New Podcast: Trump's Grotesque Tulsa Speech and the Cult of Trump

[soothsayer]

https://billmoyers.com/story/bill-moyers-talks-with-jeffrey-sharlet-about-tulsa-trump-and-america/

Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. Why do some Christians speak of Donald Trump as the “Wolf King”? Why do they think some Democrats are cannibals? Why did secular journalists and pundits describe the president’s speech in Tulsa as “incoherent” when his followers think it made perfect sense? Bill Moyers talks with Jeff Sharlet, whose book THE FAMILY revealed the truth about a Christian fellowship at the heart of American power – and whose reporting for VANITY FAIR describes how Trump the orator has turned his campaign into a militant crusade. Here now is Bill Moyers.

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BILL MOYERS: Let’s start with the president’s rally in Tulsa. You’ve been to a number of Trump’s rallies starting in 2016. And every report you’ve written has been a flare in the dark. Was this one any different?

JEFF SHARLET: I believe it was. The fact that he could not turn out his numbers the way he wanted to. He predicted 100,000. The arena held 19,000. And he got 6,000. That doesn’t mean those people have abandoned him. But it means that they weren’t motivated enough. And I think Tulsa could mark a turning point. He responded to that like a cornered raccoon. There’s times when he’s disappointed and he sort of comes out and sulks and then there’s times when he comes out and snarls. And this was the latter. He gave what I believe was the most rhetorically violent speech I’ve seen.

BILL MOYERS: That was my impression too. I kept writing words on my notebook that were fake news tropes – animals, referring to immigrants, bad people out there, thugs. He went right on as if he put all his arrows in one bow and let them go at once.

JEFF SHARLET: And I think that’s when autocratic tendencies are gonna become most dangerous. We forget he still has the full arsenal of the US government at his command and it is at his command. It seems extreme to say, but I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility to imagine a Tiananmen Square kind of response should the situation arise. And I think that’s because he recognizes he’s in battle. I like what you say about sort of pulling out every arrow of the quiver. All these moments have been there before, but they were combined with a kind of explicitness. I haven’t heard them all in one speech before like this. The one thing that actually really caught me was this strange phrase, “After birth execution,” claiming that if Biden was president the government would be paying for after birth execution: killing babies. And if you really believe Democrats were gonna do that, if you really believe they weren’t– we’re not talking abortion, actually killing babies out in the world — what retaliation wouldn’t be justified?