By Benjamin Studebaker

Over the last few days, many people have been panicking about what Donald Trump might do as president. There is a lot of fear. Because most commentators and academics are deeply hostile to Trump, many people writing about this are still deeply emotionally shaken by the result. This has tended to color the analysis and produce polemics. So today I want to take a step back and try to calmly, rationally assess what kind of threat Trump poses and what opportunities he creates. In this post we’ll focus on the threats, and in the next one we’ll talk about the opportunities

On the internet, many Trump supporters like to refer to him as “God Emperor”. They depict him as a heroic imperial figure:

Trump is a right nationalist, and during the campaign he said many things that seemed to evoke troubling periods in recent human history. This created a running narrative among Trump critics in which Trump is depicted as a Hitler figure. This peaked after he announced support for a ban on Muslims entering the country and asked an audience to raise their hands in a pledge of loyalty to him, creating a visual that reminded people of the Roman salute:

READ MORE