President-elect Donald Trump's unique talent, according to one historian, is his ability to despoil moments that should bring Americans together.
In an interview with The New Republic's Greg Sargent, Vanderbilt historian Nicole Hemmer outlined how Trump has even used the devastation from California's fires to lob attacks at his political opponents instead of trying to bring the country together.
"It does strike me as something novel about the right, certainly within the last 15 years... there is a combination of the malignancy of Donald Trump himself, who is constantly seeking ways to be in the headlines, the media environment in which we live that really favors this kind of outrage and negative emotion, and a conservative media ecosystem that takes that revved-up let's-make-everybody-angry dynamic and applies it to electoral politics," she said. "All those things come together to turn everything that happens into an opportunity for a fight."
The result of this, she says, is that "everything just feels worse all the time."
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Hemmer also notes that conservatives have been laying the blame for natural disasters at the feet of people who live in urban areas for decades, such as when they used the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina to smear the city of New Orleans.
"There was a pastor, John Hagee, who said... 'Have you been to New Orleans? You see the way that they are, you see what sinful people they are, so God has sent this punishment against them,'" she recalls.
She adds, though, that Trump has made this dynamic worse because he now thinks that "every time a natural disaster happens, I can make political hay out of it."
