One of the premises of this Trump manuscript I’m spending a lot of my time working on now is that much of what Trumpism is and was was already apparent in the Tea Party backlash that began in the first months of 2009. It’s difficult to capture, more than seven years on, just how wild and unbridled that backlash was. It went partly or mainly unnoticed in the mainstream political conversation because most journalists were simply inclined to regard it as craziness from the fringe that was largely irrelevant to real politics and somehow crass to examine or focus on.
That was a mistake.
Here is a brief exchange former TPMer Evan McMorris-Santoro had with a Tea Party protester in March 2010 who predicted civil war in the United States if Obamacare became law.
Here’s Michele Bachmann calling for an ‘orderly revolution’ to save America from Obama’s ‘economic marxism’ in March 2009.
Here’s a Newsmax columnist announcing that support for a military coup was growing to resolve the “Obama problem.”
Remind me why everybody didn’t see Trumpism coming?
