They are also loyal to their sons—a point that Trump played upon during the 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh when he offered an “out” to Republican women who may have worried about being seen as betraying female survivors of sexual assault. Trump reframed the dilemma by constructing an “imaginary choice, urging Americans to protect their sons against ‘false accusations’ by women. Pretending to be a wrongly accused son about to lose his job, [Trump] said, plaintively, ‘Mom, what do I do? What do I do?’ ”
Then there are those Republican women who, for one reason or another, admire—and even adore—Trump. Amy Kremer, a Tea Party activist and co-founder of Women for Trump, said she and the other women in her Atlanta-area social circle “love” Trump, adding, “We like when somebody promises to do something and they follow through on it.”
The Jewish Right
Jews make up a fraction of this country’s population—about 1.8 percent or 5 to 6 million people. While the vast majority—nearly eight in ten Americans—disapprove of Trump, there is a powerful minority of mostly Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox voters who support Trump. Most of them are allied with Israel’s right-wing Likud party of Benjamin Netanyahu, and also with the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel. The Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox tend to be closed groups who live in accordance with what they believe to be traditional Jewish values. They practice a rigorous tradition-oriented and highly proscriptive way of life. The rabbi is like a guru, interpreting the tradition along with the beliefs, attitudes, and practices. In some groups, women are encouraged not to work, have as many children as they can, run the household, and care for their husbands and family. Children are sometimes homeschooled or sent to yeshivas where they receive both secular as well as religious education. In some ultra-Orthodox groups they are mostly taught the Torah, as opposed to American or world history, science, and literature. Many do not speak English in the home. They tend to be intolerant of homosexuality, are against abortion, and do not question what they are told to believe or do. Some of the insular groups practice shunning against those who question or who do not abide with the strict code of behavior. Shunning is a common feature of high-demand groups and cults. Organizations like Footsteps have sprung up to help those who wish to leave.36
Some communities, especially those in Israel, have tried to define what is considered true and legitimate Judaism, just as some Christian groups profess to speak for all Christianity. They claim that people practicing reform, conservative, reconstructionist, humanistic, and renewal forms of Judaism are not “real” Jews. These distinctions have generated rifts both in Israel and among American Jews like myself, who support Israel but see the ultra-Orthodoxy’s rejection of any but their own version of Judaism as a kind of anti-Semitism. While many in these traditionalist communities want to see a peaceful, workable solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, they often take a more authoritarian perspective, such as the one-state solution proposed by Prime Minister Netanyahu. They are comfortable that the Chief Rabbinate and Orthodox Jews in the Knesset seem to prevail in most disputes. (The Israeli legal system is sometimes more powerful, such as with its decision that all Israelis must serve in the military. Ultra-Orthodox Jews are fighting this recent ruling.)
Though Netanyahu (like Trump) has faced charges of corruption and scandal, he was reelected in 2019—in fact, he has been supported by Trump, who soon after becoming president, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Many on the Jewish right—and even on the left—joined Netanyahu in touting it as a Cyrus-like act of deliverance. Though Trump does not appear to have strong sympathies with Jews, and has made anti-Semitic statements since coming to office, he appears to be influenced by powerful donors like Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire with strong ties to Israel.
Trump is also undoubtedly influenced by his family. His son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka are active members of the Orthodox Jewish organization Chabad (also called Lubavitch), which is a sect of Hasidism. Often referred to as “a spiritual revivalist movement,”37 Hasidism arose in Eastern Europe during the eighteenth century and draws heavily on Jewish mystical tradition, seeking direct experience of God through ecstatic prayer and other rituals, conducted under the spiritual direction of the charismatic figure of the rebbe, or rabbi.38 In these and other respects, the movement mirrors practices of the New Apostolic Reformation. Chabad grew to be one of the most widespread Hasidic movements under the leadership of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, historically the seventh leader of this sect, who was revered as a Jewish messiah39 by many members. Ivanka Trump and Kushner visited Schneerson’s grave in Brooklyn, New York, three days before the 2016 presidential election, presumably to pray for Trump to win.40 Chabad has outposts across the United States and the world, including Russia. In fact, Putin welcomed Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar to practice in Russia. Lazar, who is now the chief rabbi of Russia, is considered to be a close friend of the Russian leader and is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s rabbi.”41 Putin has other connections to Israel through the large network of Russian emigres who now make up about 10 percent of the population and who occupy powerful positions in business and government.42
Chabad aggressively seeks to convert Jews to their form of orthodoxy—they do not recruit Christians, Muslims, or other non-Jews. They use what I consider to be high-pressure tactics, though they often appear deceptively friendly and accepting, both in their recruitment and indoctrination campaigns. The organization is viewed by many Jews as messianic, elitist, and cultish. In fact, it currently appears to be forming alliances with messianic groups on the Christian right. In an article in The Forward, Jay Michaelson describes how the codirector of the Utah Chabad was scheduled to give the invocation at the World Congress of Families, an annual convention of evangelical, Catholic, Mormon, and other religious factions and interest groups—including an “extreme fringe that opposes human rights and in some cases, the foundations of secular democracy itself,” Michaelson writes. “Indeed, some of them—Christian Reconstructionists, Dominionists and others—seek to do away with the secular law altogether, one day replacing the United States as we know it with an explicitly Christian nation.”43
When prominent evangelical Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech at the Israeli Knesset, on the occasion of the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, he appeared to be offering support and solidarity with Israel. Yet, like many on the Christian right, Pence does not believe that Jews can be saved without accepting Jesus. The Christian right agenda is to make the world safe for Christianity—and for some evangelicals, to prepare the world for the coming of Christ—not to recognize Judaism as a legitimate religion or to make Israel safe for the Jewish people. In his talk, Pence cited a passage from Torah in a way that appeared to appropriate the biblical figure of Abraham as the father of Christians, not Jews, and to make Jewish history appear as a mere stepping-stone to the main event, the coming of Christ.44 As Amit Gvaryahu wrote in Haaretz, he “used texts that insinuated that any redemption would come to the Jews was but a harbinger of final and real redemption for the world under Christ as king and messiah.”45 Few in the audience appeared to notice the discrepancy, except perhaps the evangelicals. By moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, Trump was killing two birds with one stone. He was satisfying his Jewish right base while playing to the much larger audience, the Christian right.
