Summary
Donald Trump is reshaping U.S. culture through a propaganda-driven strategy that rebrands symbols and controls narratives.
His actions include renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, issuing numerous executive orders, pressuring media outlets, and taking over cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center.
These moves, aimed at consolidating power and curbing dissent, mirror tactics used by authoritarian regimes, as the administration uses symbolism, legal challenges, and media manipulation to control public discourse.
(4) They think that, because they’ve been playing the game so long, they have some kind of profound insight that is denied to the hoi polloi, but really, they’re just narrowly focused tacticians with no principles and no strategy, unless smugness is a strategy. And if things go in the way it increasingly looks like they will, when we’re at the barricades, the DNC will be on the sidelines attempting to tone-police us as we fight for our lives. All they were ever good at was playing good cop, and they weren’t even all that good at that.
And I agree that Jon Stewart has been consistently out of touch on this issue. If we are able to turn this mess around, the people doing the turning will have to be made of sterner stuff than that. Resistance is not going to be something that happens with the pinky finger extended. Only after things have returned to normal will people like Jon Stewart again be relevant.