Chapter 14 analyses the Trump campaign’s relationship with religion in more detail. Based on the material gathered in several dozen elite interviews with political and religious leaders it shows how in the context of an identitarian turn in American politics, the Trump campaign appealed to America’s tradition of white Christian nationalism and forged an alliance with a subset of Christian leaders. However, it also shows how, while doing so, the Trump campaign and administration increasingly departed from America’s civil religious tradition, clashed with Christian doctrine on identitarian issues, and embraced a more identitarian and transactional approach to Christian institutions, indicating less the resurgence of the Christian right in American politics than its erosion and gradual replacement by a more secular but no less radical populist and identitarian right.

Given the Trump administration’s ambiguous approach to religion discussed in the previous chapter, Chapter 15 explores how American Christians have reacted to it. It finds that although there initially appeared to be a certain level of religious immunity among practicing Christians against Trumpism, this religious ‘vaccination effect’ against national populism has since diminished and even reversed to the extent that, unlike in Europe, American Christians have become one of the populist right’s most loyal constituencies. American Christians’ ‘conversion’ to Trump appears, however, to be less the result of a shift in their attitudes than of supply-side factors. Specifically, a perceived lack of political alternatives as well as the inability and unwillingness of Christian leaders to publicly speak out against Trumpism seem to have contributed to this development.

Political moderation in developed economies after World War II owed much to the large number of stable, well-paying industrial jobs. The decline in the number of working-class jobs has dealt a hard blow to parties on the center-left, causing them to fragment into smaller and more extreme parties. This is especially true in proportional representation electoral systems, which give voters little reason to vote for large parties in the political middle. Employing a novel dataset of parties’ vote share and seat share in 35 OECD countries from 1945 to 2017, we find that every 20 percent drop in the number of industrial jobs adds one more party on the left. We find a corresponding decline in policy moderation as the left fragments. In the United States and Britain, where majoritarian electoral rules limit party fragmentation, economic insecurity takes other forms including attacks on parties’ ability to formulate and implement moderate policies.

Annotations and “translations” of the seemingly cryptic statements of President Donald Trump have been an ongoing feature of media coverage of his candidacy and the first year of his presidency. Efforts in the media to decipher Trump’s enigmatic references have presented Donald Trump and his campaign as communicating in a language unintelligible to mainstream media audiences. As in Keith Basso’s account of a Western Apache speech genre termed “speaking with names” (1996), the coherence and significance of Donald Trump’s use of proper names and a variety of other expressions often become clear only when linked to a context at a remove from their immediate surround, generally one found in the world of conservative and alt-right media. In providing such clarification, mainstream media annotations of Donald Trump’s words render his speeches a moment of something like language contact between two distinct communicative worlds: the “right-wing” and the “mainstream.” The result is the aggravation of divisions between multiple disconnected communicative “silos” or “bubbles.” Trump’s verbal practices thus bring into question the very existence of something that might be called “the American public.”

looks at the part emoji play in interpersonal communication. One of the aims behind their initial development was to provide a way to express those things that gestures, facial expressions, and tone of voice do in face-to-face conversation but that get lost in written communication. Emoji were seen as a way of diminishing the possibility of accidental conflict by signalling the emotional frame in which a message was meant. But they also allow for a great deal of ambiguity, and as their popularity has grown they’ve started to be used in an increasingly broad range of contexts. The chapter considers what it’s appropriate to express via emoji (and who makes these decisions). Is it deemed appropriate to use them to break up with someone? Or to send condolences about the death of a loved one? Drawing on discussions of their use by legal and political commentators, the chapter looks at how emoji have been used as evidence in legal cases and co-opted into the world of politics - so that, despite their seemingly frivolous and light-hearted roots, they’re now at the front line of debates about everything from the alt-right to post-truth politics.