On Wednesday, I received an alarming text message: “THEY WENT AFTER TRUMP WITH DEADLY FORCE!” It claimed that a “shocking new report shows the FBI allowed DEADLY force during Mar-a-Lago raid.” Even as robust a Donald Trump critic like me ought to see this as dangerous government overreach, right? Deadly force? That shouldn’t be necessary with a 77-year-old fellow who probably can’t even ride a bicycle. When I clicked the link in the text, I ended up on a webpage that exclaimed, “Armed FBI agents were preparing to CONFRONT Trump on [sic] HIS OWN residence.” It reported that there was shocking proof that the “WITCH HUNT” against Trump is “trying to KILL HIM,” adding, “If the left’s agenda now includes DEADLY FORCE, we CANNOT continue to stand on the sidelines.”

How could one help right this terrible wrong? Obviously, by donating money to Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump—I know this will shock you—was exploiting the latest right-wing disinformation campaign to grift his supporters.

The previous day, a trove of documents was unsealed in Trump’s stolen-documents criminal case. They included the operations order for the search the FBI conducted in August 2022 at Mar-a-Lago. It noted that Department of Justice officers “may use deadly force only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.” 

Naturally, the right-wing media jumped on this as proof that the FBI had been cleared to use deadly force during the search—and that this had placed Trump’s life at risk. Of course, this was bullshit. The instruction contains boilerplate language that appears in all such operation orders. It was a measure to limit the use of deadly force in these instances. The same wording appeared in the operations order for the FBI search of President Joe Biden’s residence.

Nevertheless, Trump immediately went ape over this. That day, on social media, he posted, “Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT FOR OFFICE — 25TH AMENDMENT!” In a campaign fundraising email sent out that night, Trump declared that Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out.”

Yet by Tuesday evening, media fact-checkers and law enforcement experts were pointing out that there was nothing untoward in the FBI instructions and that Trump had never been endangered. (In fact, the FBI deliberately and courteously scheduled the raid for a day when Trump would not be at Mar-a-Lago). That did not stop Trump and the right-wing hysteria machine from beating this drum relentlessly. That fundraising text I received came the day after the claim that the Biden administration had prepped to assassinate Trump had been thoroughly debunked.

In some ways, this episode could be looked at as yet another farcical Trump con job. But it’s profoundly dangerous, showing how Trump and the right-wing gang at Fox and elsewhere continue to rile up his base and fiercely demonize Democrats and liberals. They’ve been moaning for years that the Deep State was out to get Trump by spying on him, rigging the 2020 election against him, and bringing bogus civil and criminal cases against poor ol’ Donald. That was all baloney. But the authoritarian handbook is clear: Always be raising the stakes.

So now Biden and the libs are out to kill Trump. This is how Trump, by feeding paranoia and division, can intensify his supporters’ hatred of the Democrats and squeeze more money out of them. It’s the latest dopamine fix for his diehard followers. Obviously, for many Trump devotees, the false message that Biden and the FBI schemed to assassinate Trump will stick and not be undone by the truth. Thus, one more reason for them to despise Democrats and the left and support Trump’s extreme attacks, which they view as necessary and defensive counter­-attacks.

All this reminded me of another Republican fundraising solicitation that recently hit my inbox. It declared the left was waging “disgusting attacks on Christian Americans” and forcing them to “worship in the shadows.” It asked, “Will you stand with us against [the left]?” And then came a poll with two choices: “Yes, I love God!” and “No, I am a Democrat” (i.e., I hate God). Clicking either option led to a fundraising page for Mayra Flores.

A far-right Republican, Flores won a special election in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley in June 2022 and became the first female Mexican-born member of the US House of Representatives. She had promoted QAnon-related hashtags and the conspiracy theory that antifa had orchestrated the January 6 riot. She was a climate denier. (Elon Musk tweeted that he had voted for her.) Flores didn’t last too long in the House. The following November she lost decisively to a Democrat.

Now, after being recruited by the National Republican Congressional Committee and endorsed by Trump, Flores is running for the seat again. And she may have a shot. In the first quarter of this year, she raised more than twice as much as her Democratic opponent Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, though he is still better positioned to win.

Imagine the worldview of a Republican who listens to Trump and Flores—and believes them: Democrats are God-haters out to kill your Dear Leader. What might the proper response be?

