 |
| Author Carl Hoffman: "He's powerful. The first time I saw him, I thought, 'Wow, this guy is powerful, he just conveys a power.'" |
Two years after Donald Trump kicked off his 2024 reelection bid with a March 25, 2023, rally at Waco Regional Airport, a constitutionally contemptuous Trump presidency is gutting everything from the Internal Revenue Service to the Department of Veterans Affairs; siding with Russian attackers over Ukrainian defenders; weaponizing the Department of Justice to pursue Trump’s political enemies; and testing the tolerance of global markets and the federal judiciary. Anyone trying to understand the mindset of Americans supportive of all this should consult globetrotting American journalist Carl Hoffman’s 2020 book “Liar’s Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey into the Upside-Down World of Trump’s MAGA Rallies.” It chronicles the former National Geographic contributing editor’s rollicking months attending Make America Great Again rallies nationwide, including an Oct. 17, 2019, rally at the American Airlines Center in Dallas that drew 20,000 Trump fans. The book’s final chapter bristles with arguably the most profound, insightful summation of the MAGA mindset under Trump’s influence. A brief excerpt:
"He acknowledged them. Acknowledged their pain, their confusion, their vertigo. He gave voice to them. They played the victims, and it was easy to have no sympathy for them because they had little sympathy for anyone else. When I listened to Trump fans talk about 'them' and 'they' – how 'they' wanted something for nothing nowadays – the subtext, the code, was lazy people of color and immigrants who wanted everything for free. Yet we were supposed to have sympathy for white men who weren't changing with the times. They wanted to work, didn’t want handouts, were hungry for the meritocracy, in their parlance. But that was bullshit. They were nostalgic for privilege, the days when an uneducated white man got a job over a better-educated black man; they wanted to be let go by police for traffic violations in a world when black men were too often gunned down for the same; they longed for a world in which a thousand small barriers existed that boosted them and blocked everyone else. They wanted massive farming subsidies and all kinds of handouts and preferential treatment. They pined for a time when billions of Indians and Chinese, Brazilians and Indonesians – the whole rest of the world – were living in abject poverty with scant education and Americans and Europeans were the only people who designed things and built them. But the world wasn’t like that anymore."
On occasion of the Waco rally's two-year anniversary, the Waco Tribune-Herald spoke with Hoffman – best-known for his extensive forays and research into tribal cultures of New Guinea and Borneo – about Trump’s steadfast supporters a day after Trump "paused" military aid to besieged Ukraine in its war with Russia (with the Kremlin praising the United States for forsaking its ally in exchange for a policy that "largely aligns with our vision"); sparked trade tensions by threatening 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, causing all of the gains seen in the S&P 500 since Trump’s Nov. 5 election to vanish; vowed gutting federal funding for colleges and universities that allow "illegal protests," whatever those are; and oversaw continued cutting of tens of thousands of federal employees, threatening to paralyze constituent services such as Social Security. Below is a greatly expanded edition of exchanges conducted March 4 and March 19 and published March 22, 2025, in the Tribune-Herald.
Q Of the
avalanche of books about the political and cultural phenomenon of Donald Trump,
“Liar’s Circus” has long struck me as the most engaging if most disturbing. It
conjures musty motel rooms, long lines of Trump fans camped out to get into
coliseums and ingratiating conversations with Trumpers that seem rational one
moment, utterly insane the next. It's extraordinarily personal, given the
intimacy you gained with those who regularly frequented Trump's far-flung
rallies during his first presidency. The book was published Labor Day weekend
2020, two months before the general election. Have any further conclusions
about Trump followers crystalized?
Carl Hoffman Thank you
for saying that. I’ll be honest with you: That’s my fifth book and the
worst-selling one of all. It was a total flop. It got no attention and almost
no one reviewed it and I sold like 6,000 copies. I appreciate your words more
than you know.
Q It’s extremely readable. You allow conversations with very interesting folks to unfold, each offering varying motives for his or her Trump obsession. It’s entertaining. I mean, there’s a gal from my hometown of Abilene – maybe you’ve seen her – who gets dressed up as Captain America in this skin-tight, red, white and blue outfit and drives in her sports car from Trump rally to Trump rally across America. She’s a Dyess Air Force veteran, an Iraq War veteran, a J6er, a lot of fun. She also believes former Vice President Pence should be executed for treason. It took several cops to drag her off inauguration scaffolding during the January 6 violence.
