Nicole Hemmer — an expert on conservative and right-wing media, and the effect they have had on American politics — this week explained Donald Trump’s penchant for whipping up anger and causing division amid tragedies and disasters.
“It definitely is the case that this is something Trump does, right?” Hemmer, An associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, asked The New Republic’s Greg Sargent in the latest episode of his podcast “The Daily Blast” that was released Thursday.
The president-elect has most recently sought to politicize the devastating California wildfires with repeated attacks on — and some false claims about — President Joe Biden and Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, who he has derogatorily nicknamed Gavin “Newscum.”
The returning POTUS used the same playbook after Hurricane Maria barreled into Puerto Rico in 2017, during the coronavirus pandemic and on various other occasions.
Trump “takes these moments that used to be a time when people began to come together a little bit, at least in that period of immediate disaster when there’s shock and horror” and attempts to use it for political gain, said Hemmer.
Hemmer told Sargent:
You and I grew up in a period where we had the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine shootings, so many different natural disasters. And they have been these moments when people found a kind of common humanity. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture of it, but I do think that there’s something substantially different about entering that moment and saying, ‘Actually, the person responsible for your problems are my political enemies, and instead of focusing on rebuilding, you should focus on hating them.’
Sargent suggested it was part of a “full-on right-wing MAGA effort to degrade public life” with everything “about seizing on every opportunity to spread deranged conspiracy theories” and “turn people against each other.”
Right-wingers now have a desire to “metastasize disasters, to make them worse than they actually are,” agreed Hemmer, who authored the 2022 book “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” and “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics” in 2016.
It’s “a combination of the malignancy of Donald Trump himself, who is constantly seeking ways to be in the headlines, the media environment in which we live that really favors this kind of outrage and negative emotion, and a conservative media ecosystem that takes that revved up ‘let’s-make-everybody-angry’ dynamic and applies it directly to electoral politics,” she explained.
“I think all those things come together in order to turn everything that happens into an opportunity for a fight and into an opportunity to make everyone feel worse than they already felt,” Hemmer added. “And that I think is it gets to the heart of what you’re saying about the degradation of public life, that everything just feels worse all the time.”
The Countdown To Trump Is On
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Listen to the full podcast episode here: