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"A brilliant, riveting, funny, terrifying journey into the beating heart of Trumpland." --Liza Mundy, author of Code Girls In this daring work of immersive journalism, based on hundreds of hours of reporting, Carl Hoffman, who has written about the most dangerous and remote corners of the world, journeys deep inside Donald Trump's rallies, seeking to understand the strange and powerful tribe that forms the president's base. Hoffman pierced this alternate society, welcomed in and initiated into its rights and upside-down beliefs, and finally ushered to its inner sanctum. Equally freewheeling and profound, Liar's Circus tracks the MAGA faithful across five thousand miles of the American heartland during a crucial arc of the Trump presidency stretching from the impeachment saga to the dawn of the coronavirus pandemic that ended the rallies as we know it. Trump's rallies are a singular and defining force in American history--a kind of Rosetta stone to understanding the Age of Trump. Yet while much remarked upon, they are, in fact, little examined, with the focus almost always on Trump's latest outrageous statement. But who are the tens of thousands of people who fill these arenas? What do they see in Trump? And what curious alchemy--between president and adoring crowd--happens there that might explain Trump's rise and powerful hold over both his base and the GOP? To those on the left, the rallies are a Black Mass of American politics at which Trump plays high priest, recklessly summoning the darkest forces within the nation. To the MAGA faithful, the rallies are a form of pilgrimage, a joyous ceremony that like all rituals binds people together and makes them feel a part of something bigger than themselves. Both sides would acknowledge that this traveling roadshow is the pressurized, combustible core of Trump's political power, a meeting of the faithful where Trump is unshackled and his rhetoric reaches its most extreme, with downstream consequences for the rest of the nation. To date, no reporter has sought to understand the rallies as a sociological phenomenon examined from the bottom up. Hoffman has done just this. He has stood in line for more than 170 hours with Trump's most ardent superfans and joined them at the very front row; he has traveled from Minnesota to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Hampshire immersing himself in their culture. Publishing in the heart of the 2020 election cycle, Liar's Circus is a fresh and revelatory portrait of Trump's America, from one of our most talented journalists. … (meer)
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I liked this book although it felt like a slog. Mr. Hoffman's recounting of conversations with Trump rally goers was exhausting. I did enjoy his characterizations of the regulars he met in line at the rally's. Hearing their about their backstories and lives leading to Trump hit all the common narratives that seem to lead people to support trump so there were no surprises there. Mr. Hoffman provides some opinion and commentary about what issues he thinks underlie these narratives but he doesnt really bring anything new to the conversation on that front. Honestly though, Hoffman provides some stunning clarity in his observations and analysis. In the end, this book is very important for understanding Trump and the legions of diehards who gobble his bullshit. ( )
Hoffman also delves into the psychology of crowds, makes comparisons to Nazi Germany, rebukes the Republican establishment for its submissiveness, and holds out hope that “the end of American exceptionalism” brought about by Trump’s rise to power will provide “an opportunity for wisdom.” The result is both an intriguing portrait of a political phenomenon and a missed opportunity to go beyond the stereotypes of Trump loyalists.
Hoffman often shakes his head in wonderment but rarely condescends, and he approaches his subject with scholarly vigor, sometimes quoting from heady philosophical and sociological sources while retaining a sense of fraught adventure: “If Trumpism was a place, then it was a place I could travel to just as surely as a village in the swamps of New Guinea or the huts of nomads in the rain forests of Borneo.” What he discovered speaks volumes about economic uncertainty, racism (“almost no one admitted to being a racist…but none of them wanted blacks living next door to them or to share any power with them”), xenophobia, fundamentalism, and other populist dog whistles that “lay at the heart of Trump’s message and his power.” A valuable portrait of authoritarianism in action and its more-than-willing adherents.
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By compromising we could learn ow each small demand for our outward acquiescence could lead to the next, and with the gentle persistence of an incoming tide could lap at the walls of just that integrity we were so anxious to preserve. -Christabel Bielenberg, The Past In Myself
Opdracht
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
For Charlotte
Eerste woorden
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We trickled into Minneapolis by ones and twos, a migratory influx that grew as showtime approached.
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
...used to be that if we went out for dinner with conservatives I’d say, ‘We can agree to disagree,’ but I can’t do that anymore. I mean, if you support Trump’s policies that are racist, then you’re a racist. Are you a good person? I don’t know anymore! I realized I can’t do it; I can’t sit there and be tolerant. Their bubble of ignorance and loss of critical thinking just ruins it for me.
I didn’t want to see it or feel it but I did: an immense strength. A strongman. A force that echoed Mobutu or Idi Amin or Franco and that would plow ahead and kill anything in its path. A force that hundreds of Democratic representatives and smart, hardworking journalists and all of the rails and rules and conventions of almost 250 years of American history might not be enough to stop. Because the truth didn’t matter to him. He was dazzling, there was no question about it, because he was shameless; guilty of nothing, he was willing to say anything. And if you didn’t read the newspaper and only listened to him and the increasingly sycophantic people around him, you didn’t know that 90 percent of it—more than ninety minutes, almost Castro-like—was simply untrue.
Almost 175 years before Hitler or Mussolini or Juan Peron, those wise and far-seeing architects of the American republic had cautioned in the very first Federalist paper “that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”
Barack Obama was a phenomenon: he drew 75,000 people to a rally in Portland, Oregon, in May 2008, and then in St. Louis, Missouri, that October, 100,000 people crowded under and around its famous Arch to see and hear him—more than have ever attended a Trump rally, it’s worth noting.
The essence of that kind of populism was not just that he was the people—the real people—and that he spoke for them, but that the others were the anti-people.
