MAGA returns to a fave fantasy to tune out Trump's troubles

There has been much attention rightly paid to Project 2025 during the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. However, not enough attention has been paid to modern America’s original manual of hatred, "The Turner Diaries."

First published in 1978 and recently banned by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon following the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, thanks to the combined minds of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, this racist dystopian novel about a white supremacist insurrection undergirds the Trumpian worldview. In a nutshell, the book is an apocalyptic tale of genocide against racial minorities set in a near-future America.

This narrative successfully captured 49.8% of the voting electorate in November 2024. First introduced in 2015 after Donald and Melania Trump came down the Trump Tower escalator to announce his bid for the Republican nomination, the premise was always focal to his three political campaigns and his first term of abuse, lawlessness and corruption. Soon after the failed coup d’état on Jan. 6, this narrative became the core message of Trumpism.

At the same time, the persecution or victimization of the wannabe strongman became the core message of Trumpism. It is why Trump was returned to the White House instead of going to prison for his crimes against the Constitution and the American people.

This same narrative also captured and underlined the anti-constitutional 6-3 decision by the MAGA majority of the U.S. Supreme Court granting Trump — and all subsequent presidents — criminal immunity from prosecution.  

I am not alone in making the obvious connections between Donald Trump, MAGA supporters, and the words and deeds and beliefs of Timothy McVeigh and company who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building back in April 1995. McVeigh’s bombing killed 168 people, 19 of whom were children, and the rest were federal office workers providing government services. Like other military veterans of the first Iraq War, McVeigh did not believe that the U.S. should become entangled in foreign wars at a time when his white-working class buddies back in Buffalo were suffering from the earliest waves of deindustrialization in America.

McVeigh was part of an emerging right-wing militia movement that was going after or attacking a corrupt group of people that they believed were secretly running the government from within. They also believed that it was on the ordinary citizens of America to take up arms against a tyrannical ruling order, no matter what the cost to innocent lives might be.

With the rise of Trumpian propaganda and disinformation, this radical conspiracy theory about a deep state and its enemies from within was going viral and eventually became the hegemonic mainstreaming narrative. 

Whether or not Trumpists have read the “Diaries” authored by the 1974 founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, not unlike McVeigh or The Order before him and other militia types such as the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers, those who voted for Trump in 2024 along with the MAGA crowd, all share the white-power fantasy described in the pages of the “Diaries.”

It inspired a slew of violent crimes by The Order in the 1980s, McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building back in 1995 and Trump’s assault on the Capitol after he lost the 2020 election. It has also accounted for why the Always Trumpers still support the liar in chief to this day and why they believe in the falsehoods that the election was “rigged” and “stolen” by the Democrats.  

It is also consistent with the justification for Trump keeping a campaign promise to exercise executive clemency and provide full, pardons to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Which he did on day one of his new administration to the tune of some 1,500 convicted felons, including leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy by juries of their peers and were serving 18- and 22-year sentences, respectively. Trump also signed the ominous executive order "Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens," signed on his 99th day in office as part of his assault on sanctuary cities. If all of the parts of this order are successful, they would also usher in pathways to a police state.  

For example, Trump’s twin “other” wars on immigrants and on DEI recipients are visible expressions of the same old conspiracy theories operating to defeat the cabal of Jews, African Americans and internationalists that have allegedly been stealing America's true identity and manifest destiny. These are the folks, along with anyone else who disagrees with Trump’s dystopian vision, that are presently being silenced, removed or eliminated at whatever cost this might have for our on-the-ropes democratic republic.

All these declarations or projections and talking points by the MAGA forces are part and parcel of the same old lies about “paid” protesters at rallies agianst Trump and Elon Musk. Something that both Donald and Elon are well-steamed in, not to mention their extensive knowledge about buying both candidates and votes.

Perhaps nothing captures Trump’s authoritarian agenda better than ICE’s illegal kidnapping and disappearing of hundreds of people or DOGE’s firings or dismissals of some 250,000 federal workers — all without any due process of law. All of which makes perfect sense in the Trumpian schemes to dismantle and emasculate USAID worldwide and to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s proposed “redesign” of his department to do away with human rights programs and others targeting war crimes or the strengthening of freedom and democracy. Namely, that of reversing the “decades of bloat” and seeking to eradicate the ingrained thinking of globalism or of a “radical political ideology” that Rubio now believes represents the antithesis of Trump’s attempt to realign world power under the imperialistic banner of “America First.”  

For nearly five decades, the “Diaries” have been the right wing’s favorite go-to conspiracy theory. Many of the driving forces behind Trumpian authoritarianism have their roots in the hateful thesis of the “Diaries.”