Night falls, stars shine: Jeff Sharlet on Trump, extremism, and journalism’s future

The author of The Undertow and The Family strikes a bleak tone, but predicts “some brilliant, heroic reporting.”

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Nov 20, 2024

Though Jeff Sharlet admits to having had some misplaced hope that Kamala Harris could eke out a win, he was not surprised by Donald Trump’s triumph at the polls. “I always thought it was not only possible, but probably likely, that he would win and that he would win without stealing,” the writer and academic tells Depth Perception.

Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth College and a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, knows this terrain better than most. His 2023 book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, features on the ground reporting on the rise of right-wing extremism; the one before that, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, centers on a secretive group of fundamentalist Christian politicians. (The latter was adapted into a Netflix documentary series.)

“I don’t really get people who pretty much only write about people that they admire,” Sharlet says. “The great puzzle to me is people who have ideas that terrify me. Also, I’m very counterphobic. It’s how I deal with my fears.”

To be honest, right now I’m scared about the fate of our country and how (if?) journalism can survive another Trump term. I wanted to hear Sharlet’s thoughts on all this, and our hour-plus conversation proved, for the most part, pretty goddamn bleak. The following is just a small portion of our talk, edited for clarity. —Mark Yarm

We’re speaking one week after Trump was declared the winner of the election. How are you feeling?

I’m feeling horrible because of the faster-than-I-ever-could-have-anticipated collapse of left, liberal, and journalistic response. People are telling me, “We need time to process.” No, we don’t have it. Just look at the [Trump cabinet] appointments this week. The tiger’s coming at you. You don’t tell the tiger you need time to process. You don’t ask a forest fire to let you think this through. We’ve had nine years to process.

I’ve been on this beat for eight years. We need to change the way we think about information. During the campaign, people said, “Oh, [Trump’s] losing it” — no, no, he’s not talking the way you think he should talk.

Your book The Undertow came out about a year and a half ago. Are there any particular parts of it that you've been returning to in your mind in light of Trump’s win?

In the title essay, I’m wandering around the country following the kind of martyr myth of Ashli Babbitt, the insurrectionist killed on January 6. And you meet people who seem wonderful, and then you discover that they, too, believe in the civil war and want the civil war. And by the end of this journey, I was driving late at night over the Green Mountains, where I live in Vermont. There’s no big highways across Vermont; you’re just on mountain roads. I’d always wanted to see a moose, and I’d never seen a moose. And a moose comes loping out of the woods, and it’s sick. The moose here are dying and probably lost, probably going extinct. We don’t get cold enough winters anymore. The ticks that used to freeze off don’t. This is a climate change extinction.

So at the end of that essay, I’m getting home to my kids after being gone a long time. I think about this children’s book they loved when they were little, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. The refrain from the book that little kids love is “We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!” It probably doesn’t sound like optimism to people who are surprised that Trump won. But it feels like optimism to me in the sense of the larger frame of the long struggle. We’re going to go through it — and, man, are we going to go through it. But not all of us are going to make it through it.

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John Thune, the incoming Senate majority leader, is a member of the Family, which you wrote a previous book about. What kind of insight do you have into the way he’ll lead?

I think the question of how anybody leads now is mostly irrelevant. More useful than my book for understanding how John Thune is going to lead is the Filipino journalist Patricia Evangelista’s recent book, Some People Need Killing. Fascism in the United States or in the Philippines now is not Germany 1936. It’s different. But a common factor is the hollowing out of the individual. John Thune was able to take that position because he bent the knee. What are John Thune's politics? They are Trump’s politics.

Did you ever walk to watch The Walking Dead? Remember Negan? He’s got the leather jacket, the horrifically eroticized baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. He teases, he protects, he kills. He’s charismatic. You can’t look away from him. And the only price is, you’re Negan. His name is Negan and when somebody is captured, they say, “I’m Negan. I’m Negan. I’m Negan.” Thune, he’s Trump. Rubio, he’s Trump. Gaetz, he’s Trump.

There's political scientists who can talk to us about this, there’s historians, there’s journalists like me who are on the beat. Or we could get Nicole Wallace and Claire McCaskill on MSNBC, tittering because Trump says he's going to use recess appointments and don't he know that that's a weak tool of a weak president? And I’m quoting word for word, “He doesn't know how power works in Washington.” My God, you don't know how power works in Washington. We're not going over to Sally's for a cocktail party after this.

You go to a Trump rally, and it is like, “I am Negan.” In 2016, I went to my first Trump rally for the New York Times Magazine, and I went on the condition that I did not go with press. I’ve never had a press pass in my life. Have you been to a Trump rally?

I have not.

So the press all goes into a metal pen in the middle of the room. And that’s not an accident. That is Vince McMahon. And there'll be a moment at every rally where Trump says, “Look at those scum.” They’re the heel. These publications, they’re so eager to prove that they are not the lying fake news that Trump says they are that they will stay in the pen, where they have been put as a prop, and they will take notes, and they will wait for a political line. And Trump can talk as long as he wants about decapitations, disembowelments, rape, pedophilia. They’re waiting to see if he says something about how power works in Washington.

“People are telling me, ‘We need time to process.’ No, we don’t have it. Just look at the [Trump cabinet] appointments this week. The tiger’s coming at you. You don’t tell the tiger you need time to process.… We need to change the way we think about information.”
— Jeff Sharlet

It’s clear you don’t think the media has really held Trump accountable. Are there journalists you feel have done good work in that regard?

The idea that the New York Times is in bed with Trump? No. There are tons of good reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, everywhere else. But folks on Twitter are saying they’re in bed. Like, did you read [Times reporter] Charles Homans’ long piece on people saying, “Oh, we know who Trump is this time”? Homan, who's been on the beat as long as I have, is like, “No, no, he’s changed. This is newer. This is darker. This is dangerous.” Beautiful, long piece. Got no fucking pickup. Dear readers, step the fuck up.

As for people who canceled their New York Times subscription, I’m sympathetic to those who were like, “This article about Gaza crossed the line for me. This article about trans rights crossed the line.” I totally get that; they did some terrible reporting on both those things. But there are other reporters doing great reporting there, and I need that information because they have those resources and because, dear readers, y’all stopped subscribing to your local newspaper, so there isn’t anything left.

What do you think the U.S. media will look like after another four years of Trump?

Very bad. And yet I think there’s gonna be some brilliant, heroic reporting. I think of my friend Elena Kostyuchenko, the great Russian reporter who was exiled, and her gorgeous book, I Love Russia. And she is exactly what rises. To call her “the Joan Didion of Russia” is to insult her, because she’s better. But she is also in exile, and now [free press] publications are gone and there’s a whole lot of state media. I mean, that took Putin a long time to do — it took him a lot more than four years.

We could also look at Israeli media. What’s left? Haaretz, sort of. Netanyahu is a Trump-like figure who’s been in power for a long, long time. People grow up thinking that’s the way it is. There’s no protests on the Dartmouth campus now, because my students were 10 years old when [Trump became president]. I may not like it, but it’s the way it is. So I foresee lots and lots of acquiescence. But also some gorgeous shooting stars.

Night falls, stars shine: Jeff Sharlet on Trump, extremism, and journalism’s future

The author of The Undertow and The Family strikes a bleak tone, but predicts “some brilliant, heroic reporting.”

How did America get the far right so wrong?

Further reading from Jeff Sharlet

Discussion about this post