Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump
SARAH POSNER
(RANDOM HOUSE, 368 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064
This seems at first blush to be simply the latest in a long line of Trump-hating books that have sold well during his presidency. Sarah Posner is a journalist who has written for The Guardian and The Washington Post; part of her ambition is the familiar one of portraying the President of the United States as a cruel and bigoted thug. She tries, however, to place him in an historical context, arguing that the truth about Trump is to be discovered among the white supremacists of the 1980s. “Trump, then, is not a shocking aberration who rose to power through a combination of celebrity, personality, Russian interference and dumb luck,” she writes. “He is a New Right archetype reconditioned for the twenty-first century. He has predecessors – not in presidents but in activists, writers, policymakers and legislators.”
Posner points out that “mainstream” conservatism tried – only occasionally – to expel these influences, but “as Trump exemplifies, they, and their odious ideas, never went away.” So we know the territory: we are on the shifting ground between reliable reporting and impassioned diatribe.
If Trump condemns white supremacists outright, Posner’s reaction is always that what he says is “desultory” or a “bland disclaimer”. The level of ferocity always falls short of her requirements. If defenders point to Trump’s support for and friendships with African Americans, they are simply trying to provide “cover for the President’s racism”.
