"Enemies of the People"

The best of the press on threats to democracy

This Substack was born in part of my frustration with how we’re reporting on Trumpism. By “we” I mean the media, from which I can’t excuse myself.

I’ve written and talked about Trumpism for magazines and in a book, and on TV, radio, and Netflix. If “the media” is doing a bad job, I’m complicit. I’m a small part of it, but I’m part of it.

Accountability means not just throwing darts but also recognizing good work—and explaining why I think you should give it your time.

I’m calling this column “Enemies of the People,” after Trump’s name for journalists. I’ll run it occasionally. I’m not going to spend much time on what NYT, WaPo, and cable news get wrong. That’s important work, but more pressing now than identifying the unwitting biases and banalities of a news media that is mostly in rapid retrenchment is boosting the work that’ll help us grasp this frightening moment—the better to stop fascism and imagine democratic futures.

Gift links whenever possible.

1. This in-depth reported piece by Charles Homans for the NYT, “Donald Trump Has Never Sounded Like This,” is the article that started me down the road to this Substack. After reporting 2016, 2020, and since—as did Homans—I thought I’d sit this one out. But the political press hasn’t stepped up as I’d hoped it finally would. And—here’s the thorny bit—neither have readers. This should have been a big buzz piece, substantial evidence of Trumpism’s growing violent ambition. Too many people are making the mistake of thinking they already understand Trump. But fascism is fast-mutating virus. Homans shows how.

2. John Ganz is a sharp political thinker. Every time I say that on Twitter, he yells at me. Some people don’t take “you’re right!” for an answer. That’s ok, though, because he so often is right. On his Substack, Unpopular Front, he screenshots the same exchange from a NYT roundtable with 11 swing voters I shared on Twitter:

   

When I shared this, some responded that this was useless information, that these people are just fools, and how come there aren’t more roundtables with Biden voters? But here’s an eloquent expression of the mindset that sees the very gangsterism I wrote about earlier this week as a virtue. Or, rather, the fictional gangsterism, since it’s worth paying attention to how even art we may admire can be used to create monsters. Ganz, though, focuses on the actual gangsters in Trump’s life, and how Trump then manufactures for his followers his own fictional mafia:

Mafias and the lie are secret societies. Rackets work for a closely knit in group that exploits an outgroup. But what Trump offers is the clubbiness of the mob for the masses.

Emphasis mine, excellent insights Ganz’s, in “The Shadow of the Mob.”

3. You may have heard about Project 2025, the nearly 900-page policy blueprint for Trump 2.0, “Mandate for Leadership” drawn up by dozens of major rightwing organizations working together. Some are established, such as The Heritage Foundation and Concerned Women for America; some are new and increasingly militant, such as Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation and the openly theocratic Center for Renewing America. The leader of the latter is former Trump budget chief Russ Vought, who spearheaded the document and whose “ ‘post-constitutional’ vision,” as reported by Beth Reinhard for The Washington Post, has made him a top candidate to be Trump’s next chief of staff.

4. You can download a copy of Project 2025 here. It’s been with us for more than a year, but apart from sporadic coverage, the press has been slow to dig in. That’s starting to change. The Nation is taking it most seriously. The July issue is a special edition dedicated to the topic. If you’re not a subscriber (subscribe if you can; I, too, prefer stories to arguments, but if we don’t sustain forums for the latter we’ll lose ground for the former), you can read three stories free. I started with my friend Chris Lehman’s contribution, “The Theocratic Blueprint for Trump’s Next Term.” Chris finds in Project 2025 yet another MAGA avatar for Trump:

   In this dark vision of a looming administrative coup, the president becomes the Nick Fury savior figure: a master accruer of power devoted at the same time to its wide dispersion among the satellite communities of superheroes practicing an elevated MAGA-sanctioned lifestyle in conditions of stoic watchfulness.

