One of the most under-covered stories of the Trump era and the 2024 presidential campaign is Donald Trump’s relationship with far-right extremism. This has been going on for years. During the 2016 race, he hobnobbed with and praised conspiracy-monger Alex Jones and encouraged anti-Muslim hatred. A few months into his presidency, Trump hailed participants in the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville as “very fine people.” The insurrectionists who stormed Capitol Hill on January 6 for Trump included Christian nationalists, members of right-wing militias, white supremacists, Confederate flag wavers, neo-Nazis, and others. In 2022, he supped with antisemite Kanye West and Hitler fanboy Nick Fuentes. He has repeatedly winked and nodded at the unhinged QAnon movement.

These are just a few examples of Trump’s long-running affiliation with radicals of the right—an affinity that has not prevented him from becoming president and, now, the GOP’s banner carrier for a third time. While the instances cited above have been covered by the mainstream press—except perhaps for Trump’s pat on the back for Jones—they haven’t shaped the overall Trump narrative. And Trump’s current ties to fringe and hard-right activists are not at the center stage of the 2024 election. Far more (digital) ink has been spilled on Joe Biden’s age.

Take Project 2025, the operation organized by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks to develop a far-reaching agenda for a second Trump term that would grant him expanded powers to run an authoritarian-ish government in which he could order the prosecutions of his foes and critics and demand loyalty oaths from federal workers. This initiative has earned a couple of stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post. But how many voters are aware of this extensive scheme? A recent poll found that 76 percent of voters said they had heard "a little" or "nothing" about Project 2025.

On Saturday, the Washington Post ran a piece on Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist who was budget chief when Trump was in the White House and who’s now a major player behind Project 2025. He’s in line to be Trump’s chief of staff, should the convicted felon return to power. And he’s an outright radical right-winger. In a 2022 essay, he claimed, “We are living in a post constitutional moment” because the left over the past century has supposedly hijacked the government. He decried the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, and the civil service. He denounced the independence of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He grouses that “conservatives find themselves interpreting a revered document [the Constitution] that is no longer in effect, lacking the tools to save their country.”

Vought’s answer is for conservatives to become “radical constitutionalists” and hyper-originalists who “throw off the [constitutional] precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years.” He doesn’t spell it out, but his targets could well be civil rights laws and legal cases that protect an assortment of rights. The goal: to destroy “this regime” that is “increasingly arrayed against the American people” and “woke and weaponized.” This includes annihilating the FBI, which, Vought claimed, is “putting political opponents in jail.” (Narrator: The FBI is not putting political opponents in jail.) The hour, he warned, is late.

Vought’s goal is to load up the federal government with people who share his troglodyte views and prosecute culture wars on multiple fronts, including reproductive rights and immigration. He has recently suggested that United States adopt a “Christian immigration ethic,” which, presumably, would limit legal immigration for non-Christians. As the Washington Post reported, he has been named the policy director for the Republican National Committee, and Trump has applauded Vought as someone who “would do a great job.”

The Washington Post effectively depicted Vought’s extremism. But I fear this single shot and much of the media coverage does not capture the full depth of Trump’s ongoing alliance with the far right. For instance: Trump is scheduled to appear this week at the so-called “People’s Convention,” a conference organized by Turning Point Action, a political action committee headed by Trump sycophant Charlie Kirk, who has recently come under fire for a series of racist remarks. The usual assortment of Trumpists are on the bill: Donald Trump Jr., South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Vivek Ramaswamy, Lara Trump, Roger Stone, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Steve Bannon (assuming he’s not in prison). Also listed as a speaker is Candace Owens, who left the right-wing Daily Caller after coming under fire for promoting antisemitic notions. She also has denied Covid existed and apparently excused Hitler, saying, “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well — OK, fine.” She has questioned whether dinosaurs “roamed the earth until a great big meteor hit.” Once upon a time, it would have been notable—and not recommended—for a presidential candidate to be hosted by a racist like Kirk or share the stage with such a fringe player as Owens. Not anymore.