A week ago, the New York Times ran a long article on the rise of political violence in the United States. In its first section, it reported examples of violence from the right and the left, making this seem like a both-sides problem. Not until the 20th paragraph did the newspaper note, “Research does show…that recent acts of political violence are more likely to be carried out by perpetrators aligned with right-wing causes and beliefs.” This reality of Trumpism is shortchanged in much media coverage.

Granted, there are some angry and hateful voices and actors on the left, but few, if any of them, are national leaders. Their vitriol falls far short of the venom that pours from the right, up through its highest ranks. Trump has been inciting hatred his entire career. (See the Central Park Five.) He incited an insurrectionist riot. Now as he schemes to achieve his restoration to power, he is continually amping up his efforts to dehumanize (Vermin!), delegitimize (the courts are against me!), and demonize (Biden is a murderer!). It’s nothing new: He sees discord, division, and chaos as beneficial for his campaign. He is happy to break America in order to rule it.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

The Our Land team is taking a break to honor Memorial Day—and brace for the coming five months. We’ll see you in a week. And when we return you’ll find information on the next Our Land Zoom get-together for premium subscribers. If you’d like to attend—and you’re not already sending us a few bucks a month to receive the full version of Our Land—now’s your chance to sign up.

While I was reporting on the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign, I fell down a rabbit hole. A very deep rabbit hole. A rabbit hole full of paranoia, disinformation, and lies. This is RFK2 Country. I was looking at the Instagram feed of a Kennedy staffer and found that this person had posted a video of Kennedy claiming that months before the Covid pandemic struck in early 2020, the CIA had developed a scheme to hide the source of the outbreak. The evidence of this, Kennedy said, was a pandemic simulation held in October 2019 called Event 201.

Event 201—this sounded rather nefarious. I decided to investigate and found interviews in which Kennedy had gone much further. Follow me closely here: He alleged that Event 201 was organized by the CIA to cook up a diabolical plot to use the Covid pandemic to impose a “totalitarian” clamp down and mount a “coup d’etat” against democracy. No one had to take his word on this, he said. Just look at the video of Event 201 on YouTube.

I took him up on that. I watched and saw that a pandemic war game was organized by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security that presented 15 “players” from the worlds of business, public health, government, and nonprofits figuring out how the private sector could respond to a major pandemic. The event, which was held before an audience and livestreamed, was standard fare. It did not match Kennedy’s hyperbolic description, but it did demonstrate how far detached from reality Kennedy is. To view this exercise as a conspiracy to turn America into a dictatorship, one would have to be delusional.

Many of us know that Kennedy is a proponent of loony conspiracy theories about vaccines, Covid, and other topics, but the full depth of his battiness has not been covered by most of the media. So I wrote about that, in light of Kennedy’s batcrap crazy notions about Event 201. You can read that article here.

The judges debated whether to honor Nikki Haley as this week’s victor for her declaration that she intends to vote for Donald Trump. She prefaced her statement by saying she wanted a president who supported American allies, would “hold our enemies to account,” would secure the border, would support “capitalism and freedom,” and one who favors “less debt, not more debt.” She continued: “Trump has not been perfect on these policies…But Biden has been a catastrophe. So I will be voting for Trump.”

Given her list of mainstream Republican priorities, the statement made no sense. President Joe Biden has generally worked better with US allies than did Trump (Israel is a special case), while Trump has given aid and comfort to Vladimir Putin. Trump exploded the deficit as president and as a candidate blocked a bipartisan border-security measure. As for freedom, he’s made his authoritarian agenda clear. Moreover, on the campaign trial, Haley proclaimed that Trump was a “disaster” and referred to him as “unhinged.” So she wants to put an “unhinged” fella back in the White House and in charge of the nuclear arsenal?

Pretty dumb, right? But the judges determined that this remark was more hypocritical than idiotic—a sign of Haley’s soulless careerism. She obviously wants to run for president again, and her odds in a future GOP primary are likely to be much lower if she continues to tell the truth about Trump. Voting against Biden would be deemed by Trump cultists to be a grand act of betrayal—one not to be forgotten or forgiven. And the party is likely to remain dominated (or greatly influenced) by Trumpism in 2028, whether he wins or not this year. Haley is just yielding to opportunism, as is her nature.

Let’s move on to the true contenders this week. Hung Cao, a far-right conservative Republican who is running in the GOP Senate primary in Virginia, explained during an interview why he’s pursuing this position:

There’s a place in Monterey, California, called Lovers Point. The original name was Lovers of Christ Point. But now it’s become—they took out the “Christ”—it’s become Lovers Point. And really Monterey is a very dark place now. A lot of witchcraft. The wiccan community has really taken over there. We can’t let that happen in Virginia.