Hoffman I worried
that people meeting the characters in my book – Rick Frazier, Rick Snowden and
Gale Roberts, for instance – would think I picked the most egregious, craziest
nutcases rather than the norm. I don’t think that’s so. They were colorful in
the way some people are, but their opinions and views, their conspiratorial
views, their nonsensical views, their way of seeing the world as upside-down –
at least I see as upside-down – were more prevalent than I thought. When I
started this project, I thought I would have long, interesting political
conversations with these people. A big Trump rally was 22,000 people, a small
one is 10,000, and I thought the kooks would be a small percentage. In reality,
out of 22,000 people, I think 21,900 believe most of the conspiracy theories
one way or another. Characters such as Gale and Rick and Rick were actually
pretty mainstream in their Trumpian thinking.
Q Your
book came out two months before the 2020 election.
Hoffman That was
one of the problems, the book coming out in the middle of the pandemic before a
vaccine was available. No bookstores were open, I couldn’t do events, nobody
was really flying at airports.
Q With the
passage of time, have any further conclusions about the psychological profile
of Trump followers struck you?
Hoffman No,
everything those guys said, everything everyone said to me during my reporting,
was right on then [in terms of MAGA thinking]. It’s as relevant today. It was
true in 2019 and early 2020 when I met them and wrote down their words and it’s
true now. I mean, there’s so many things to talk about, but what Trump has done
is not because of Trump alone but because of the changing media landscape,
which is really a changing technological landscape. The reality is 75 million
people did not vote for Trump but 77 million people in 2024 did. There are two
kinds of people [in the Trump camp]. There are smart, affluent people who know
better but just are greedy and want lower taxes. But tens of millions of other
people really do live in a world which is an upside-down world. I can’t
emphasize this enough. Seventy million people don’t read a newspaper, probably
don’t watch a network news show – I mean, NBC, ABC, CBS, something you think of
as more or less neutral or factual. For many people it’s either Fox News or they
get all of their news, all of their information, from social media. They
literally don’t believe Trump did anything wrong, they literally don’t know the
details of, say, the indictment behind his keeping [classified] documents – and
the crazy thing is that’s an open-and-shut case. They don’t understand these
things. They just think it was a witch hunt to go after him.
 |
| Trump in Dallas, 2019: "At stake in this fight is the survival of American democracy itself." |
Q Yes, campaign officials handed out signs reading “Witch Hunt” for Trump supporters to wave at all the cameras during the 2023 Trump rally in Waco. You stress 77 million people voted Trump back into power. Surely not all of them are rich people who just don’t want to pay their taxes or people who live in this “upside-down world” such as Rick and Rick and Gale. What explains Trump’s appeal beyond these two groups?
Hoffman It’s
important to understand, again, that Rick and Rick and Gale, the characters populating
“Liar’s Circus,” were not aberrations. I mean, they might be aberrations
in the sense they were going to one Trump rally after another over months and
were sort of groupies, but their opinions about Trump and the state of the
world and their belief in this upside-down world is totally common. That’s one
thing about media and the bubble in which people now live. These people
genuinely believe that the [2020] election was rigged, that the charges filed
against Trump were politically motivated, that the impeachments lacked merit
and were based on Trump Derangement Syndrome. My book is four years old,
almost five, but there’s a lot in it about changes in the world that upset
people and left them feeling this sense of vertigo and disempowerment. Years
later it’s clear these feelings still exist and it’s perhaps even deeper. We
keep hearing people say how the economy was bad and people were overwhelmed by
the price of eggs and inflation. Yet statistics showed that unemployment was
crazy low under Biden, that the stock market was high, that there was this
incredible stream of job creation – and that inflation was a direct result in
part of the pandemic and worldwide and present in economies run by liberals as
well as conservatives. These things clearly had an impact on these people. I
can’t put my finger on it. I can’t really explain this narrative spun by Trumpians
about the economy. In certain areas of the country – the Midwest, the Rust Belt
– there are places that feel very depressed. I mean, they’re not like bustling,
teeming Los Angeles or New York City or D.C. But the larger point is there’s a
lot of people who support not just Trump in the first place but continue to
support what Musk is doing in this complete gutting of the federal government
and this antipathy toward democracy. And I don’t know what the reason for that
is. I just don’t know.
Q They
really seem to want to “burn it all down.”
