How could Trump have won after leading a violent, fatal coup attempt?

[Hume]

In the days leading up to the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump accused the Democratic Party of being “demonic,” said that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was an “evil, sick, crazy” word-that-starts-with-a-B (“Buh-,” he teased), and openly fantasized about his enemies being shot. These statements aligned with the Trump campaign’s final messaging push about enemies within and enemies at the gates. Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, held a week before the election, embodied this spirit; speakers called Democratic nominee Kamala Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist” and described the “whole fucking” Democratic Party as “a bunch of degenerates,” among other invectives.

The Demons That Rule Us | Los Angeles Review of Books

Peter B. Kaufman considers Whitney Phillips and Mark Brockway’s “The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possessed U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics.”

lareviewofbooks.org

 

[Hume]

"The authors direct our attention instead to how Trump has built up this colossal “cult of demonology,” which, like much of what he started with, he inherited—from Evangelical Christians and Republican right-wing strategists who began treating liberals, leftists, and indeed any opposition as evil incarnate as early as the start of the Cold War.