Now let’s dive a little deeper. A month after the “People’s Convention,” Kirk’s Turning Point USA is holding “The Believers Summit” in West Palm Beach, Florida, not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. Its aim is to deploy “biblical truths” to “counteract ‘woke’ narratives” and “to facilitate a God-breathed transformation in our nation.” Speakers include David Barton, who, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, has “long promoted the idea, now widely popular among the religious right, that the Founding Fathers never intended the separation of church and state but instead sought to construct a Christian nation.” Also on the bill is John Amanchukwu, a North Carolina pastor who preached against the Raleigh school district’s diversity and equality program, claiming it was “grooming children to be the next pervert.” And then there’s Doug Wilson.

Wilson is a leading Christian nationalist on the right. In a 1996 monograph titled “Southern Slavery, As It Was” that he co-wrote, he observed, “Slavery as it existed in the South…was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence.” He added, "There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.” And there’s more: "Slave life was to [slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care." His publishing house published a book in 2023 that, as Reason magazine put it, “advocates an ethnically uniform nation ruled by a ‘Christian prince’ with the power to punish blasphemy and false religion.” The author, not surprising, had a history of associating with white supremacists. Wilson promoted the book on an appearance with Tucker Carlson. He has also called for women to submit to male authority, especially in the bedroom, noting that the lack of such submission can lead to rape.

Wilson told Carlson, “As a Christian, I would like that national structure to conform to the thing that God wants, and not the thing that man wants. That’s Christian nationalism.” But it’s the thing that God wants as Wilson interprets it. That’s fundamentalism. In an interview in February with the Religious News Service, he envisioned “a Christian republic” in which people who embrace “loopy-heresy” would be barred from public office. His dream world included a global alliance of Christian states that would exclude any nation that permits same-sex marriage or abortion.

So Trump associates with and legitimizes Kirk, who has recently made racist remarks and who provides a pulpit for Wilson, a Christian supremacist and somewhat of a slavery apologist. For decades, there’s been an ugly swamp of bigotry, hatred, and intolerance on the right. Republicans have often played footsie with its denizens. (See my book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, which, alas, remains far too relevant these days.) But Trump has enthusiastically leaped into this muck, bear-hugging and elevating extremists and miscreants. And he seems poised to welcome them into a Trump 2.0 administration. This ain’t a secret. But it practically might as well be, if the media and the Democrats don’t tell the story of this ongoing crusade loudly and often.  

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

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Godzilla Minus One. Sometimes a monster movie is not just a monster movie. The original 1933 King Kong—later criticized for racial stereotypes—was envisioned by one of its co-directors, Merian Cooper, as a tale of “the primitive doomed by modern civilization.” It can also be viewed as a story of capitalistic hubris. In the 1954 Godzilla, the star’s destruction of Tokyo was meant to mirror the horror of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (If you missed the Our Land issue on my recent trip to Hiroshima, you can see it here.) The film’s opening scene—Godzilla destroying a Japanese fishing boat—was a direct reference to a real-world event in which a US hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll produced radioactive fallout that descended upon a Japanese vessel, sickening its crew and killing one member. Overall, Godzilla could be seen as metaphor for the danger and terror of the new nuclear age. And Godzilla Minus One, the latest of the Godzilla films made by Toho, the Japanese film studio that originated the franchise, also comes with a monster of a theme.

The winner of an Oscar this year for best visual effects, Godzilla Minus One is an origin story for the famous kaiju. We’re back to World War II. It’s near the end of the war—Japan is clearly going to lose—and Koichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot, chickens out on a suicide mission, landing his plane at a small Japanese aviation base on Odo Island. He claims his aircraft has a mechanical problem, but nothing is wrong with the plane. Soon after his arrival, the original Godzilla—merely dinosaur-sized at this point, not yet as big as an office building—shows up and attacks the base. The technicians urge Shikishima to scurry to his plane and use its gun to stop the beast. He reaches the cockpit but freezes. The monster kills most of the workers. Shikishima survives and returns to a post-war Tokyo devastated by US firebombing. He is wracked with guilt and doubly-shamed—for failing as a kamikaze and failing to take down Godzilla.

