MAGA’s Revanchist Roots: a Tale of Tropes
BY JERRY LEMBCKE
Image by visuals.
A year out from the 2024 presidential election, a New York Times/Siena poll showed the Republican former President Donald Trump leading the incumbent Democrat Joe Biden in five of six swing states – this, despite Trump having skipped two televised Republican Party debates and facing 4 criminal indictments.[1]
Trump’s defiance of political gravity has spawned a genre of Trump-studies, most focused on his character and the personalities of his devotees: The title of New York Times’s Maggie Haberman’s book Confidence Man is coda for her attribution of Trumpism to the perverse magnetism of his arrested development; Robert Draper’s Weapons of Mass Delusion follows suit, psychologizing his followers’ plunge “into...










