Are We Going to Be OK? On Donald Trump, MAGA, and America

On the latest episode of Inside the Hive, Jeff Sharlet suggests that there’s a way in which Donald Trump “won this election on January 6, 2021.”

“That seems counterintuitive, right? Because that’s this moment when, for a brief period, even his own party renounces him,” Sharlet says. “A lot of attention is going on [Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s schedule and pressing charges, in which we’re still imagining that Trumpism is a system that’s working within the rule of law. And on January 6, that’s just a profound pivot point.” Sharlet, an author and Vanity Fair contributing editor, who has written extensively on what he calls the “Trumpocene,” or age of Trump, said that January 6 was when “we go from the period of conspiracy theories to the age of martyrdom, which is powerful stuff.”

Sharlet, along with Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones, shared their gut-level reactions to Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris, while also discussing the language of fascism and the role of identity politics in the 2024 race.

Jones mentions how the Harris campaign was “not really emphasizing the historic nature of her run, that she would be the first woman president, that she would be the first woman of color to be president,” presumably because of how Hillary Clinton’s “I’m with her” strategy fared in 2016. But “the identity politics were happening on the GOP side,” Jones says, noting how the courting and messaging, from the likes of Stephen Miller and Elon Musk, were toward men. “Now, male identity, that’s a big group, I grant you,” she says, “but that was the drive.”

In approaching a second Trump administration, Jones says that what’s most important is separating “the distractions from what’s actually happening in substance,” to not allow Trump to easily shift attention. “What is going to happen to government agencies that we depend on day-to-day?” she asks. “What is going to happen at the border? Will there be mass deportation? Will the fluoride come out of our water? There are issues that will affect the body politic, and I would like our attention to be trained on those.”

Sharlet says that “part of what Trump has taken advantage of is this great extinction event in news organizations, the death of local news,” and suggests “looking at the granular” at how policies are affecting people. “Where are they tinkering in these small places that seem boring and insignificant, but, you know, as Project 2025 taught us, and which the Trump movement has reclaimed today, there were people paying attention to those small agencies and what can be done with them? And how [is that] going to play out in this county in Omaha…or that town in New Jersey?”

As for covering the MAGA movement, Sharlet suggests “paying attention to abstraction and metaphor.”

“The really frustrating thing with how we covered this campaign is there was a way in which Trump was—as a fascist movement evolves, it gets into a richer and richer body of myth and metaphor, and that’s what they’re working with. And in response, we have democracy becoming further and further detached, so that democracy becomes this vague term, like free speech becomes a term.”

“It falls on us, as people who want to resist fascism, and as journalists who want to cover it, to really dig deep and translate and interpret that language and find out what democracy means,” he adds. “When I talk to Trumpers, what democracy means is a king—a king that is chosen by both God and the people. A very different idea than what we have in the Constitution.”