In the last part Inside the Bucket, Jeff Charles suggests there is a way Donald Trump “I won this election on January 6, 2021.”

“This seems counterintuitive, right? Because that’s the moment when, even for a brief moment, even his own party gave up on him,” Sharlet says. “There’s a lot of attention being paid to (Attorney General) Merrick Wreath‘s calendar and making accusations that we still imagine Trumpism is a system that operates within the rule of law. And January 6, that’s just a major turning point.” Sharlet, writer and Vanity Fair contributing editor, WHO to have written comprehensively Open What he calls the “Trumpocene,” or age of Trump, said Jan. 6 was “the period when we moved from the era of conspiracy theories to the era of martyrdom, which is a powerful thing.”

with Sharlet Vanity Fair chief editor Radhika Jones, They shared their visceral reactions to Trump’s defeat Kamala Harris, On the other hand, he discusses the language of fascism and the role of identity politics in the 2024 race.

Jones notes that the Harris campaign “didn’t really emphasize the historic nature of her run, that she would be the first female president, that she would be the first black woman to be president.” Hillary Clinton‘s “I’m with him” strategy worked in 2016. But “identity politics was happening on the GOP side,” Jones says, noting how the courting and messaging was happening: from favorites Stephen Miller And Elon Musk, It was aimed at men. “I acknowledge that male identity is a big group,” he says, “but that was the driving force.”

Jones says the most important thing as we approach a second Trump administration is to “separate distractions from what’s actually going on” to not allow Trump to easily divert attention. “What will happen to the government institutions we depend on on a daily basis?” he asks. “What will happen at the border? Will there be mass deportations? Will fluoride come out of our water? There are issues that will affect politics and I want our attention to focus on them.”

“One of the things that Trump is taking advantage of is this massive extinction event in news organizations and the death of local news,” Sharlet says, suggesting “looking in detail” at how policies affect people. “Where do they fix these little places that seem boring and unimportant but you know? Project 2025 There were people who were interested in these small agencies that we were taught and that the Trump movement has appropriated today, and what can be done with them? So how will this play out in this county of Omaha or that town in New Jersey?

When it comes to covering the MAGA movement, Sharlet recommends “paying attention to abstraction and metaphor.”

“What was really frustrating about the way we handled this campaign was that Trump acted in a way: as a fascist movement develops, it becomes an increasingly rich body of myth and metaphor, and that’s what they’re working with. And in response, we see democracy becoming more and more disjointed, so that just as freedom of speech becomes a term, democracy becomes a vague term.”

“As people who want to resist fascism and as journalists who want to cover it, it’s up to us to really delve into this language and translate and interpret it and figure out what democracy means,” he adds. “When I talk to Trumpists, I see that democracy means a king; a king chosen by both God and the people. “It’s a very different idea than what we have in the Constitution.”