Hoffman Yeah, and I
don’t know where that comes from really. At the end of the day, will Trumpian
tariffs reconstitute the kind of manufacturing this country used to have in the
United States or is that never going to happen because times have changed, the
economy has changed and we have all these other countries with educated workforces who are capable of designing and building anything while
wages are still lower there. Why would someone build something in the United
States when it takes millions of dollars and years to build factories? Will
these things come back? I don’t think, no matter how big a tariff you put on
[imported goods], we’re going to return to a place where America’s economy is
built on old-time manufacturing. Even if it does, with the rise of AI and
robotics, the number of people who are unskilled without college educations necessary
to make all this happen will never exist. I just don’t believe it’s going to
happen. I’m getting off track here, but if I had to put it simply, it seems
there are great changes taking place economically and culturally and socially
across the world that no person or policy is responsible for and that people
are feeling those. The Trumpians have been able to exploit this.
Q Bringing
old-time manufacturing back to the United States strikes me as trying to put
the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube. Does anyone really think they can pay
Americans working in manufacturing plants what they pay them in, say, China?
Hoffman You’re not
going to be able to pay them that little. And you’re not going to be able to
make it and sell it (competitively) if you have to pay them $30 an hour.
Q I don’t
imagine even Trumpers will stand for returning to manufacturing jobs with
their wages cut just so they can bring manufacturing back to the United States.
I mean, this is a case where a lot of people just aren’t thinking. There are
things that could help this economy but we’re just not interested in those. We
want to go back to the 1950s or apparently now the Gilded Age that Trump talks so
glowingly about, but we’re taking bits and pieces out of our history and
ignoring the broader context of those very different times.
Hoffman Getting rid
of environmental protections in favor of the internal combustion engine – that’s
trying to rewrite history. At the end of the day, electrical cars are going to
triumph because they’re better.
Q Yet the other day President Trump talked
about bringing back coal, a reversal of what even conservatives talked of a few
years ago in encouraging more nuclear power. [In a March 17 social-media post,
Trump wrote: "After years of being held captive by Environmental
Extremists, Lunatics, Radicals and Thugs, allowing other Countries, in
particular China, to gain tremendous Economic advantage over us by opening up
hundreds of all Coal Fire Power Plants, I am authorizing my Administration to
immediately begin producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL."] We here in
Central Texas already went through all that. When a proposal arose among state
officials more than two decades ago to ring our area with coal-fired power
plants, a lot of rural folks who would’ve lived next door to these plants raised
the roof and managed to derail these plans. I remember one longtime rancher, Robert
Cervenka, saying he didn’t want a coal-fired power plant with all sorts of
chemical-ridden exhaust ash falling into his stock tank!
Hoffman You have a
world in which the second largest economy in the world, maybe the largest at
certain times – I’m talking about China – is making tens of thousands of miles of
high-speed rail. It’s not just about having the trains but the technology to
build those things and that network and to be able to export that technology
and those trains. The same with solar panels and electric cars. There has been
a slew of stories recently about how incredible Chinese electric cars are and
they’re cheaper and better than the American cars. Trump can wish all he wants
to dig more coal and return to the internal combustion automobile on the Great
American Highway, but that’s from the 1980s and the world meanwhile is
changing. And we’re going to lose out. The point is the U.S. is falling behind
and will be behind the rest of the world and we’ll lose out on markets. This [Trump-led]
abandonment of NATO, this abandonment of Europe, this so-called “America First”
– all of those things are abandoning American hegemony in the economy and security
and moral force. All of this is a complete retrenchment and it’s not happening
in a vacuum. That’s the thing people don’t understand. You won’t make electric
cars? Well, the Chinese will and they’ll sell them all over the world. There
are millions of other people who are going to step into this [American] vacuum
to lead in all of these things and it’s going to put America behind. It’s
destroying this country.
Q A few people in
our area were involved in the January 6 violence at the U.S. Capitol. I’ve been
through their court filings, prosecution and defense, plus those of many, many others. It’s clear the FBI wasn’t out there instigating
violence. Nor were antifa activists. Most J6 defendants in sentencing memorandums acknowledge their
presence in the attack, either explaining themselves as unwittingly caught up
in all the excitement or excusing the crimes for which they were convicted by
pleading some societal grievance such as PTSD or pandemic isolation or business
failure. One from our area sentenced to several years in prison explained that he thought it was OK to enter the Capitol because of Trump's encouragement in his incendiary speech earlier in the day at the Ellipse. Yet political operatives at my front door trying to get me to vote
Republican in 2024 insist J6 was an “inside job.”
