Trump

Project 2025

How Trump Loyalists and Right-Wing Leaders Are Paving a Fast Road to Fascism

Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation coalition launched in 2022, aims to “take the reins of government” during a second Trump term by concentrating power in the executive branch—the President and political appointees. The project seeks to pursue long…

Article

Still Here

The Christian Right in the 2020 Election

A white woman with blond hair, kneeling with her arms in the air, a Trump flag tied around her neck and hanging down her back

Even amid Trump’s defeat, the 2020 election proved that the Christian Right may still be the most powerful, best-organized faction in American politics. The popular stereotype notwithstanding, the election demonstrated that the Christian Right is…

Article

Armed militia members march next to a WWG1WGA flag, a common identifier of QAnon believers, at the United We Stand & Patriots March for America, St. Paul, Minnesota, September 12, 2020 (Credit: Fibonacci Blue/Flickr).

Recent developments in activity and rhetoric raise the possibility that some anti-government factions could morph into pro-Trump paramilitaries; a phenomenon we may see during this interregnum period.

Article

Unholy

Author Q&A with Sarah Posner

For years, Sarah Posner has been one of the most perceptive journalists covering the political activism of U.S. evangelicals and the broader Religious Right. In 2016, she became one of the first reporters to track the rise of the Alt Right, and its…

Q&A

Standing By for Violence

Ahead of November Election, Trump Inflames His Vigilante Base

President Trump speaking during the 2020 Presidential Debate

During the September 29, 2020 presidential debate, President Donald Trump gave his White nationalist and militia base a jolt of inspiration, refusing to condemn White supremacy and recent acts of violence and intimidation against widespread Black…

Article

Ronald Reagan gives his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, July 1980.

Trump’s election was less an aberration than a reflection of changes in the New Right coalition, which brought business elites, evangelicals, and neoconservatives together under the Republican umbrella in the late 1970s and has underpinned the party…

Article

Supreme Court building, Washington, DC, USA.

The contemporary anti-immigrant movement, which has established influence at various levels of the administration, has promoted and attempted to litigate changing the census to reveal citizenship status for nearly 40 years.

Article

Losing their Religion

A Roundtable Discussion

In the 1980s, the Moral Majority helped usher in an era of politicized Christianity in the United States. The breadth of Christian Right activity since then, from the evangelical Right, to fundamentalist homeschooling, to cross-denominational…

Webinar

Tarso Luís Ramos speaking at the Facing Race conference.

I’m a pastor’s kid and I was raised to believe in Martin Luther King Jr.’s inspiring assertion that the arc of history may be long, but it bends towards justice. And, I was raised in a family that had to flee our country when Brazilian democracy…

Webinar

Trump is briefed by Michael Burnett about the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh

Today, President Trump visited Pittsburgh, PA after a violently antisemitic attack at Tree of Life synagogue left 11 dead on Saturday. The shootings are the deadliest attack on Jews in the United States. Jewish leaders affiliated with Bend the Arc…

Article

Anti-Semitic flier distributed by the Daily Stormer

On Monday, October 22, reporting that someone had placed a bomb in the mailbox of billionaire George Soros dominated news coverage.¹ Similar devices were subsequently discovered to …

Article

Dismantling Public Education One Brick at a Time

The Privatization Strategy of Pioneer Institute and Betsy Devos

President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos poses for a photo with students of Saint Andrew Catholic School on March 3, 2017.

On Wednesday, September 12 a federal judge ruled Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s delay of Obama-era regulation of for-profit colleges as “unlawful.” The regulations forgive federal student loans from “misleading, deceitful, and predatory” lending…

Article

Protest of the Muslim Ban, Washington, D.C., January 2017.

Since the Trump administration came into office, anti-Muslim sentiment has become a glue that binds this administration’s national security leadership with anti-Muslim organizations, White nationalist organizations, and anti-government militia.

Article

In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump obtained 63.5 percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton’s 32.5 percent in Westmoreland County.4 The county is now solidly red, but it hasn’t always been. I grew up in Westmoreland County in the 1960s and…

Article

Los Angeles march for Immigrant Rights, 2017.

The racism, nationalism, and misogyny driving the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants is evident to all but a willfully ignorant majority on the Supreme Court of the United States. Whether in exclusionary policies like the…

Statement

Charlie Kirk (founder of TPUSA) speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.

