Rory Bahadur
No matter how much evidence accumulates, we cannot reason our way out of Trumpism if we keep misunderstanding what gives it power. The people most alarmed by Donald Trump have spent nearly a decade exposing hypocrisy, cataloging misconduct, correcting falsehoods, and waiting for enough proof to finally break the spell. But from 2016 to 2024, that approach did not defeat Trumpism. In many ways, it helped strengthen it, because it treated the movement as a problem of information when it is much more a problem created by the Trump Campaign’s brilliant weaponization of the human mind’s unconscious processing mechanisms.
That is the urgent premise. Good people cannot simply oppose racism, condemn cruelty, and assume the moral force of the evidence will do the rest. Most Americans do not think of themselves as defending racism. Nearly two-thirds say racism against Black people is widespread in the United States, and large majorities reject racist or religious hate speech as morally unacceptable. Yet racial inequality remains stubbornly persistent across housing, education, policing, and wealth. That contradiction is not a side issue in American public life. It is the central question: if most people sincerely reject racism, why do systems of inequality remain so stable? For the full text Read
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