Trump would never try to unite the country; doing so would dilute his power, a power built upon the existence of enemies he could demonize and save us from. As long as there were demons and enemies he could fill the arenas, and as long as the arenas were full and the mobs came to his rallies and cheered and said I love you, his power was a kind of cudgel, and there was no stopping him.
A staple of Trump’s rally speeches was about ending globalism and waging a trade war against China: it was China and cheap Asian manufacturing that had destroyed American manufacturing and American blue-collar jobs. And yet, right now, right in the middle of the trade war, nearly every item in the vast store was made in China or Vietnam or Bangladesh. This American, Trump-supporting company was pushing cheap Chinese products and profiting off of cheap Chinese labor.... Every purchase made in a Walmart directly contributed to America’s decline and the decline of small towns throughout the country.
There was so little local—not locally designed or locally owned or locally stocked or locally cooked. On the one hand, people could go online and buy almost anything, things that never would have been available in their small town, but their daily interactions and daily rituals were almost exclusively with quantities of mass-produced things which they had not designed and over which they had no control. What, I wondered, was the effect of that? What was it like to live in a world in which you had so little personal control, where so much was decided in faraway corporate meetings? And what effect did that have when a man came along who said you hadn’t been listened to, heard, who said he would make your world great again?
....they didn’t read newspapers. Many of them didn’t even watch Fox News. Dave Thompson’s description of his information gathering—from Twitter, he’d said, and “citizen journalists”—was typical. It meant he didn’t hear any reliable news at all. None. Many people had left Fox News behind and turned to the One America News Network, which made Fox look progressive. Huge numbers of people—lots of them, tens of millions of them, I was now seeing—were in a hermetically sealed bubble of conspiracy theories, lies and disinformation hammered home through Facebook, Twitter, OANN, right-wing talk radio, and the dark web itself.
To be alone wasn’t lonely; to be by yourself in a massive crowd of people who didn’t share any of your values, to be in an echo chamber where reality itself wasn’t acknowledged, that was crushing.
“America does not consist of groups,” said Woodrow Wilson. “A man who thinks himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.”
Human beings were little time bombs capable of tremendous cruelty, and it didn’t actually take much to trigger it, especially when they were brought together in great numbers to celebrate their own tribe, a celebration explicitly and implicitly built upon demonizing anyone who was different, as Trump did repeatedly in his speeches.
What was the difference between a twenty-first-century American who believed in the Tribulation and that global warming was a hoax and a fifteenth-century priest who proclaimed that Joan of Arc was possessed by the devil? Nothing. There was no difference at all.
...the megachurches asked little of their congregations.... Like the loss of small businesses to Walmart and Dollar General, the decline of all these groups had to have an effect, had to leave people adrift and hungry for belonging and identity—and vulnerable to a liar and patriarchal xenophobe like Donald Trump.... The ritual of a Trump rally was social bonding for people who’d lost that in so many other ways.
They played the victims, and it was easy to have no sympathy for them because they had little sympathy for anyone else.... They were nostalgic for privilege, the days when an uneducated white man got a job over a better-educated Black man; they wanted to be let go by police for traffic violations in a world when Black men were too often gunned down for the same; they longed for a world in which a thousand small barriers existed that boosted them and blocked everyone else. They wanted massive farming subsidies and all kinds of handouts and preferential treatment.
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
From the great wound of Donald J. Trump, I hoped there might be an opportunity for wisdom. ANd I could honestly say that someday I looked forward to a horseback ride in the fresh air and backcountry with Gale Roberts.
"A brilliant, riveting, funny, terrifying journey into the beating heart of Trumpland." --Liza Mundy, author of Code Girls In this daring work of immersive journalism, based on hundreds of hours of reporting, Carl Hoffman, who has written about the most dangerous and remote corners of the world, journeys deep inside Donald Trump's rallies, seeking to understand the strange and powerful tribe that forms the president's base. Hoffman pierced this alternate society, welcomed in and initiated into its rights and upside-down beliefs, and finally ushered to its inner sanctum. Equally freewheeling and profound, Liar's Circus tracks the MAGA faithful across five thousand miles of the American heartland during a crucial arc of the Trump presidency stretching from the impeachment saga to the dawn of the coronavirus pandemic that ended the rallies as we know it. Trump's rallies are a singular and defining force in American history--a kind of Rosetta stone to understanding the Age of Trump. Yet while much remarked upon, they are, in fact, little examined, with the focus almost always on Trump's latest outrageous statement. But who are the tens of thousands of people who fill these arenas? What do they see in Trump? And what curious alchemy--between president and adoring crowd--happens there that might explain Trump's rise and powerful hold over both his base and the GOP? To those on the left, the rallies are a Black Mass of American politics at which Trump plays high priest, recklessly summoning the darkest forces within the nation. To the MAGA faithful, the rallies are a form of pilgrimage, a joyous ceremony that like all rituals binds people together and makes them feel a part of something bigger than themselves. Both sides would acknowledge that this traveling roadshow is the pressurized, combustible core of Trump's political power, a meeting of the faithful where Trump is unshackled and his rhetoric reaches its most extreme, with downstream consequences for the rest of the nation. To date, no reporter has sought to understand the rallies as a sociological phenomenon examined from the bottom up. Hoffman has done just this. He has stood in line for more than 170 hours with Trump's most ardent superfans and joined them at the very front row; he has traveled from Minnesota to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Hampshire immersing himself in their culture. Publishing in the heart of the 2020 election cycle, Liar's Circus is a fresh and revelatory portrait of Trump's America, from one of our most talented journalists.
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