Established in 2012, Turning Point USA (TPUSA)’s mission is to “identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.” Claiming to have a presence on over 1,000 college campuses…

Profile on the Right

Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

The depth and breadth of White evangelical support for Donald Trump before and since his election has perplexed most observers. But a team of sociologists, freshly-analyzed data in hand, may have the answer that has eluded journalists, scholars, and…

Article

The Future of the U.S. “Populist Radical Right” and White Nationalism

Looking at Cas Mudde’s The Far Right in America

Donald Trump did not invent nativism or right-wing populism, but he did provide those ideologies a more prominent platform than it has enjoyed in many decades. And, as scholar Cas Mudde warns, its claws in American society will ensure that it…

Article

Protest in support of DACA, September 1, 2017. Photo: Joe Flood / Flickr.

It should come as no surprise that President Trump disparages scores of countries while lamenting the lack of European immigrants coming to the U.S., as he reportedly did during a meeting with lawmakers in January 2018. In addition to his racially…

Article

Race, Class, and the Contradiction of Contemporary Abortion Politics

As we mark the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, two facts about the current abortion patient population in the U.S. are especially striking. First, that patients are disproportionately poor, with half living below the official poverty line and…

Article

Women’s March on Washington, January 21st, 2017. Photo: Molly Adams via Flickr.

On the anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration, PRA Executive Director Tarso Luís Ramos talks about some of what’s changed in the past year, and what progressives should be alert to going forward.

Q&A

Steve Bannon speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland. Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

Stephen K. Bannon was the Executive Chairman of the Far Right media website Breitbart from March 2012 to August 2016, and from August 2017 to January 9, 2018. Between the two periods he took a leave of absence to be Donald Trump’s campaign adviser…

Article

When Silence Equals Death

On Friday, December 15, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration has prohibited the Center for Disease Control (CDC) from using the terms “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and…

Article

In the Court of the Centrist King

Emmanuel Macron and Authoritarian Liberalism

If Macron is the bulwark against a looming authoritarian nightmare, why does his program look like an assault on the fundamental foundations of democracy in France?

Article

The Christian Right’s Growing Allegiance to Trump

As Donald Trump exited the stage after addressing the 2016 Values Voter Summit (VVS) in Washington, DC a year ago, the Rolling Stone’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” blasted from the speakers. The audience gathered together for the Family…

Article

Press Release: From the Streets of Charlottesville to the Corridors of the Capitol, White Nationalism is On the March

Contact: Greeley O’Connor, g.oconnor@politicalresearch.org, 617.666.5300 (BOSTON) The U.S. Far Right has killed nearly 450 people since 1990. Heather Heyer of Charlottesville, Virginia…

Press Release

Battle without Bullets: The Christian Right and Fourth Generation Warfare

What might have seemed to most to be normal, if unusually acrimonious, political aggression was in fact a classic example of a right-wing strategy developed in the late 1980s: Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW). Trump’s rhetoric and policies rightly…

Article

Attacking Trans People in Defense of “Austerity"

On July 24, 2017, the Family Research Council (FRC), a right-wing political advocacy group based in Washington, DC, issued an Action Alert to its members, enlisting their support in denying healthcare to military personnel who are transgender. FRC…

Article

The Triumph of the Lie

How Honesty and Morality Died in Right-Wing Politics

This is how lies move to normalization: A small “white lie” is put forward, just to clarify a point. A larger lie follows, but it’s still only a detail in a larger argument. The whopper, down the line, performs another function: drawing attention…

Article

Photo from 1926 of Klansmen on a ferris wheel in Cañon City, CO.

Trumpism is built on a split-screen image of life for the White middle and working classes: a contemporary view of economic suffering and “loss” to encroaching “others,” while in the background hovers a shimmering past of cultural and economic glory…

Article

Between Trump and Putin

The Right-Wing International, a Crisis of Democracy, and the Future of the European Union

Two men in suits leaning over a table shaking hands

One of the more striking features of the 2016 U.S. election was the convergence of the rhetoric and talking points of President Donald Trump and his supporters with those of the Kremlin. And in the tangled and ongoing investigation of Russian…

Article

A black sign with the words "imagine the end of male supremacy"

Effectively fighting mobilizations like those emboldened by Trump’s election requires accurately understanding their composition—one in which misogyny thrives alongside, and intertwined with, racism.

Article

A man in a suit with a receding hairline talking into a microphone.

Stephen Miller, the 31-year-old senior policy advisor to Trump with no discernible policy experience, developed his right-wing ideology early and has associated himself with white nationalist figures such as Peter Brimelow and Richard Spencer.