White Power: Alt-Right
Of all the factions in Trump’s base, the alt-right may be the most dangerous. They are responsible for the tragedies in Charleston, Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, and Christchurch, New Zealand. Though the perpetrators appear to have acted alone, they are increasingly connected to one another through online websites, often on the dark web, according to a report in The New York Times. In a manifesto published online, the perpetrator of the New Zealand attack on two mosques, which killed fifty people, said that he drew inspiration from white extremist terrorism attacks in the United States, Sweden, Norway, Italy, and the Un
ited Kingdom. “His references to those attacks placed him in an informal global network of white extremists whose violent attacks are occurring with greater frequency in the West,” write Weiyi Cai and Simone Landon in The New York Times.46 They found that, since 2011, a third of extremists were inspired by others who carried out similar attacks.
White supremacist and nationalistic thinking has existed for centuries in the United States but Trump’s words and deeds—his America First sloganeering; his apparent excusing of, or failure to acknowledge, the violence; his racist remarks; his own bullying—have given it a legitimacy that hadn’t existed before, according to Mark Potok, former senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. According to Potok, the number of hate groups has grown to its highest number ever. The FBI hate crime statistics back up this point.47
Arno Michaelis was a founding member of the racist skinhead band the Centurion. He is now an activist and an outspoken critic of white nationalism.48 He told me that white supremacists, “across the board, were delighted to vote for Donald Trump.” He described how hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan actively campaigned for him, organizing and paying for robocalls for Trump and other right-wing politicians. “As much as [Trump] may deny an affiliation with the ideology, or as much as he may grudgingly condemn it, the fact is that his rhetoric and his policy is exactly what these guys want to hear,” Michaelis said. “His rhetoric of building walls, of monitoring Muslims, of casting people of color as inherently dangerous saying that, ‘Mexicans are rapists’—Donald Trump is using the language of genocide. It’s a language that dehumanizes people.” Michaelis compares it to the rhetoric used in Nazi Germany, where Jews were compared to rats, and during the genocide of the Tutsi people by the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, where Tutsis were labeled cockroaches and snakes. David Neiwert’s book The Eliminationists goes into the history of this kind of hate influence and how right wing talk radio has carried this forward.49
“Today, we have a sitting president of the United States who refers to people crossing the border as an infestation of our country. He has called them animals. Of course, this genocidal language strikes a chord with hate groups because it’s the language they’re familiar with. That’s how they talk about people who they’re afraid of, people that are different than them. They hear the president of the United States using that language from a position of power, that’s really unparalleled, it’s an incredible concern,” said Michaelis. “It’s also an incredible kind of uplift to people in hate groups, who felt for a very long time that they were on the margins of society, and now, here’s the President of the United States speaking their language.”50
QAnon
During the summer of 2018, people wearing the letter Q emblazoned on T-shirts and signs made an attention-getting appearance at a Trump rally in Florida. It was a surprising, even shocking, display. The symbol is associated with a right-wing conspiracy cult, called QAnon, which started in 2016, soon after the Pizzagate hoax, which promoted the outrageous idea that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophilia ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor. A year later, more conspiracy ravings about Clinton appeared on a website called 4chan. They were signed by a person who identified himself as “Q Clearance Patriot,” “Q Clearance” being a designation for top-secret security access to materials concerning nuclear weapons. Over the following months, the mystery poster would offer up a series of ever more cryptic posts—for example, “Your president needs your help”—which looked like clues to a grand conspiracy by the deep state and global elites to remove Trump from office. They would gain a life of their own in alt-right and other groups, as people assembled and interpreted the clues, known as “crumbs,” and “baked” them into explanatory diagrams and word collages that would be circulated online.
