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,” which 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 Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom 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, Hemmer said.
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.”
( This is from Yahoo news today)
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