Trump’s disastrous kidnapping playbook exposed by right-wing media expert

Conservative and right-wing media expert Nicole Hemmer this week outlined Donald Trump’s penchant for stoking anger and causing division amid tragedy and disaster.

“This must be what Trump does, right?” Hemmer, an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, asked The New Republic’s Greg Sargent in the latest episode of his podcast, “The Daily Blast,” released Thursday.

The president-elect has sought to politicize the devastating California wildfires, most recently with repeated attacks on President Joe Biden and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and some false claims.

The returning POTUS used the same playbook after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, during the coronavirus pandemic and in many other situations.

“President Trump is trying to exploit, for political gain, these moments when people are starting to come together a little bit, at least in times of immediate disaster, of shock and fear,” Hemmer said.

You and I grew up in an era of natural disasters, including the Oklahoma City bombing and the Columbine shooting. And that was the moment when people discovered some kind of common humanity. I don’t want to paint a too rosy picture, but it’s important to step into that moment and say, ‘Actually, the person responsible for your problems is my political enemy.’ , you should focus on hating them.’

Sargent suggested this was part of an “all-out right-wing MAGA effort to degrade public life” by “seizing every opportunity to spread outlandish conspiracy theories” and doing anything to “turn people against one another.”

Hemmer, who wrote the 2022 books “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Reshaped American Politics in the 1990s” and “Messengers of the Right,” agreed that the right now has a desire to “transform the disaster and make it worse than it is.” : Conservative media and changes in American politics” (2016).

It’s a combination of Donald Trump’s own malignant behavior, which is constantly looking for ways to get into the headlines, the media environment we live in that really favors this kind of anger and negativity, and the conservative media ecosystem that revives it. It fosters the ‘let’s make everyone mad’ dynamic and applies it directly to electoral politics,” she explained.

Hemmer added, “I think it all comes together to turn this into an opportunity for a fight and an opportunity for everyone to feel worse than they already felt.” “And I think the point of what you’re saying about the decline of public life is that everything always feels worse.”

Listen to the full podcast episode here.