A lot of politicians have difficulty articulating why they are running for office. Not Cao: Keep witches out of Virginia! Given that the GOP is trying to take the nation back to the 1800s regarding women’s rights and other freedoms, leave it to Cao to outdo them all by pushing the GOP into the 1600s. He’s one of five contenders in the Republican contest. Last year, he lost but ran a competitive race for a House seat.

Meanwhile, James Woods, the actor-turned MAGA-naut, waded into geopolitics this week. In response to an Economist report that Iran is close to developing a nuclear weapon, he tweeted: “Remember when Obama made a nuclear treaty with Iran. Remember when Trump said it would lead to Iran building nuclear weapons and canceled it? Remember when Biden's puppet masters reinstated it? Remember the billions of dollars and pallets of cash sent to Iran by Obama and Biden?”

There’s a problem with his analysis: Biden has not reinstated the deal. Trump killed the deal negotiated by the Obama administration, claiming that the accord (which limited Iran’s nuclear activity) would lead to Tehran developing nuclear weapons. But canceling the agreement made it easier for Iran to pursue those weapons, and now it’s close to achieving that objective. Trump did nothing to slow or prevent Iran from going nuclear. He eased the way. Woods should go back to acting.

Our winner is Jared Perdue, the secretary of transportation in the cabinet of Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He earned his title for this tweet: “As Floridians prepare for Freedom Summer, Florida's bridges will follow suit, illuminating in red, white, and blue from Memorial Day through Labor Day! Thanks to the leadership of @GovRonDeSantis, Florida continues to be the freest state in the nation.”

That may seem innocuous. But the official message Perdue sent to localities throughout the Sunshine State was this: You cannot illuminate bridges with other colors. No rainbow lights to commemorate Pride Month (which is June) and LGBTQ rights. Consider all the pettiness that went into this decision. And the absurdity of declaring Florida “the freest state in the nation,” when you are prohibiting local communities from deciding how to light up a bridge, not to mention DeSantis’ attacks on academic freedom and the freedom of businesses to establish health and safety rules for their consumers and customers, as occurred during the Covid pandemic. There’s also his draconian six-week ban on abortions. For claiming this dumbass move an act of freedom, Perdue ends up in first place.

In the last Our Land outing, I probed an important question: Why do Trump supporters believe and/or accept all his outrageous lies? No surprise, my analysis sent many a reader to his or her keyboards.

Gary Stewart wrote:

In response to your invitation to offer additional explanations for how Trump supporters deal with his oh-so-obviously-ridiculously-wrong statements, I would offer the following observations. I am an internal medicine physician, and I am currently reading The Cult of Trump by Steven Hassan, a cult expert who was previously fully incorporated as a Moonie and therefore speaks with personal knowledge of what it was like to have been drawn into a cult that, in retrospect, was based upon patently insane claims.

The psychological process by which cult leaders groom followers can occur in a mass psychosis setting The tools are very similar from one cult leader to another. Trump effectively checks off most of the long list of communication techniques used by cult leaders, which Hassan goes through in detail. Trump also shares a very long list of personal characteristics typical of cult leaders. One method is to be constantly moving and constantly providing a torrent of information that overloads those who are unable to detect that the information is invalid and can be dismissed.

This torrent of claims is purposefully incoherent—that is, there are statements that are internally inconsistent. There is never time for the listener to sit back and logically reason their way through all the mass of input, so it overwhelms them. The confidence with which these things are said, and the endless repetition, become the basis for credence. Once this state is reached, the factual accuracy of what is being said becomes entirely irrelevant.

Mr. Hassan gave some very telling examples of statements that the cult leader of the Moonies made, which are literally just batsh** crazy, the kind of thing that no halfway rational person over the age of 13 would believe for one moment. Hassan describes how he didn't question them, and just kept trying to figure out how he could be more like Moon. In short, many of Trump's followers are in a psychological state that is indistinguishable from that of members of a cult, technically-speaking. A lot of psychological research has gone into this.

They are not in an analytical frame of mind at all. They just accept it, and there is no categorization of what is being said beyond the fact that Trump is the one saying it. It's more akin to a hypnotized state. However, the connection to their emotions, which is non-analytical, is very strong.