Profile on the Right

The President Gets Paradoxical about Religious Freedom

During the presidential campaign and since assuming office, Donald Trump has repeatedly promised the Christian Right that he would make religious freedom a priority. In an apparent bid for their support, Trump made clear that he would advance the…

Article

Donald Trump and Manufacturing the Muslim Menace

Trump’s first week in office was punctuated by an executive order to ban travelers from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the U.S. for 90 days, and refugee admissions for 120 days. Under the order, Syrian refugees are…

Article

Pro-LGBTQ Smokescreens for Anti-Muslim Attacks

In a press release issued after last year’s Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida, where a Muslim-American gunman killed 49 people at a gay dance club, Donald Trump said, “Hillary Clinton can never claim to be a friend of the gay community as…

Article

Profile on the Right: Steve Bannon

Stephen Bannon is the former CEO of Breitbart News Network—which he promotes as “the platform for the Alt Right”—and former chief strategist to Donald Trump. Bannon has a history of antisemitism and has been called “one of the foremost peddlers of…

Profile on the Right

Democratic Principles for Antidemocratic Times

Engaging Trump, Defending Human Rights, and Preventing Authoritarianism

The bigotry and false solutions championed by President Donald Trump are not a new phenomenon in American politics. Indeed, the idea that one person’s dignity requires another’s subjugation has been a central contradiction in this country’s founding…

Statement

Many are called but few are chosen during any presidential transition. That’s why it’s illuminating to consider who Donald Trump has chosen from the parade of possibilities for his transition team and senior administration appointments so far— and…

Article

The Public Health Story Behind Trump's Rise

What we know about income and Trump voters suggests that they are not the poorest Whites, but those who see their communities losing ground. Middle aged and older Whites who don’t live in major cities are the core population of Trump voters. They…

Article

Press Release: Political Research Associates Joins Local Social Justice Groups in Resisting Trump’s Assault on Democracy

Political Research Associates (PRA) joins more than a dozen local social justice organizations in criticizing the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School for providing a platform to members of president-elect Donald Trump’s…

Press Release

Statement from PRA on the 2016 Election

This is a difficult moment for justice-minded people and anyone who believes in democracy. A man who ran an insurgent campaign as a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and anti-establishment demagogue is now president-elect of the United States.

Statement

Declaración de PRA sobre la Elección de 2016

Éste es un momento difícil para quienes creemos en la justicia y la democracia. Un hombre que llevó a cabo una campaña insurgente como un demagogo racista, xenófobo, misógino y anti-establecimiento es ahora el presidente electo de los Estados …

Statement

The Transformation of a Goldwater Girl

Why It Matters in the Time of Trump

Campaign buttons for the Barry Goldwater (Republican Party) presidential campaign of 1964

This is, in some respects, a ghost story. A political ghost story in which the mythic, the symbolic, the demon archetype come to substitute for sustained engagement with ordinary human beings. Both major political parties love to tell scary stories…

Article

What time is it?

Why we can’t ignore the momentum of the Right

Broadly speaking, the consensus is that we’re in a time of great instability, revolt, and possibility. History teaches us that in times like these, we need to be both bold and vigilant. Authoritarian, chauvinistic, and bigoted movements assert…

Article

Trump and Right-Wing Populism

A Long Time Coming

Two men holding a flag that says Trump 2020 The Sequel and banners saying "crack lives matter"

Most Americans surveying the wreckage of the national political landscape amid the 2016 presidential election are startled, most of all, by the ugliness and violence that has suddenly returned to our electoral politics thanks to the prominence of…

Article

Beyond Trump

Disrupt, Defuse, Compete

To defeat the current upsurge in right-wing populism, progressives will need to disrupt, defuse, and – critically – compete for portions of its constituency.

Article

Trump, Cruz, & Dominionism

Some Christian Right Leaders Fear a Crack-Up

The 2016 Republican presidential campaign has transformed American politics, likely forever. Everyone is making adjustments, but two recent illuminating episodes suggest that some Christian Right leaders are finding the changes to be unusually…

Article

'Trumping' Democracy

Right-Wing Populism, Fascism, and the Case for Action

Debate over what we should call Trump’s vicious political movement should not stop us from organizing now to protect the people being demonized and scapegoated as targets of White rage. Our challenge is to expose the ideas and policies of Trump and…

Article

Not Fascism

Trump is a Right-Wing Nativist Populist

The demonization and scapegoating that accompanies right-wing populism in the United States is breeding a backlash movement that will take creative and bold approaches as we organize to defend democracy and diversity in the public square.

Article

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