Hoffman It's cliché
to say so, but it’s true: All the things Trumpers say of others are projections
of themselves. Everything they accuse the left of doing are things the right is
actually doing. January 6 is a good example. I have friends on Facebook, a
large number of people who are not my political brethren. I don’t
silence or block them because I’m interested in what they have to say. I
practiced karate for almost 30 years and my teacher is like a father figure to
me. He’s also the most right-wing, obnoxious, racist Trumpian. I never knew
this about him until Trump came along, so I’m loathe to silence him. But here’s
a guy who believes in Blue Lives Matter and sees BLM [Black Lives Matter] as
rioters who should be thrown into prison and the key tossed away. Yet he posts
every day about the “patriots” who went into the Capitol and how the [police
officer] who is black, not white, killed Ashli Babbitt. I mean, here was a
group of violent rioters who broke into U.S. property and assaulted the police.
And the person who was shot by police because she was physically breaking
through the last barrier between the rioters and the vice president of the
United States – I mean, he’s got it all upside-down!
Q The
casual Trump voter I get. Some of my neighbors, for instance, don't
particularly care for Trump, acknowledge they would have preferred someone less
volatile as the Republican nominee. But they're also easily overwhelmed by the
tedious complexities of such issues as tariffs and immigration and taxation,
not to mention the flood of executive orders and social-media posts coming
daily from the Trump White House and Trump co-president and SpaceX entrepreneur
Elon Musk and Trump himself. So they retreat into this non-thinking, knee-jerk
default position of identity politics. They simply vote Republican and trust in Trump
to bow to at least some Republican priorities, including not interfering with
their 401(k) investments in the markets and not letting transgender people compete
in sports.
Hoffman I think
you’re right. It’s also because the media system has changed. I’m 64, almost
65, and when I was growing up, people tuned to “Huntley & Brinkley” [which
aired from 1956 to 1970 on NBC] or whatever each night. Every American watched
the same newscast for a half-hour.
Q We all
had the same news. We discussed and debated the same facts.
Hoffman Now these
people, even the casual Trump voters, the people you’re talking about, don’t
read the newspaper. I mean, maybe they read a local newspaper – I don’t know
how much local newspapers say – but they don’t read, say, the Washington Post
or the New York Times, they probably don’t even read the Wall Street Journal.
They’re not engaging on an intellectual level with any of this. They’re removed
from history. We’re getting further and further away from World War II and from
fascism [which the United States belatedly fought]. What happened in World War
II was a signature event of our lives. I was born after World War II, but it
was still about Nazis and Mussolini. Twenty million Russians died and untold
millions of other people. It was a generation about Anne Frank and the
degradation of Nazism and racism and a world war in which Rosie the Riveter and
the Greatest Generation represented the values that the whole Western world
coalesced around. People today have forgotten those things. Casual Trump voters
don’t seem to be aware of the connections between democracy and liberalism [as
in “classical liberalism”: individual rights, civil
liberties, democracy and free enterprise]. They’re being swept away by
nonsense and all the political bullshit thrown at them. There’s no other way
around it. And at some point we have to assign responsibility. In “Liar’s
Circus,” I was really empathetic to all these people [traveling to Trump rallies]
– genuinely so – men who had lost power through everything from losses of manufacturing
to changes in gender roles. I’m very sympathetic to these people. But at the
end of the day, it’s like, at a certain point, all of these people who are
living in places subject to economic decline, for instance, and who are
penalized for their lack of education – at some point, those people just have
to get up off their asses and move to New York City or LA or a factory town in
the South or wherever the jobs are and go to work. And, yeah, college is
expensive, but there are community colleges.
Q You’re
talking about victimhood, a theme that runs strong through your book and the
MAGA movement. The White House sent me a list of its guests for Trump’s State
of the Union address. Most are in some way victims. You’ll look in vain for
people who, say, run a soup kitchen for the poor. Guests
included a 15-year-old Texas girl who was the victim of computer-generated
deepfakes created by a bully at her school and the wife and daughters of Corey
Comperatore, the former firefighter and MAGA disciple killed by the gunman who
also shot at Trump during that campaign rally in Pennsylvania in July 2024. One
Trump honoree is 13-year-old
Devarjaye “DJ” Daniel, a Houston youth suffering brain cancer, notwithstanding
the fact that the Trump administration eliminated child cancer research funding
– what one observer described as “a perfect encapsulation of MAGA morality.”
