Trump’s Disaster-Hijacking Playbook Exposed By Expert On Right-Wing Media | EUROtoday

Nicole Hemmer — an knowledgeable 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 definitely is the case that this is something Trump does, right?” Hemmer, An affiliate professor of historical past at Vanderbilt University, requested The New Republic’s Greg Sargent within the newest episode of his podcast “The Daily Blast” that was launched Thursday.

The president-elect has most not too long ago sought to politicize the devastating California wildfires with repeated assaults on — and a few false claims about — President Joe Biden and Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, who he has derogatorily nicknamed Gavin “Newscum.”

The returning POTUS used the identical playbook after Hurricane Maria barreled into Puerto Rico in 2017, throughout the coronavirus pandemic and on varied different events.

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 makes an attempt to make use of it for political acquire, mentioned Hemmer.

You and I grew up in a interval the place we had the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine shootings, so many alternative pure disasters. And they’ve been these moments when individuals discovered a type of frequent humanity. I don’t need to paint too rosy an image of it, however I do assume that there’s one thing considerably totally different about coming into that second 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 advised it was a part of a “full-on right-wing MAGA effort to degrade public life” with all the things “about seizing on every opportunity to spread deranged conspiracy theories” and “turn people against each other.”

Right-wingers now have a need to “metastasize disasters, to make them worse than they actually are,” agreed Hemmer, who authored the 2022 ebook “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 defined.

“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.”

Listen to the complete podcast episode right here: