Liar's Circus

July 1, 2020
Travels among Trumpian true believers. Hoffman, the author of outstanding books that blend travel, history, and anthropology such as Savage Harvest (2014), turns his eye on Donald Trump's MAGA rallies. The author racked up thousands of road miles over many months going into Trumpian strongholds, meeting people such as "a fifty-nine-year-old self-employed house painter and dog breeder, a former Marine, big boned and goateed, who walked with a rolling gait and traveled with a bottle of whiskey, a battery-operated bullhorn, several large flags, and banners exalting Donald Trump." That fellow vies to be first seated in the front row at any Trump rally, but he's skunked by a young cancer survivor who has turned to both the Bible and the Donald. Early on, Hoffman validates Godwin's law: namely, that these days, in any conversation involving politics, someone will soon compare one of the players or subjects with Hitler. Sure enough he does, citing Hitler's observation nearly a century ago that "great movements are...volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments." That's abundantly evident, and the quote is apposite. Hoffman often shakes his head in wonderment but rarely condescends, and he approaches his subject with scholarly vigor, sometimes quoting from heady philosophical and sociological sources while retaining a sense of fraught adventure: "If Trumpism was a place, then it was a place I could travel to just as surely as a village in the swamps of New Guinea or the huts of nomads in the rain forests of Borneo." What he discovered speaks volumes about economic uncertainty, racism ("almost no one admitted to being a racist...but none of them wanted blacks living next door to them or to share any power with them"), xenophobia, fundamentalism, and other populist dog whistles that "lay at the heart of Trump's message and his power." A valuable portrait of authoritarianism in action and its more-than-willing adherents.

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August 17, 2020
Journalist Hoffman (The Last Wild Men of Borneo) recounts his experiences at eight Trump rallies held between October 2019 and January 2020 in this vivid yet somewhat shallow sociological study. Hoffman has a keen sense for such ironies as the blaring of Village People songs “in an arena of fundamentalist Christians who thought homosexuality a sin,” and enriches his descriptions of the rallies with incisive sketches of rural American towns hollowed out by the decline of family farms and lucrative blue-collar jobs and “surrounded by lines and lines of chain stores.” Yet interviews with attendees, including a former strip club owner who’s been to nearly 60 rallies, a mortgage broker who thinks Trump is “heaven-sent,” and multiple people who subscribe to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, reveal little of substance. Hoffman also delves into the psychology of crowds, makes comparisons to Nazi Germany, rebukes the Republican establishment for its submissiveness, and holds out hope that “the end of American exceptionalism” brought about by Trump’s rise to power will provide “an opportunity for wisdom.” The result is both an intriguing portrait of a political phenomenon and a missed opportunity to go beyond the stereotypes of Trump loyalists.