Though some speculated that the original Q was a military intelligence officer and even Trump himself, what came to be known as QAnon turned out to be the brainchild of three men—a YouTube video creator and two moderators of 4chan. They developed and used the whole conspiracy mythology as a way to make money by selling T-shirts and other QAnon paraphernalia. Trump did nothing to dispel the conspiracy theory and even had his photo taken in the Oval Office with Michael “Lionel” Lebron, a TV and radio host and active promoter of the QAnon conspiracy theory. In some ways, the theory is just an extension of the fourth-generation warfare scenarios Trump spun on the campaign trail—of a global elite headed by Hillary Clinton and the radical Democrats.
Though fringe at first, the QAnon movement has gained ground through its circulation on alt-right websites and Reddit, YouTube,51 and other sites. Celebrities like Roseanne Barr referred to it, giving it a bigger platform. QAnon believers are not just showing up at rallies; some are becoming dangerous. In June 2018, a QAnon supporter named Matthew Wright drove his armored vehicle onto a bridge near Hoover Dam, blocking traffic for hours, and engaging in a standoff with police. He had a rifle and a handgun when he was taken into custody. His motive was not clear, but he had sent letters to Trump and other officials that included the phrase “For where we go one, we go all”—a line popular among followers of QAnon.52 While on the bridge, he held a sign that said “Release the OIG Report,” which apparently referred to the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General’s internal report on the department’s handling of the Clinton email probe.53 It is not clear what his psychological state was—and it is the case that some of the white terrorist tragedies that have taken place over the past two years were carried out by psychologically disturbed men, armed with angry rhetoric and guns.
Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has tried to debunk QAnon using logic and social psychology.54 Logic rarely works to disarm a conspiracy movement with passionate followers. Meanwhile, people are making money. In March 2019, a book written by twelve “citizen journalists,” called QAnon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening, reached bestselling status on Amazon.55 That same month, at a Trump rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, thousands of Q supporters filled the audience.56
NRA Members and Gun Owners
In a 2017 Gallup poll, 42 percent of American households reported owning guns—that’s 50 million households with 393 million guns.57 NRA Americans take the Second Amendment seriously. The NRA claims five million members.58 They operate an online video network, whose home page features stories like “The Left is Unrelenting in Painting a Picture of How Horrible Gun Owners Are,” and how Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) “Wants to Rob You of Your Guns,” and “Imprison all Pro-Gun Americans.”59 In a banner at the top, it announces Trump’s appearance at the upcoming annual NRA meetings in Indianapolis. Trump campaigned on a broad pro-gun agenda, which he maintained even after the mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where seventeen students and teachers were killed, and the massacre in Las Vegas, which killed fifty-eight people and wounded hundreds more—not to mention the several white-supremacist-inspired massacres. In the spring of 2018, Trump spoke to a rapt audience at the annual NRA convention in Dallas: “Thanks to your activism and dedication, you have an administration fighting to protect your Second Amendment and we will protect your Second Amendment. Your Second Amendment rights are under siege, but they will never ever be under siege as long as I am your President.”
Trump would both soothe and incite his audience’s fears with his repetition of the word “siege”—it’s all part of his influence formula: repetition, us versus them, and fearmongering. Not that the NRA needs any help. Not all gun owners are Republicans. Nor are they all in favor of military assault rifles, machine guns, or bump stocks, which can be used to kill many people very quickly. Many think they should be banned.60 But the gun industry, and their main lobbying organization, the NRA, feed the fears of many Americans who do not feel safe in their own homes and also of members of conspiracy groups who believe an armed revolution is coming. Gun culture is deeply ingrained in American society and the liberal “Hollywood elite” that Trump and other Republicans rail against has done li
ttle to dampen it, producing gun-glamorizing movies, video games, and TV shows.
As with other issues, Trump held different views until he began to consider running for president as a Republican. “I oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun,” he wrote in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve.61 Unsurprisingly, he experienced what political observers call a “campaign conversion,” adjusting his views to match the voters he was seeking.62 This was also part of a larger strategy based on promoting fear, danger, and enemies at every turn—and a tough guy to make America safe again.
ALL TOGETHER NOW
For Trump and his followers, the safest place may be at one of his rallies. “Outside the world is a cruel and ugly place. Here, inside, they are safe,” writes Ed Pilkington in The Guardian. In 2018, Pilkington attended five Trump rallies in eight days and talked to scores of Trump supporters. He asked them what America would be like in 2050 if Hillary Clinton had been elected president. Among the most common refrain he heard was that America would become socialist. “Taxes and unemployment would go through the roof, the economy would collapse, there would be riots for food and water.” “People are going to get killed,” said Rick Novak, fifty-seven, a retired building foreman. “Gang wars. We are going to get gang wars between white and black, whites and Mexicans. We could have our own little Vietnam right here.”
The Cult of Trump Page 22