In the meantime, Godzilla, terrifying enough on Odo, has gone nuclear, thanks to that US H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll. He’s grown tremendously and now can shoot a powerful heat ray from his mouth. And he’s heading to Tokyo. The United States, overseeing Japan after its surrender, tells the nation it’s on its own. Godzilla reaches the capital city and destroys a big chunk of it before heading back to sea. With no military left, Japanese civilians must pull together a force to thwart a return visit. Shikishima becomes a part of this ragtag outfit.

That’s enough of a description of the fun-to-watch and amusingly predictable Godzilla Minus One. As for the big idea in the movie, this version also works as a cautionary tale about nuclear weapons. But stitched into the film are several scenes in which characters assail the Japanese elite for having guided the country into World War II and cavalierly using an entire generation of Japanese men as cannon fodder for a pointless war. When former Japanese soldiers are loading warships heading out to confront Godzilla, an engineer involved in the plan to neutralize the monster says, “Their faces, they’re bright and beaming. That’s because they know this time, they have a chance to make a real difference….Now we get to do good again.” Godzilla Minus One, now streaming on Netflix, isn’t quite Apocalypse Now. But it’s an antiwar movie in which Japan has been devastated not just by a monster but by the monstrous warmongers of the empire class.

The Pole, J.M. Coetzee. In 1980, South African writer J.M. Coetzee published Waiting for the Barbarians, an intense novel set in an unnamed settlement in an unnamed land that assailed colonialism and, obviously, apartheid, as the anti-apartheid movement was gaining steam throughout the world. He went on to win the Booker Prize twice and the Nobel Prize for Literature, producing over a dozen other novels, memoirs, and collections. Several were set in South Africa, but none since 2009. Which is the case for his most recent, The Pole.

Inspired by Dante’s Vita Nova, a collection of poems and commentaries the Italian poet wrote to express his love for Beatrice, The Pole reverses the POV. Beatriz, a patron of the arts living in Barcelona and married to a banker, is now the storyteller. She helps to manage a classical music series that hosts a Polish pianist named Witold Walczykiewicz, a renowned interpreter of Chopin. She’s not a big fan of his highly technical take on Chopin, but he is wildly smitten by her and pursues her from afar, inviting her to travel with him to Brazil. A cool number, Beatriz is not attracted to him—he has a mane of white hair but he’s a bit too old and boney for her—or swayed by his importuning. But she seems to be drawn to his love of her. She feels compelled to sort out her mixed feelings, but in a deliberate manner. This is not an affair of the heart. This is a more a matter of what-does-this-all-mean. About her. About her marriage (to a man who presumably has had some side action). About her life. She eventually yields and agrees to meet Witold at her husband’s summer place in Mallorca. For what? She isn’t sure.

Coetzee devotes more time to how Beatriz copes with the adoration from Witold than to the poor ol’ pianist’s unrequited love, which leads the musician to write poems for her—as did Dante for Beatrice—that he keeps to himself. I read this short novel mostly as an exploration of secrecy within personal relations. Can two people within a marriage each maintain a slice of a secret life separate from the other? But it certainly stands as a contemplation of an unequal exchange of love. Does Beatriz in some way love the Pole? We may never know.

June 8, 2024: Is Donald Trump Jr. right that Republicans are weenies?; more on Trump’s love affair with revenge; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Sen. Tommy Tuberville); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

June 4, 2024: The Trump-Russia denialists are back; revenge of the Trump; a frustrating Civil War; the unending extraordinariness of Richard Thompson; and more.

June 1, 2024: Trump loses a big battle in his war on accountability; Dumbass Comment of the Week; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

May 25, 2024: Trump’s dangerous grifting; Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crazier than you might think; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Jared Perdue); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

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.