'Dark and challenging times': Here’s a glossary for 'Trump’s return to power'

27 December 2024

Donald Trump's second term as president is less than a month away, with the president-elect scheduled to be inaugurated on January 20, 2025. And when he is sworn in, Republicans will have small majorities in both branches of Congress.

Salon's Chauncey DeVega hasn't minced words in his anti-Trump articles, many of which have attacked him as a dangerously authoritarian.

In an article published on December 27, DeVega offers a "Words of the Year" listicle for "Donald Trump’s imminent return to power and the very dark and challenging times that may lie beyond in the country's worsening democracy crisis."

The terms in DeVega's listicle include: (1) "weathering," (2) "witnessing," (3) "dread," (4) "corporeal politics," (5) "anticipatory obedience," and (6) "malignant normality."

DeVega describes "weathering" as "the impact of chronic stress and other negative factors on a person's mind, body and overall wellbeing."

"The American people are going to experience great weathering from a resurgent Trump Administration, the MAGA Republicans and the larger 'conservative' movement and its allied forces," DeVega warns. "This weathering will also impact those people who voted for Trump — his 'working-class' supporters in red state America will be particularly vulnerable."

DeVega describes "corporeal politics" as "the relationship of the body to politics" and "anticipatory obedience" as "a temptation to surrender in advance" when " societies that are under siege from fascist and other such authoritarian, illiberal, and antidemocratic forces."

"The reasoning here is that preemptive surrender and compliance will somehow create safety," DeVega explains. "This is largely an illusion."

According to DeVega, the "malignant normality" concept "helps to explain Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and larger right-wing's hold on power and the country's political imagination."

The Salon journalist laments, "This state of malignant normality will likely endure long into the future because the collective relationship between truth and reality has been so disrupted by right-wing malign actors and such forces as disinformation, propaganda, social media, the algorithm, digital media echo chambers, conspiracism, closed epistemes and alternate realities, a failing public education system, a weak Fourth Estate and the death of local newspapers and other legitimate news sources, and perhaps most importantly the Trump-MAGA political experience-infotainment machine and pseudo-religion."

Chauncey DeVega's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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