Donald Trump, American Preacher (‘The New York Times’)

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“When I ask Trump supporters what they love most about his rallies, they’re at a loss; all of it, they say, ‘just, just’—the way it makes them feel. How much it makes them feel,” writes Associate Professor of English Jeff Sharlet in a New York Times Sunday Magazine story about presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“American politics tends to produce a limited emotional range, mostly positive, peppered with indignation,” he writes. “But Trump scrawls across the spectrum: not just anger but rage; love and, yes, hate; fear, a political commonplace, and also vengeance. It doesn’t feel political. Politicians have long borrowed from religion the passion and the righteousness, but no other major modern figure has channeled the tension that makes Scripture endure, the desire, the wanting that gives rise to the closest analogue to Trumpism: the prosperity gospel, the American religion of winning.”

Read the full story, published 4/12/16 by The New York Times.

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