Hoffman This explains the role of immigrants and trans people in the movement. There needs to be a target, an “other,” and that’s what those people are for this administration. Look, at the end of the day, for the Trump administration, it’s purely about power. It’s not really about making government more efficient, it’s not about reducing the deficit, it’s all about power and they’re building that power on victimhood, if you’ve been a “victim,” and exploiting that victimhood. One of the political talking points for the GOP for the last 20 or 30 years – really since Reagan – was about resentment over your money going to help inner-city black people, even though that was not always true – more poor whites were on public assistance than urban blacks. [Figures in 2024 indicate this remains true.] Nonetheless the pitch was your money was going to help these people and this country isn’t built on help [public assistance], it’s built on Horatio Alger themes [stories of poor boys triumphing over impoverished backgrounds through hard work and gaining middle-class security and respectability].
 |
| Trump speaks of political enemies and persecution during his March 25, 2023 rally in Waco |
Q Your book reminds me of the Waco rally of March 2023 that I attended. It was one for the history books. It was the first Trump rally where, upon his arrival from the sky, rallygoers were invited to stand and pledge allegiance as a video played on huge screens showing pitiful January 6 inmates languishing behind bars and Trump filmed in scenes of presidential pomp and patriotism with backdrops such as Mount Rushmore and massive coliseum crowds. The video soundtrack, which played as the Waco crowd recited the pledge, involved a recording of Trump reading the Pledge of Allegiance while a jailhouse choir of J6ers sang "The Star-Spangled Banner." Did anything happen in all the rallies you attended that compares?
Hoffman No. And, of
course, January 6 hadn’t happened yet. But the scene you describe – there’s no
other way to say it – is a perversion of everything that America stands for and
all of its values. It’s a complete flipping of them. But every Trump rally was
like that to some degree. That’s why the book was called “Liar’s Circus.” I
don’t like the idea of living in a bubble in which there is no truth, in which
truth is inverted. And it’s a masterstroke for Trump that he was able to do
that, to flip things and make hot cold and dark light. I mean, to say [Ukrainian
President] Zelensky is a dictator and is responsible for the invasion of his
own country – that’s not a nuanced thing, it’s not something that scholars can
agree to disagree on. It’s an actual inversion of the truth.
Q It's
pretty astounding – Kremlin talking points are echoed by Trump and in a day or
so your neighbors down the street are saying it too!
Hoffman It’s beyond
me. I mean, you can say these people don’t know their history, but why do you
and I think differently? How is it that Liz Cheney, with whom I don’t agree on
anything politically or policy-wise but who I admire because she stands for the
truth – how did it get to be that she emerges as a truthteller? The question
growing up for me was always: How could Hitler have taken power? How could this
have happened? How could people have gone along with the Holocaust, the murder
of six million people, the premeditated, meticulously synchronized murder of
six million people? And it’s not just Germany but Mussolini in Italy and Franco
in Spain. Look at the military junta in Argentina and Brazil and Pinochet in
Chile. How could people go along with that?
Q We’re
seeing more evidence of this in the United States.
Hoffman It’s a
revelation. I didn’t realize people were so easily manipulated, but they are.
In my book, my editor suggested [in 2020] that I take out these references to
Hitler, that it’s not really that bad. And I said no, I think there really is a
comparison. I feel that way even more now. I mean, 2025 is not 1933 and Trump
is not Hitler. People are confused and misled by trying to be too literal.
They’re different people. The thing about Trump is he has no real ideology.
He’s just a sociopathic narcissist. I don’t say that in a flippant way. I think
honestly, deep down, that’s the thing driving him – sheer, unadulterated power.
I think that’s what the tariffs are about. He’s brought America to its knees; now
he needs to do it to the whole world. That’s what Panama and Greenland and
Ukraine are about. And I think people don’t grasp that enough. Musk may have an
agenda. His agenda may be tech getting rid of regulations that impinge on the
growth of his companies and his crazy techno dreams. That’s the case of the
tech bros. But Trump just wants power. That’s all he wants, all he cares about.
And that is different from Hitler to a certain extent. But the gutting of
institutions and the rule of law – things are happening very quickly with Trump
while larger things will take more time – but I believe that, unchecked, and I
mean unchecked by the Supreme Court which may or may not happen, we don’t know,
Trump will come after the media, he will try to suppress the mainstream media.
