Reporting from Trump’s America, Jeff Sharlet finds a slow-motion civil war.
. “The chance of his winning nomination and election is exactly zero.” This was the conventional wisdom: The national immune system would kick in, liberals and Never Trumpers said before Trump won the Republican nomination for president. They said the same thing afterward, too. The fever would break and Hillary Clinton would win.She didn’t. Trump lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, and his frenzied bigotry had mass appeal far beyond what the professionals expected.
In the centuries since the Founders said all men were created equal, there has never been unified agreement over what this might mean, and for whom. The friction between America’s promises and its practices erupts regularly into violence: into the degradations of chattel slavery, a civil war, and the white terrorism of the Jim Crow South; then into police killings, mass shootings, and the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021.
Some perspectives, of course, are more accurate than others. Ashli Babbitt’s America is hostile to pluralism, egalitarianism, and the very notion of democracy. The people who live there long for a strongman and believe they have found him in Trump. Sharlet knows this and contends with the implications throughoutSharp and probing, this book doesn’t indulge in cheap scares.
The America I once knew, which has become the land of Babbitt and Greene, always planned for expansion and conquest, not coexistence. This nation within a nation wants to triumph over all others. Trump was a means to an end, but he has become more than that, too. Like Babbitt, he is a symbol: an earthly father figure, a reflection of their God.is no mere guide to Trump or how he came to be, however. Sharlet’s ambitions are sweeping.
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