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virtually every speaker at Trump’s marathon rally. One after another, they looked at a seething, conspiracy-addled crowd and indulged, fed, and stoked every element of their furious worldview. I didn’t see a single true leader on Trump’s stage, not even Trump himself. I saw a collection of followers, each vying for the affection of the real power in Waco, the coddled populist mob.
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To understand the social and political dynamic on the modern right, you have to understand how millions of Americans became inoculated against the truth
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every time Trump faced pushback, he and his allies called critics “elitist” or “fake news” or “weak” or “cowards.” It was much easier to say the Trump skeptics had “Trump derangement syndrome,” or were “just establishment stooges,” than to engage with substantive critique
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Disagreement on the right quickly came to be seen as synonymous with disrespect. If “we the people” (the term Trump partisans apply to what they call the “real America”) believe something, then the people deserve to have that view reflected right back to them by their politicians and pundits.
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Repeatedly, Fox leaders and personalities who did not seem to believe the 2020 election was stolen referred to the need to “respect” their audience by telling them otherwise. For these Fox staffers, respecting the audience didn’t mean relaying the truth (a true act of respect). Instead, it meant feeding viewers’ insatiable hunger for confirmation of their conspiracy theories.
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Politicians are always tempted to pander, but rarely do you see such a complete abdication of anything approaching true moral or political leadership as what transpired at the Waco rally
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It’s common to critique the Trumpist movement as a Donald Trump cult, but that’s not quite right anymore. He’s still immensely influential, but do true cultists boo their leader when he deviates from the approved script? Yet that’s what happened in December 2021, when parts of a Dallas rally crowd booed Trump when he said he’d received a Covid vaccine booster. And does anyone think that Trump is a QAnon aficionado? Yet in 2022 he boosted explicit Q content on Truth Social, his social media platform of choice.
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There may have been a time when Trump truly commanded his movement. That time is past. His movement now commands him. Fed by conspiracies, it is hungry for confrontation, and rallies like Waco demonstrate its dominance