Nick Fury, for the comics-uninformed, is the super-secret agent commander of S.H.I.E.L.D., itself a sort of bastion of patriots fighting the good fight within the deep state.

But as ominous as Project 2025 is, it’s also a lot like that scene in a superhero movie where the villain delivers a monologue laying out his evil scheme. Which means it also reveals some of the weaknesses in the Right’s plans.

In a comparison of Project 2025 with a similar document the Heritage Foundation created for the incoming Reagan administration, labor historian Kim Phillips-Fein points to a key difference:

In place of the idea that rolling back the state and unleashing the free market will lead to a revival of national power, the new Mandate offers a vision of “restoring the family.”

I noticed this distinction, too, when last December I participated in a panel about Project 2025 for a group called Stop the Coup 2025. So I dug up my notes from my presentation, which I dedicated to identifying fault lines exposed by the plan—cracks in a movement that only appears monolithic from outside:

The convener of Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation, which made its name, as this document notes, 44 years ago with a similar initiative on behalf of Ronald Reagan— 60% of which, Heritage boasts, became policy.

In the years since, Heritage became the establishment—the one Trumpism either toppled or coopted. So right away, we see bad news: the competence of the wonks put to work for the fury of the new far right.

But we also see good news. If 1980 marked the beginning of the Heritage Foundation’s ascendence in the age of Reagan—stretching from 1980 to 2016, a period in which the neoliberal assumptions and rhetoric of Reaganism shaped both GOP and Democratic politics—the Trumpocene has been a challenge for Heritage. This is the first of several potential fault lines I want to identify.

Reaganism and Trumpism may be related, but they’re not as close cousins as they look to liberals and the left. In 2016, the loudest boos at Trump rallies were for Hillary Clinton; the second loudest were for the Bush family. Project 2025 is an attempt to bridge the gap between Reaganism and Trumpism by pretending it’s not there. But it is, and it’s big, and we may be able to weaken the latter by emphasizing the contradictions.

Project 2025 begins with four broad “fronts.” Two of them are Reaganite de-regulation, and one is anti-immigration, but number one is theological: “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” “Protect our children” both invokes and sanitizes the QAnon horror fantasy of elite child trafficking and cannibalism rings. It’s not so much about “policy”—DEI, CRT, bathrooms—as an attempt to claim for the Right the myth of innocence. The “children” are good, and thus those who oppose one’s attempts to “protect” them are evil. It’s biblical.

“In many ways,” declares the introduction, “the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family.”

Within that sentence is hidden the Reaganism / Trumpism fault line that still threatens the Right: the one between the open embrace of big business and the (false) posture of standing against corporations, for “workers”; between the deregulatory obsession of Reaganism and Trumpism’s only real concern: the concentration of as much power as possible in one man.

That fault line is visible, too, in the tension between libertarians and book banners, between crudes and prudes, fascists who revel in transgression and fascists who get off on restricting other people’s sexuality, real and imagined.

“Pornography should be outlawed,” declares Project 2025, defining pornography not just as dirty pictures but “transgender ideology,” which it seeks to criminalize “But it must go further,” declares Project 2025, lumping Big Tech in with porn and the “drug dealers” whom Trump, emulating former Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte, has long called to be executed, preferably without much in the way of a trial. One can imagine a Proud Boy tied up in knots about this: the killing sounds so thrilling—but if they lose Pornhub, what are they really fighting for?

More fault lines lacing Project 2025: tension between the ascendent Catholic Far Right and the longstanding, Protestant-dominated Religious Right; discord between Trumpism’s white nationalism and fascism’s growing appeal to some people of color; friction between two rightwing legal theories, the “originalism” that grew out of Reaganism and a resurgent idea of “ordered liberty” that emphasizes “the common good,” which sounds nice until you understand it as an assault against any class of person the Right deems uncommon and thus ungood.

I’m not a strategist or an organizer. I don’t know how to exploit these fault lines. I’m just a journalist, bringing good news: They exist.