For those who thought that the billionaire’s early domination of the Republican race was merely a summer silly season sensation, Osnos’s reporting suggested otherwise: that America had entered a parallel political universe. Late that August, the New Yorker published what turned out to be a seminal essay from Osnos on how Trump’s nationalist coalition, “a confederacy of the frustrated,” was taking shape.
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Having noticed that America’s most popular neo-Nazi news site, the Daily Stormer, had been quick to endorse the reality TV star, Osnos realized these projects should be conjoined. By happenstance, he was midway through researching a piece on the rise of far-right racist groups when he was assigned to cover Trump’s nascent campaign. Evan Osnos became one of the first journalists to describe that rebellion in detail. What we were truly seeing that summer, it became evident in hindsight, was the start of a white nationalist blowback, a force that helped propel Trump all the way to the presidency. Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury, Evan Osnos, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 480 pp., $30, September 2021. The corollary, many Democrats predicted, was that America’s first Black president would hand the torch to its first female president. While far from being universally accepted, these breakthroughs nonetheless seemed irreversible. It was tempting to interpret these milestone moments as the triumph of progressivism. Afterward, the president returned to a White House bathed in the colors of the rainbow, celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision earlier that day that made same-sex marriage a right nationwide. Barack Obama sang “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of shooting victim Clementa Pinckney, perhaps the most emphatically African American moment of his presidency. In the tumble of events that followed, we watched the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capital in Columbia, a ceremony that felt like the final surrender of the U.S. That was the night the white supremacist Dylann Roof terrorized a prayer meeting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot dead nine worshippers, all of them African American. Yet most of us, I suspect, thought that June 17 would end up being a more consequential date. We were amused and bemused by what happened on June 16, when the New York tycoon descended on his golden escalator to announce his bid for the presidency. Journalists misread the rise of Donald Trump in 2015, partly because we misinterpreted the events of that year’s tumultuous summer.
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