New Podcast: Trump's Grotesque Tulsa Speech and the Cult of Trump (1)
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.
BILL MOYERS: Jeff Sharlet, I'm really pleased to be talking to you.
JEFF SHARLET: Thank you, Bill. Thanks for having me.
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?
BILL MOYERS: What do you think that evoked in that audience? Because the audience certainly came alive again there.
JEFF SHARLET: I reported on Trump rallies in 2016 and then 2020. Both times I was interested most of all in what the role of religion and religious-like structures were playing in his rallies. And in 2016 one of the things that really struck me– the first time I heard it at one of these rallies was someone saying, “You know what the Democrats are really up to.” And I had heard all the conspiracy theories. The Pizzagate conspiracy theories about human trafficking, child trafficking. This took it to another level. They said, “They're actually cannibals. They eat children.” I said, this person must be mentally ill. This person must be fringe. But then I kept encountering that idea again and again. And now that's moved the whole range of possibilities. So when Trump says plain out Biden supports post-birth execution, he is signaling to that audience that is ready to receive the message that your darkest fears, your most twisted fantasies of what your political enemies are up to, it's all real. This is a life or death battle.
BILL MOYERS: There was a very bizarre passage when he was obviously stoking sexual fears. You called it in your commentary on the speech, “A rape fantasy.”
DONALD TRUMP: It's one o'clock in the morning and a very tough, I've used the word on occasion, a very tough hombre is breaking into the window of a young woman whose husband is away as a traveling salesman or whatever he may do.
JEFF SHARLET: That's an old racist fantasy. The kind of racialized and racist fear in America. The idea of, for white people, of a dark-skinned man of supposedly savage appetite hurting your women. Now pay attention to who that's targeted toward. It's saying to the woman, “This is going to happen to you.” And it's saying to the man, “While you're away. You are out honorably trying to do business and this tough hombre–” he's saying: I know the way that people say that this is a racist word and, even knowing that, I'm gonna use this word. This goes right back to the way he launched his campaign with talking about Mexican rapists. Rapist was another word that he used in the Tulsa speech. And it's sort of a staple. It's one of the things that bothers me about so much of the coverage of Trump speeches. They pull out the political line but don't pay attention to the density of references to sex crimes that are such a staple of his speeches. The way he's speaking to this sort of terror that rape is there. And it struck me as a sort of vintage pornographic scenario coming out of Trump's lurid imagination. He's both activating the titillating, the lurid, sexualized fantasy. And then allowing you to wallow in it if that's your inclination, and also at the same time feel righteous because you're opposing it. And he does throughout the speech.
BILL MOYERS: And immigrants have once again, as in 2016, animals, that description showed up several times in the course of an hour and 40-minute speech. They're animals.
JEFF SHARLET: Animals. Exactly. He said, I got in a lotta trouble for using this. But I'm gonna use it. And then he talks about animals who I even feel uncomfortable sort of describing. Our victim is always an innocent young woman. And the race of the attacker is always described. It's not the race of the victim. And in doing so he makes that person implicitly white. So an innocent young woman, that's a white woman. Sometimes he says a blonde woman. In a lot of his speeches, he'll say beautiful, young, blonde girl. And these animals– apparently he's talking about a particular crime where they kill her. And then he takes some time describing this crime that these people have allegedly committed. And again, saying let's wallow in the disgusting detail, saying that they cut these young women up with a knife to draw out the pain. That's also a staple of his speeches or increasingly a staple. It wasn't in 2016. Increasingly the description of really grotesque violent murders committed by so-called animals, who are always a racial other, against innocent young women. Sometimes he talks about decapitation, sometimes he talks about carving out hearts and eating them. Sometimes he talks about beatings and killings with baseball bats. I mean, it's a horror movie. So many of my colleagues in the political press don't really report on this kind of material because they don't see it as politics. And they're right, in a sense. It's not politics. But it's what matters in those speeches.
BILL MOYERS: But it is politics. You're collecting a constituency. You're organizing your followers around the tropes of hate and bigotry and the purpose is to get them to the polls in November. It seems to me basic politics. And it's not new.
JEFF SHARLET: No, it's not new. He's very good at it. And after that Tulsa speech I think because a lot of people hadn't watched Trump speeches before– so much of the press when they report on Trump rallies, he puts them in a metal pen in the middle of the arena. And it's a prop. Why anyone would agree as a reporter to do this, I don't know. Because you become a prop for this sort of wrestling match like moment when he points to them. They're the heel. That's the bad guy in wrestling. And at certain point he calls them scum, liars, the worst people on earth. And the crowd turns. And a lotta people give them the finger and they scream at CNN. It's the biggest hate line of the night, usually, the loudest line is hating on the media. So you don't actually get out into the crowd and experience how the speech is working. And when you do, you realize that what sounds to a rational observer like contradiction is actually what I think of as sort of a double signal in Trump's rhetoric. He simultaneously telling you the official story and he'll read from the teleprompter and some statistics and so on. And there's almost a performance of boredom with these numbers. And then he looks up and he says, let me let you in on a real secret. And sometimes it's a so-called comic routine, mocking an enemy. And sometimes it's one of these graphic horror stories. So when people saw that Tulsa speech and they said, “Oh and he was incoherent and it was a bad speech,” that was a masterful speech. I think that was an extremely effective speech.
BILL MOYERS: I did too. The press, highly focused on the smaller crowd that turned out, people forget that seven million people watched that speech live on Fox News. There were so many code words. For example, what do you make of that sentence, “They–” whoever they is, “They,” the people who control Biden, “want to punish your thoughts.”
JEFF SHARLET: That was a real direct shout-out to QAnon.
BILL MOYERS: QAnon is what?
JEFF SHARLET: QAnon is a network of conspiracy theories that is really at the heart of Trump's base. The idea sort of grew out of that Pizzagate conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was running a child trafficking ring out of a pizzeria in Washington. And a man took this very seriously and traveled from North Carolina to Washington with an assault rifle and opened fire. Thank God, didn't hurt anybody. And out of this grew this sort of whole conspiracy world, how bad are the Democrats? Well, they are trafficking humans. And what is special about Trump, and here's where it gets really interesting, the idea is that Trump knows all about this and knows more than he can say. And you can get clues to this through this figure called Q who leaves messages on these anonymous message boards like 8chan and 4chan that tell you that this everything Trump is doing is really part of this larger plan to drain the swamp. That one of these days indictments are gonna come down, Obama and Hillary will be arrested for treason as will thousands of others and that this has all been in the works. And that everything that Trump does, anything that you think is clumsy is actually a clue. That when Trump uses a typo in a tweet, this is actually his way of signaling what is to come. And that he will sometimes give signals, who knows if at this point he's doing it deliberately, the symbol of this is the okay sign. Just the, you hold up your thumb and your finger and so on. The okay sign. Also sort of a white supremacist symbol. Trump happens to use that. He always has. That's sort of a hand gesture he has. But, of course, they read that as affirmation. In Tulsa, really amped it up.
