Nicole Hemmer — an professional on conservative and right-wing media, and the impact they’ve had on American politics — this week defined Donald Trump’s penchant for whipping up anger and inflicting division amid tragedies and disasters.
“It undoubtedly is the case that that is one thing Trump does, proper?” Hemmer, an affiliate professor of historical past at Vanderbilt College, requested The New Republic’s Greg Sargent in the latest episode of his podcast, “The Daily Blast,” which was launched Thursday.
The president-elect has most lately sought to politicize the devastating California wildfires with repeated assaults on — and some false claims about — President Joe Biden and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom he has derogatorily nicknamed Gavin “Newscum.”
The returning POTUS used the identical playbook after Hurricane Maria barreled into Puerto Rico in 2017, in the course of the coronavirus pandemic and on varied different events.
Trump “takes these moments that was a time when folks started to come back collectively somewhat bit, not less than in that interval of rapid catastrophe when there’s shock and horror” and makes an attempt to make use of it for political acquire, Hemmer stated.
Hemmer advised Sargent:
You and I grew up in a interval the place we had the Oklahoma Metropolis bombing, the Columbine shootings, so many various pure disasters. They usually have been these moments when folks discovered a sort of frequent humanity. I don’t wish to paint too rosy an image of it, however I do suppose that there’s one thing considerably completely different about getting into that second and saying, ‘Truly, the particular person answerable for your issues are my political enemies, and as an alternative of specializing in rebuilding, you need to give attention to hating them.’
Sargent recommended it was a part of a “full-on right-wing MAGA effort to degrade public life” with all the things “about seizing on each alternative to unfold deranged conspiracy theories” and “flip folks in opposition to one another.”
Proper-wingers now have a want to “metastasize disasters, to make them worse than they really are,” agreed Hemmer, who authored the 2022 e book “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics within the Nineteen Nineties” and “Messengers of the Proper: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics” in 2016.
It’s “a mix of the malignancy of Donald Trump himself, who is continually looking for methods to be within the headlines, the media setting through which we reside that actually favors this sort of outrage and detrimental emotion, and a conservative media ecosystem that takes that revved up ‘let’s-make-everybody-angry’ dynamic and applies it on to electoral politics,” she defined.
“I believe all these issues come collectively with a purpose to flip all the things that occurs into a possibility for a struggle and into a possibility to make everybody really feel worse than they already felt,” Hemmer added. “And that I believe is it will get to the center of what you’re saying in regards to the degradation of public life, that all the things simply feels worse on a regular basis.”
Hearken to the total podcast episode right here:
