How Trump made Jan. 6 'the core of his campaign platform': analysis

18 March 2024

On Saturday, March 9 in Rome, Georgia, Donald Trump gave what could arguably be described as his first general election speech of 2024 — that is, the first speech since securing the GOP presidential nomination for the third time.

The New Yorker's Susan B. Glasser analyzed the speech in an article published on March 14, describing it as "rambling, unhinged, vituperative, and oh-so-revealing" yet "undercovered" by the mainstream media.

Glasser warned that during the speech, Trump's conspiracy theories involving President Joe Biden and false claim that he won the 2020 election "reflected a man not rooted in any kind of reality." But mainstream media outlets, Glasser lamented, failed to adequately report on all the troubling things Glasser said during the speech.

Glasser, who co-wrote the 2022 book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021" with the New York Times' Peter Baker, continued to sound the alarm about Trump's authoritarianism during an appearance on The New Republic's podcast posted on March 18.

Glasser told host Greg Sargent, "We are eight years into this Trump phenomenon in American politics since he entered the race back in 2015, and we've gone through every cycle of cover him, don't cover him — whatever…. I was really struck just to actually sit down and listen to the full two hours of kind of hate speech flow over you. And I heard some new things….. Rather than January 6 spelling an end to Donald Trump's political career, he has, just a few years later, transformed this event into the core of his campaign platform. And that is a remarkable and striking thing, which apparently, many Americans are not familiar with."

The journalist/author continued, "Well, they should get familiar with the idea that Donald Trump, not only is he not taking any responsibility for the attack on the legitimacy of the election…. and this attack on the Capitol…. Nearly 2000 of his supporters have been arrested, tried, convicted, many of them in many cases for storming their own Capitol — for violently attacking the Capitol in an effort to shut down Congress in its constitutional duty of certifying the election. Donald Trump is saying that these people are heroes and martyrs."

Glasser went on to say that she finds Trump's rhetoric in 2024 even more disturbing than his rhetoric in his last two presidential campaigns.

Glasser told Sargent, "He is explicitly running against the rule of law…. I just feel like that, of course, is something new we didn't have in 2016 or 2020."

She added that Trump's "framing" of the "state of the country" under Biden's presidency is "scary and delusional."

"Now," Glasser told Sargent, "he is basically denying the personhood of people who are trying to come into the United States illegally."

Listen to the full New Republic podcast at this link and read Susan B. Glasser's full New Yorker article here (subscription required).

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