Opinion

In the immediate aftermath of reports that Donald Trump had dinner with two notable antisemitic political figures — Nick Fuentes of America First and Ye (formerly Kanye West) — a simple excuse was floated to mitigate the backlash: It wasn't Trump's fault — he was sandbagged!

"Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about," Trump said in a statement in which he also notably did not condemn Fuentes's antisemitism, racism or misogyny.

If someone ever managed to copyright the word “resentment,” the owner would enjoy a steady stream of revenue, especially from columnists and opinion writers. Take those of the venerable New York Times. “The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party is Not Coming from the Suburbs,” reads the headline of a Thomas Edsall column from earlier this year. (January 25, 2023) Just a day later, Edsall’s Times colleague Paul Krugman declared, “Rural resentment has become a fact of American politics.” (January 26, 2023). Earlier that month, Bret Stephens wrote, in a colloquy with David Brooks, “The problem is that Trump turned the [Republican] party into a single-purpose vehicle for cultural resentments,” adding: “It doesn’t help that coastal elites do so much on their own to feed those resentments.” (Jan. 15, 2023) And in August of last year, Jamelle Bouie struck the same chord: “Republicans would like to offer you some resentment.” (August 22, 2022)

Given these assertions, it is no surprise to discover that the rush to evoke resentment coincided with the election of Trump in 2016. It quickly became an off-the-shelf explanation for a political phenomenon that defied all rational expectations. David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, vilified the victorious candidate as a “slick performer” who essentially duped his followers by being “more than willing to assume their resentments, their fury, their sense of a new world that conspired against their interests.” And days after the election, Leon Wieseltier, writing in the Washington Post, seized upon it as the apt word to describe the present moment: “Resentment, even when it has a basis in experience, is one of the ugliest political emotions, and it has been the source of horrors,” he declared. Others followed suit.

Televangelist Pat Robertson, who died at the age of 93 on June 8, 2023, was a familiar face on television for many conservative Christians, attracting a million viewers each day on his flagship show, “The 700 Club.”

In 1960, Robertson founded the Christian Broadcasting Network and in 2018 launched the first 24-hour Christian television news channel. He also founded an evangelical school in Virginia Beach in 1977, the Christian Broadcasting Network University, and changed its name to Regent University in 1990.

Recovering from three years of pandemic, our middle class staggered by 42 years of Reagan’s neoliberalism, rejecting the efforts of Republican neofascists in the mold of Trump, America appears poised on the edge of an egalitarian and small-d democratic renaissance.

Observers of the cycles of history agree:

“In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” Trump said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference and repeated at his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

How do we describe what Trump wants for America? “Authoritarianism” isn’t adequate. It is “fascism.” Fascism stands for a coherent set of ideas different from — and more dangerous than — authoritarianism. To fight those ideas, it’s necessary to be aware of what they are and how they fit together.