Trump’s ‘lost cause’, a kind of gangster cult, will not go away
Opinion piece, Elections 2024
David W. BlightJanuary 14, 2024
On January 6, 2021, former President
Donald
Trump, the loser of the 2020 election, famously addressed a gathering of followers who then joined the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol. Although Trump’s speech was rambling and disjointed, a few things became clear:
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Leftists had conspired to steal the election through fraud, and the mobs summoned to Washington on his behalf should remain strong. The implication was that violence might be necessary because you will never take back our country in weakness.
Trump then made former Vice President Mike Pence a target of collective contempt for refusing to…
E
electorally
c
college process back to the United States. If weak Republicans did not stand up and cooperate in overturning the results, Trump vowed, we will never forget. For the next four to five hours, during the most recorded event in American history, the world looked anew
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lost
c
The cause was born of violence and spectacular lies.
There have been countless
L
lost
c
causes in modern history, usually after defeats in war, where the vanquished glorify their loss as a source of pride and shared hostility towards the victors. Three big ones
L
lost
c
causes have plagued the world and American history. After their bloody defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, the French displayed an intergenerational cultural need to avenge the loss. Then, after Germany’s defeat in World War I, the Nazis gained ground by blaming Jews and leftists, who were depicted as poison in the blood of the body politic. And then, of course, there was the American South after the Civil War, when the story of the Confederacy took place
“lost cause”Lost cause
delivered a potent brew of distorted history and white supremacist ideology.
Lost
c
Cause narratives have sometimes been powerful enough to build or destroy political regimes, shape national and ethnic identities, and fill landscapes with monuments. They function primarily as powerful new founding myths, always promoting a politics of resentment that culminates in retaliation and sometimes victory. Immediately after the military surrender in 1865, the Confederate formed
“lost cause” lost cause
took root in a Southern society marked by physical destruction, the psychological trauma of defeat, resistance to the victors’ reconstruction policies, and racial violence
,
and carefully constructed sentimentalism over time.
Particularly the Confederates
“lost cause” lost cause
asserted that Southern soldiers had shown unerring courage and that the South had not actually lost, but merely succumbed to superior numbers and resources. White Southern women are said to have supported the cause to the bitter end and helped preserve its true memory; the Confederacy enslaved
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The black population probably remained loyal to their owners; and finally, the Confederates had never really fought for slavery, but rather for domestic, national sovereignty, and states’ rights.
To be supported as public propaganda,
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lost
c
Causes need a pure story with clearly identified villains and heroes. Sometimes they are havens for sick souls; other times they are the levers of power for a disciplined political movement. Trumping
“lost cause”, lost cause,
newly virulent now as he campaigns for a second term despite multiple indictments, drawing on a menu of grievances among the disaffected, and energizing those who believe a diversity-obsessed multicultural America has gone out of control, especially on immigration at the Mexican border.
Some also firmly believe in conspiracy theories about fraud allegedly committed in the 2020 election, as well as other dark ideas about left-wing machinations at American universities, school boards and in the Democratic Party. Unlike the Confederate Lost Cause, the Trump version is a kind of gangster cult, full of rituals of loyalty to a single man and his plans to form an authoritarian American government that will use executive power to achieve the preferences of his followers .
Trumping
Lost cause “lost cause”
also has its martyrs, including the hundreds of convicted insurgents known in the movement, and by Republican politicians such as Elise Stefanik
(RN.Y.)
, as hostages now in prison. Above all, it promotes a model of politics and society in which facts and evidence are irrelevant. At Trump rallies, constitutionalism is for losers, history is little more than a useful weapon, and American civic pride is used as entertainment to fuel hatred of liberalism and representative democracy.
,
and in many cases, non-white America. The Trump
“lost cause”Lost cause
is thus a platform that the Republican Party has adopted to turn these stories and lies into votes. Win or lose, it won’t die.
In the Confederacy
“lost cause”, lost cause,
white southerners endured truly colossal grief: nearly 300,000 people lay in graves scattered across their landscape, and much of their society lay in ruins. The Trumpian mourning seems rooted in social media-driven nostalgia for an ideal past that almost no one has experienced. The movement’s adherents long for a vanished racial order, for a world of secure social identities, protected from unknown but hated elites, and for communities not stripped of their cohesion by the internet, the pandemic, and economic displacement. They need their story to be great again.
Lost
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Causes can make lies a common currency and forge deep and lasting myths. We still don’t know how much power the Trumpian has
“lost cause”Lost cause
will have, regardless of whether he survives his criminal prosecution and the election campaign. What we do know is that we have already experienced the formative years.
David W. Blight is the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”

Fernando Dowling is an author and political journalist who writes for 24 News Globe. He has a deep understanding of the political landscape and a passion for analyzing the latest political trends and news.