Sargent: The use of these moments to degrade public life and make people dumber also has a history. You write about Pat Robertson in your book, Partisans. He seized on natural disasters to cast them as punishment for social liberalism. In a way you can see MAGA’s conduct as an updated, secularized version of this in the sense that disasters are always cast as a failure of Democratic governance. Or in other cases, with Covid’s initial spread in blue cities, it was attacked as a sign that cosmopolitan urban areas are corrupted and infested and diseased.
Is there a through line from that Pat Robertson religious right stuff right through to the way MAGA does it today?
Sargent: That happened in North Carolina too. Republicans had to step forward and say, I’m sorry, MAGA, but the truth is that the federal response is actually very good.
That can’t be all people do. The other thing that people have to do is model the world that they want to be part of.
It means being the person who shows up for your neighbors. It means being the person who helps gather supplies to send people who are hurt. It means modeling a humane response to disasters when they happen. And so I think that it’s both end. It is both pointing out and making clear how terrible this is, and then proving that there’s a better way to do it right, a better way to move forward. You can’t do that everywhere all the time, but it is something that I would hope that all of your listeners are thinking about: how they can in their communities respond to pain and loss and crisis and deprivation in ways that make their communities better. I actually think that is the generational road out of a lot of this.
Hemmer: It is absolutely his strategy. He did it with the ventilators too, during the early days of Covid. And it really is not just about negotiation and power plays, although that’s how it’s often framed in Trumpworld—he’s a master negotiator, he’s getting these people to bend to his will. It’s actually this deeper fascistic strategy of “us” versus “them.” And what do you do with “them”? You punish them at every opportunity. If you have power, you use that power to protect your own and to harm others. And that is absolutely the philosophy of the Trump administration that just becomes very clear in these moments of crisis.
Hemmer: I think there is. There are two ways that conservatives got to natural disasters as political opportunities. Certainly, it comes up through the religious right.
Pat Robertson is saying that everything, from hurricanes to earthquakes to tornadoes, these are all God’s punishment. And even in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina happened, there was a pastor, John Hagee, who said, Well, have you been to New Orleans? You see the way that they are. You see what sinful people they are.
God has sent this as punishment against them. So you have that history and that rhetoric.
Hemmer: It seems like hoping that it goes away is not working, so I wouldn’t recommend that as a strategy going forward. I do think that there is real value in calling it out, right? Talking about the fact that it is weird and cruel to respond to a forest fire or to flooding or to a hurricane with this vitriol and these wild conspiracy theories. There is real value in that, and so I definitely think that people should be doing that.
Hemmer: Yeah. Remember Steve Bannon’s saying that the strategy of the Trump administration—he was saying this back in 2015, 2016—was to flood the zone with crap, right?
Just put so much bad stuff out there, make people feel terrible all the time, and while people are feeling terrible, you can go over here and amass all of this political power and use it for whatever you want. And we are still living in that world.
Hemmer: It’s like we’ve reached the apotheosis or like the height of all of these different trends with both Donald Trump and Elon Musk. We certainly could go back and we could look at conservative media, which has for decades really been a site of conspiracy theorizing and partisan attacks. That’s not anything that’s new. But its combination with electoral politics is something that really started to come of age in the ’90s, and then you layer on top of it this not just anger but a kind of meanness that has become the overarching emotional scale or the emotional tenor of right-wing media. It used to be you would have to turn on Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck in order to access that, and now you just have to listen to a Republican politician and you’re going to get uncut, unmediated conspiracy theories and cruelty.
Sargent: There’s another good example of this as well.
Remember when the chemical train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, MAGA figures tried to cast it as proof that liberal elites were deliberately abandoning a virtuous white working class community. They actually racialized this. JD Vance even did a little bit of that. If you’ll recall on Twitter and in social media, these pictures of these huge clouds rising up out of East Palestine were everywhere, and right-wing politicians were pushing them. They all coalesced behind this story in which the white working class was being abandoned and getting poisoned by liberal elites. I see a lot of that in there.
Hemmer: Right.
Then instead, you also have these stories then of people who could really use the help of the federal government not wanting to interact with FEMA, or waving their guns when FEMA shows up. In these moments of real crisis, it cuts people off from the things that would make their lives better.
That is both part of the MAGA project and part of the conservative project: to take away from people the things that might make their lives better. That seems like it should be easier to counter, but those affective ties that MAGA voters have to Donald Trump are proving to be very difficult to overcome.
I also think that Hurricane Katrina is a really important moment here because Hurricane Katrina was badly mismanaged by the Bush administration. That was something that benefited Democrats, because Americans hated the way that Bush responded to Katrina, and Republicans took from that. Not that they should be better at responding to natural disasters, but that you could seize on a natural disaster to injure the Democrats.
When Barack Obama takes office, they first take the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and they try to turn that into Obama’s Katrina.
You have Republican politicians who are, on the one hand, talking to the administration and getting all sorts of help from the administration, and then going on Fox News and talking about how terrible and unresponsive the Obama administration is. You see it in Superstorm Sandy. You’ll remember that Chris Christie was persona non grata for years because he accepted aid from the Obama administration. So I think that’s an important turning point because Republicans realized that they could make political hay from natural disasters.
And then you get to Donald Trump, and he’s like, Hey, every time a natural disaster happens, I can make political hay out of it. Whether it is a hurricane in Puerto Rico or fires out in California, what you get is a purely partisan political response to what’s happening.
Today, we’re super excited to be talking about all this with Nicole Hemmer, who’s one of the best historians of the right wing out there today. She’s the author of a number of books, most recently Partisans, which traces today’s moment back to the 1990s. Nicole, thanks so much for coming on.
Hemmer: Thank you so much for having me, Greg.
Sargent: That’s exactly it. The explicit game plan here is to just fill everybody with hate and rage and, critically, confusion.
Nicole Hemmer: Thanks so much for having me, Greg.
Hemmer: It is all one big mass, and all one big mess. It is an erosion that’s been happening over time.
I really would root this in the 1990s when the lines between politics and entertainment began to erode, and also when Republican politicians really began to take their cues from right-wing media. I think about the suicide events, Vince Foster in 1993, and the conspiracy theories around his suicide, this idea that the Clintons had him murdered.
This was extremely popular in right-wing media, but it very quickly jumps over into Republican politicians. You had one member of Congress, Dan Coats, who talked on the floor about going into his backyard, getting a melon and a handgun and proving, he said, that Vince Foster couldn’t have shot himself, that it had to be a murder. That almost right-wing radio cosplay is happening in the ’90s. And now we see it not just in a one-off representative from Indiana, but in almost the entirety of the Republican caucus. That’s what feels different: that erosion of any separate sphere for some of the craziness, that it has infected the entire party. It’s also infected all of us.
We can’t escape from it either.