John Friedman shared:

I recently finished Demagogue by Larry Tye. It’s about the rise and fall of Senator Joe McCarthy, who also had the support of the people and congressional Republicans. There are striking similarities between the two men to whom truth was ignored or omitted, while lies were flaunted as truths. One key similarity is both were/are great salesmen of fear. My take from the book is people got tired of McCarthy and credible news sources brought him down. (God bless Edward R. Murrow!) What irritates me the most is anti-Trump politicians and media labeling his followers as cultists, then leaving that topic untouched. They do nothing to delve into it and deal with the cult. 

Maybe they should read the Hassan book mentioned above.

Mary Santarcangelo chimed in:

Bill Maher says that each side (Trump, anti-Trump) regards the other as an existential threat to this country. As you outlined in this newsletter, the Trump lovers really are an existential threat to this country because they do not internalize the ethos of the United States. I understand the ethos of the United States to be that all human beings have equal rights under law and as citizens of the United States we bind ourselves together to ever strive for a more perfect union to maintain a nation that guarantees life, liberty and justice for all its citizens. The maddening question is what is wrong with these people? I suppose it comes down to the ability of human beings to compartmentalize their emotions and motivations. Perhaps some (the majority?) are kind and caring assets to their communities, so how can they be enthralled to the moral horror show that is Trump?

Drake Christensen reported this experience:

I had a recent conversation with a lifelong friend who’s probably a single-issue voter: She’s anti-abortion. I mentioned that Trump is selling Bibles. She hadn’t heard about it and didn’t believe it until I showed her ads and the website. It concerns her as a Catholic. How as a religious person she hasn’t heard he’s hawking Bibles is beyond me. It does show how far some people are out of touch with what’s going on.

Pooky Amsterdam emailed:

One thing I've observed is that by becoming a Trumper you also buy into and belong to a group of people who are supporting you all the time. You have your own outfits and dress code, your own talking points, TV shows. You know what to think, say and do. And Trumpers have a strong social network so they are always correct amongst themselves. Trump has created as we know a real cult of identity politics. That is also why they buy in. And they do not believe this fascism thing will hit them. It's only for POC or gay people or Democrats or Jews.

In response to the recent issue about the latest efforts of Russia to intervene in the current American election, several readers echoed my thought that the media are not paying sufficient attention to this crucial matter.

Charlotte Durham wrote:

The media want to cover the embarrassing exchange between Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jasmine Crockett but not a word about the more important hearing [held by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Kremlin’s ongoing covert operations targeting US politics]. If I hadn't read your piece, I would have not known about this. 

I recently reported that Moxie told me that she doesn’t subscribe to Our Land. In response, Edward Hackett emailed:

Let's pass the hat for Moxie. Raise enough money so she can subscribe. Maybe even a little extra to pay someone to read it to her. Her comments will be nice; she knows who buys the dog food.

Speaking of which...

“What do you think is going to happen in the Trump trial?”
“Moxie, you know I don’t make predictions.”
“Did the prosecutor bring up the point he has no dogs? That could really hurt him with the jury.”
“No, that wouldn’t be relevant.”
“Or maybe it would be too prejudicial.”

May 21, 2024: Why do they believe Trump?; the meaning of Trump’s bad makeup; lesson from a mass shooter’s mother; the beautiful noir of Ripley; and more.

May 18, 2024: Here come the Russians, again; Sonya Cohen Cramer’s You’ve Been a Friend to Me; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Eric Trump); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

May 14, 2024: Paul Manafort and the metrics of shamelessness; 3 Body Problem’s obvious but understated tie to climate change; Neil Young and Crazy Horse keep a promise; and more.

May 11, 2024: America is broken, and the media ain’t helping; my fascinating trip to Japan; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Laura Ingraham); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

May 7, 2024: Modern-day lessons from Hiroshima; Ed Zwick’s Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions; the virtues of Tokyo Vice; and more.

May 1, 2024: From the Our Land archive: Donald Trump, stochastic terrorist; and more.

April 24, 2024: From the Our Land archive: Take a walk; and more.

April 20, 2024: Ari Berman’s new book explains the GOP's grand plan: minority rule; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Sen. Tom Cotton and Kari Lake); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

April 16, 2024: Should there be presidential debates?; Peter Morgan’s Patriots lacks that ol’ Russian drama; the Beckham documentary scores on the fields of sports and celebrity; and more.

April 13, 2024: Sleepwalking toward the 2024 election; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Woody Johnson); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

April 9, 2024: A special Our Land report: Everything you wanted to know about Trump’s porn-star-hush-money case; and more.