I mean, already the Washington Post is self-censoring. He’s going to go after
television news, I think there’s going to be a case somewhere down the line in
which he tries to sue or the Justice Department goes after a reporter, a
specific reporter like at the New York Times, and I think it’s going to go all
the way. I don’t think there’s any stopping Trump. I guess it’s up to the
Supreme Court or the people in some way, but I believe Trump is so insane that
he has to dominate everyone and everything and that no one can be undominated
by Donald Trump.
Q I’m
afraid the Supreme Court of the United States has in many ways led us to this
point, whether in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission or Trump
v. United States.
Hoffman And I’m not
confident they’re going to be the bulwark we need them to be. I mean, these
people – [Justices Samuel] Alito and Clarence Thomas – are really something.
Can you imagine being a Supreme Court justice and taking a $250,000 RV and food
and housing and all these things [from wealthy, influential patrons] and never
thinking these are things you need to report and actually saying it’s not
corruption when it’s the very definition of corruption?
Q Did past
experiences immersing yourself in the cultures of Borneo and New Guinea tribes
[resulting in the Hoffman books “The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of
Death and Treasure” and “Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and
Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art”] help you understand what
political scientists describe as tribalism or the MAGA psyche? Two key features
of tribalism figure around hierarchy and obedience.
Hoffman You say
hierarchy and obedience, but it’s more complex. There’s ritual, a lot of ritual
– and Trump is all about the ritual. The rallies are rituals, the wearing of
colors, the regalia, the flags mounted on pickup trucks with slogans like
“Don’t Tread on Me.” All of these are rituals about identity. Tribalism by
definition has an “in” group and an “out” group. You know, like the Asmat, the
people who killed Michael Rockefeller in 1961, people with whom I spent a lot
of time – and they’re not doing that [cannibalism] today – but at the time of
Rockefeller’s death, villages were in constant warfare with each other. If you
were members of one village, you were enemies of another village. Nazism was
built on portraying as “others” the Jews, Eastern Europeans, the Poles – and
Trumpism is about making “others” of immigrants and trans people. The role of
immigrants in this country – I don’t think Trumpism is going to change that in
any particular way. He’s not going to expel all those people. All of this is
performative. If you do the math, you can see it’s never going to happen. But
“Liar’s Circus” was built on spending a lot of time with these people
[Trumpers], spending a lot of empathetic time with them. I mean, I enjoyed
my time with them for the most part. The friendships I made were genuine in the
sense that it’s not like I liked everyone but, well, [Trump rallygoer] Rick Frazier’s
been to my house since the book came out. These were friendships.
Q Even
though they know you’re on the other side of all this?
Hoffman Oh, yeah. I
couldn’t have done what I did if I’d just gone in there and said to these
people, “You’re a fucking racist!”
Q Well, it’s obvious in the book you enjoyed
these people. I enjoyed those I met at the Waco Trump rally, though over eight
hours of interviews they were exhausting in their giddiness and obsessiveness
and detachment from reality. There’s something charming if naïve about them.
Hoffman They’re
funny as hell. They have a zest for life and a joyfulness. It was all kind of a
big party. That’s really what it was. The point is with these tribes in Borneo
and New Guinea, you can’t just parachute in there as a journalist and
demonstrate attitudes about them. You have to be open and listening and be
willing to give of yourself. And so the process is the same [in gaining
insights from Trump fans].
Q One individual
from our area who participated in the January 6 insurrection is something of a
keyboard warrior. He didn’t fight any cops – he let all the other guys fight the
cops – and then he strolled into the U.S. Capitol. He got several months in
prison. I spent a summer just following his social-media group, patterned after
the anti-tax Whiskey Rebellion of the early 1790s. They continually posted memes that
seemed to yearn for a world somewhere between two Mel Gibson flicks – "The
Patriot" and "Braveheart." Some of those individuals peppering
your book would seem to qualify but I may be wrong.
