Like much of mainstream journalism, Salon notes that Trump’s Independence Day speeches, rallies, emails and fundraisers are either mocked or worshipped, given the side eye and the eye roll or conversely, accepted without question, cult-like.
For the most part (the Washington Post being a notable exception), the American mainstream media and political class have responded to Trump’s Agenda 47 and its earlier iterations with a combination of laughs, mocking, schadenfreude, and indifference. And of course, there were the obvious jokes about the Jetsons cartoon with its flying cars and futuristic cities. . . .Why have the mainstream news media, commentariot, pundits, and responsible political class, failed, for the most part, to correctly assess and respond to Trump’s fascist-authoritarian Agenda 47, and the Trumpocene and America neofascism, more generally?
To quote Chauncey de la Vega, senior writer for Salon:
Agenda 47 would consist of an end to birthright citizenship, further criminalizing transgender people and the LGBTQI community more broadly, expanding the thought crime and other censorship laws to end the teaching of “critical race theory” and to defeat “Woke” and “Black Lives Matter”, attacking academic freedom and replacing it with “patriot education”, implementing a national stop and frisk law, pardoning the Jan. 6 terrorists, putting homeless people in camps or some other designated area under threat of arrest, building high tech “freedom cities”, ending the professional civil service and replacing it with right-wing political appointees and other such partisan agents, gutting the Department of Justice and other parts of the government that opposed Trump’s attacks on democracy and the rule of law, executing drug dealers, starting a trade war with China, and making “peace” with Vladimir Putin by withdrawing support for the Ukrainian people and their freedom struggle. In many ways, Agenda 47 is a continuation of the fascist and other authoritarian policies Trump put in place during his first regime but now made even more extreme and cruel.
“The entirety of what Donald Trump offers, or rather the cronies around him who handle the ideology and focus of his disgusting campaigns, is a reheated version of prior fascist and authoritarian movements. Promises to “clean up” the messes in government while using new technologies to deliver the “future” and powerwash culture. We’ve seen this before. And we’ll see it again. Whenever demagogues understand an opening that prioritizes cruelty and meaningless hope, they are quick to fill the voice. And the people around Trump understand it is a perfect environment to unleash their wildest and most violent dreams.” (Jared Yates Sexton, who is the author of the book “The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis”.)