Hoffman No, I think
you’re right actually. They long for an easier, more black-and-white time. A
lot of them seem to yearn for a world of the 1950s. But we’re not in that world
today and I don’t think we can go back. And look at all Trump is doing. Is the
government really going to be more efficient? That is, are you going to get
more [government] efficiency with less [personnel staffed to do jobs of public
service]? All the people who voted for Trump – are their lives going to be
better? Is inflation going to go down? Is the price of gas going to go down? Is
the air going to be cleaner? Are they going to get their masculinity back? Are
they going to get back to the days of men going to work in a mine or a factory
where they’re making good money and they’re supporting their families and they
feel good about themselves and their wives look at them and bat their eyelashes
when they get home and they can afford one or two cars on their salaries? I
could be completely wrong, but I think by the end of Trumpism, when it comes,
the world is going to be more brutal, more violent with fewer government
services and the deficit isn’t going to be any lower and things are going to be
more expensive and there’s going to be less humanity because AI is all about
getting rid of people. And the less we go shopping, the less we go to work, the
less whole we are and the more separate we are from each other and the things
that matter and give us meaning. Trumpism isn’t going to give any of the things
that the people who voted for it imagine.
Q It’s
odd. When I tell people I spent eight solid hours interviewing folks in the
MAGA crowd at the 2023 Trump rally in Waco – this was before Trump actually arrived –
some of my friends say, “Oh, my God, how awful!” But the Trump folks could not
have been more accommodating. One thing my friends don’t understand is that
Trump loves press. Nothing means more to him than the chance of making
headlines and getting attention, even if a lot of it is just to stir people up
in ways that often backfire. The press coordinators of the rally, who determined
ahead of time whether or not I got press credentials, and how I was treated at
the actual rally – they could not have been more accommodating, even though
Trump went through his usual showmanship bit during the rally, pointing at reporters
and photographers in the risers and vilifying them to the crowd’s amusement. Ironically, some of the press in the risers with me were from “news organizations” that are
little more than propagandist agencies for him. I watched one of these “reporters”
go to the barricades that cordoned off press from the MAGA crowd awaiting Trump. That’s
where this one “reporter” fired wildly provocative questions at the crowd, just to get
them baited and stirred up for Trump.
Hoffman You
know, as a reporter, people often ask – and I’m sure they ask you this – “Were
people willing to talk?” People love to talk about themselves. I like to talk
about myself. And people [at these rallies] were almost unfailingly nice.
Q The
rallies are a big party. If you approach individual Trumpers on, say, a street
corner, they might feel threatened, they might clam up. But at the Trump rally
they’re among their own and they’re having a good time, flying massive flags on
pickup trucks and buying Trump souvenirs and listening to music by people like
Ted Nugent. So they’re tickled to talk with you.
Hoffman Yeah, and I’m a middle-aged straight white guy so they don’t see a perceived threat from me, you know. I haven’t called them a racist or anything. I didn’t berate them or call them out in my first conversations with them. And I was a genuinely curious person.
 |
| Trump supporters overwhelm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to halt certification of the 2020 presidential election. |
Q Did the January 6 insurrection or riot or protest or however you want to label it surprise you, given all the time you spent at Trump rallies in 2019 and 2020 and the friendships you cultivated with individual people attending these rallies?
Hoffman It did not surprise me at all. I mean, you’re always slightly surprised at any event. You know, when, say, the Russians actually attack Ukraine, and you’re asked, “Well, were you really surprised Russia attacked?” The answer is no, but the moment of anything can still be a little surprising. But so much of the book, the subtext, of “Liar’s Circus,” of the feeling that I had through the experience of listening to Trump and watching him work the crowd and the down-ballot people – governors, senators and representatives in attendance of whatever state he was speaking in who usually gathered there in mass – it was the gathering together of a crowd and the power. As Elias Canetti put it in his book “Crowds and Power” (1960), that’s the point of the rallies – to, on one hand, create this kind of cult following – but the larger point should never be lost and that’s power. The power of the mob, the power of the crowd, was always on display. It’s the roar of the crowd when Trump stood up on stage and mocked Marco Rubio and belittled him. That was the power of the crowd over Rubio to toe the line, the power of the crowd to go primary someone and vote them out of power. Trump’s power – originally as a populist – involved this power of the crowd. So what happened on January 6 [after President Trump’s fiery speech about a stolen election earlier in the day and his exhortation “to fight like hell”] didn’t surprise me at all. I mean, that was the plan.
Q What
stunned me is that many of these people for so long talked about the
Constitution and respect for the police and the rule of the law – and then one
day you turn on the TV and they’re overrunning the U.S. Capitol and pummeling cops
with clubs and flag poles. It struck me as such a broad statement of hypocrisy.
Hoffman It is. I
mean, what’s happening right now with [the Department of Governmental
Efficiency under Musk’s controversial direction] and deportations and the
courts – they’re obviously contemptuous of the rule of law. The rule of law for
Donald Trump is the rule of Donald Trump. The state becomes Donald Trump. Those
are the elements of anti-democratic populism, still within [the framework] of a
democracy as in the first Trump term and the evolving nature of the second
term which is moving from populism into something more nefarious and more
dangerous. I think sometimes we talk about Nazism and fascism and people get
hung up on those ideas of the 1930s. But these terms on their own are
describing a kind of authoritarian dictatorship in broader terms in which will
triumphs over reason, in which action is everything, in which efficiency and
the trains running on time are the ideas used to – well, it’s not really about
making the trains run on time, it’s not really about making government
efficient, it’s about power. And part of fascism is the equation of state with
the man. The man becomes the state and that’s what Trump is doing. He is the
Constitution, he is the law and if [as a judge] you rule against him in a
court, then you’re a “lunatic judge.”
Q A friend who spent his career in upper management of two or three major corporations but still believes in such things as democracy and the rule of law
told me the other day that, since the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump, he has undergone
therapy because he simply cannot imagine or accept an American electorate of 77 million
people putting this guy back in power. Given your understanding of what
happened in Germany in the 1930s and what some would say is happening today,
most recently with this constitutional crisis involving the federal judiciary
and a Trump Department of Justice that clearly does not respect the federal judiciary,
how do you find it possible to continue to be friends with people such
as Rick and Rick and Gale? How do you emotionally and rationally put aside what
they’re clearly contributing to and still be friends?
Hoffman Well, I can’t
really. I haven’t spoken to them this year at all. In the runup to the book and
after its publication, I talked with Rick Frazier and Gale. But I haven’t
talked with them in a long time. January 6 was kind of a watershed moment for me.
I found it hard to listen to Rick, who I appreciate as a good man. But I found
it difficult to listen to his support of something that was so obviously egregious.
We had reached the point where there was no sugarcoating it anymore. So I
really haven’t talked to them. I mean, if Rick called, I would be kind to him
and I wouldn’t rule out, you know, having a beer with him or something. But it
would be hard to. And this goes back to your question about the people [in
MAGA] who aren’t rich and aren’t just voting out of greed and why they support Trump.
Well, they support him for all the reasons in the book but, on another level, I
can’t say why people support Trump. Again, one of the great mysteries to me growing
up in the time I did was always how people could rationalize the KKK or how people
could have supported Hitler. These seem such aberrations to me. It was once so
obvious that everyone in America – even with racism in the South – in World War
II and afterward with all the talk of the Greatest Generation – that someone raising
their arm in a fascist salute a la Hitler or Mussolini, even as a joke, back
in the 1960s, Seventies and Eighties, would have been seen as abhorrent. We’ve
always had whackos that never go away, but these were minorities. If anyone had
done that [in past decades], they would have been castigated by the left and
the right, by Republicans and Democrats.
Q We as a
people seem to have lost that post-World War II virtue.
Hoffman The
Trumpers will always say, when someone like Elon Musk raises his arm like that,
it’s just a joke, they’re just trolling liberals, they’re “just trying to get a
rise out of you.” That’s like a man saying abusive things to a woman and when
the woman gets upset, the man says, “Oh, I’m just joking.” Well, it’s not a
joke. This isn’t something to joke about. But another thing that we don’t always
fully understand – especially liberal Democrats, and this is something I’m
grappling with even now – is the extent to which the media and the pillars of
what we think of as the truth [are being abandoned]. I mean, my go-to source,
if I had to name one, is the New York Times. I believe in it. I don’t think it’s
a religious belief, but I think the reporting of the New York Times is largely
accurate. It’s probably the best source of accurate information about America
and the world and things in general. But I’ve found that people just don’t read
the newspaper anymore. And it’s not just the right – many liberals don’t read newspapers
either. It’s all social media, it’s all “influencers.” I know a couple, I met
them at a bar near my house because they’re neighbors, it turns out. This has
nothing to do with journalism or anything – these are very lefty YouTubers and
they have in the neighborhood of a million followers and their fulltime job is
kind of being left-wing pundits by YouTube. And I’d never heard of them before.
Yet a million people follow them and prefer that to the New York Times. And in
that world are some 70 million or 80 million people locked in that right-wing
information bubble and they don’t see anything else.
This
interview was conducted, condensed and edited for clarity and brevity by
retired Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor Bill Whitaker.
