Fox Guarding the White House

While Brietbart’s readership has fallen drastically since the election, Fox has moved into the void. Speaking to Politico, Harvard media scholar Rob Faris explained, “A big part of Breitbart’s success was that there was a niche to be filled that Fox News was not able to fill at that point,” Faris said. “The role, the importance of Breitbart is diminished.”[1] Fox News not only has cultivated a symbiotic relationship with the Trump, but has adopted the racial language and conspiracy-mindset of the alt-right. But with the rise of Trump, the network has been giving less time to conventional conservatives and more to Trump friendly-voices like English nationalist Nigel Farage. The delusions of a “deep state” has become standard fare for hosts like Sean Hannity. “In other words,” add Jeet Heer, “Fox News used to be simply right-wing. Now it’s becoming a far-right outlet that resembles Breitbart at its peak under Bannon.”[2]

Debunking the significance ascribed to Facebook and social media alone for inciting political radicalism, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat argues that television played a much bigger role in creating Trump than did the Internet. “It’s also clear—as the economists Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro wrote in these pages late last year—that among older white Americans, the core demographic where first the primaries and then the general election were decided, television still far outstrips the internet as the most important source of news,” Douthat wrote.[3] In short, as Heer noted, “Breitbart gave Trump his ideology; television gave him his popularity.”[4]

Fox News is by far America’s dominant television news channel. In the second quarter of 2017, Fox boasted 2.35 million total viewers in primetime versus 1.64 million for MSNBC and 1.06 million for CNN.[5] Academic study of media bias has developed considerably in recent years, showing that “slant is real and quantified it, developed and tested theories of slant, and shown that slant has effects on voting,” explained Elizabeth Schroeder and Daniel F. Stone in the Journal of Public Economics.[6] Studies found there was increased voting share and support for Republican positions on controversial issues in places where Fox News was introduced.[7] A new study in the American Economic Review, by Emory University political scientist Gregory Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu, estimated that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008.[8] That would have made John Kerry the winner of the popular vote 2004, and turned Barack Obama’s 2008 victory into a landslide.[9]

In 1995, Rupert Murdoch told The New Yorker, “The truth is—and we Americans don’t like to admit it—that authoritarian societies can work.”[10] Fox reporter Diana Falzone, who had obtained proof that Trump had engaged adulterous relationship in 2006 with a porn actress Stormy Daniels, claimed that Ken LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com, said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.”[11] It was Jared Kushner who apparently convinced Murdoch to reserve his former hostility and to finally back his father-in-law in the Spring of 2016.[12] Kushner’s editor-in-chief for the New York Observer, Elizabeth Spiers, related that when she communicated to Kushner that she was appalled by his father-in-law’s birtherism, which she considered cynical and racist, he rolled his eyes and said, “he doesn’t really believe it, Elizabeth. He just knows Republicans are stupid and they’ll buy it.”[13] Spiers also reported that Trump is apparently such a notorious liar that a friend of his once said, “he’d lie to you about what time of day it is, just for the practice.”[14]

According to Nicole Wallace of MSNBC, speaking of Fox News’ Sean Hannity’s influence over president Donald Trump, “Fox isn’t state-run media. The state is run by Fox.”[15] Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, agrees. According to Hemmer, who is the author of Messengers of the Right, a history of the conservative media’s influence on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”[16] For both Trump and Fox, explains Hemmer, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.”[17] According to Blair Levin, former chief of staff at the FCC and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.”[18]

Roger Ailes invented programming, argues Levin, “that confirmed all your worst instincts—Fox News’ fundamental business model is driving fear.”[19] In 2011, at Ailes’ invitation, Trump began making weekly guest appearances on the morning show “Fox & Friends.”[20] As far back as the summer of 2015, Trump was already benefitting from significantly more coverage on Fox News than any other presidential candidate, and by spring of 2016 he and Murdoch were holding private meetings. Trump, explains Jane Mayer, “became famous, in no small part, because of Rupert Murdoch.”[21] As Edward Luce, of the Financial Times, has noted, both Trump and Murdoch, both friends of Roy Cohn, adopted the slippery tactics of tapping into human frailties. “Trump was interested in specifically Rupert’s ownership of The Post, because Page Six is very important to his rising stature in New York City and branding efforts,” said Roger Stone.[22] It was the Post’s gossip section, Page Six, which helped transform Trump into celebrity that he became.[23] According to Luce, “Mr Trump’s antics helped sell newspapers, which, in turn, gave him the celebrity he craved. Their relationship changed the west’s democratic course. But it was Mr Murdoch who made it possible.”[24]

As Amy Chozik indicated in The Sydney Morning Herald, in the 44 years since Murdoch bought his first newspaper in the US, he has largely failed to cultivate close ties to an American president, until now. After decades of ups and downs, Murdoch is one of Trump’s closest confidants. In March 2016, Murdoch tweeted that Republicans would “be mad not to unify” behind Trump “if he becomes inevitable.”[25] Since the inauguration, Murdoch has spoken almost daily with Trump, often bypassing the White House chief of staff, General John F. Kelly, who normally screens incoming calls.[26]

In the lead-up to the Republican primary, Murdoch had favored Jeb Bush, and tensions were reported between them. Fox News benefited immensely from a ratings standpoint during the election. More viewers watched the debate on Fox News than on any other network, broadcast or cable. Since the election, the network has let go of two of its most outspoken Trump critics, Megyn Kelly and George Will, and hired two Trump boosters, Tucker Carlson and Nigel Farage. One reason Fox News gave in and decided to support Trump was that they were flooded with criticism of Megyn Kelly from their audience following the debate. A Fox anchor related that the message from Roger Ailes’s executives is they needed to go easy on Trump. “It’s, ‘Make sure we don’t go after Trump,’” the anchor said. “We’ve thrown in the towel.”[27]

According to a New York Times review by Jennifer Senior, Kelly indicated in her memoir Settle for More that Trump was provided prior, accurate knowledge that she would ask him a “very pointed question” at Fox’s August 2015 primary debate. Senior writes that this indicates that “parts of Fox—or at the very least, Roger Ailes… seemed to be nakedly colluding with the Republican presidential nominee”[28] Fox, according to Nicole Hemmer of US News, “is remaking itself in Trump’s image.”[29] David A. Bell, writing for The Nation warns that:

…the conservative media machine, and a majority of Republican officeholders, up to and including the president-elect, now form part of a coherent, united ideological apparatus that has fought with enormous success to capture the principal levers of power in this country, and that attempts systematically to discredit and demonize anyone who opposes it.[30]

The Washington Post has reported that White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff.[31] Hannity is on a list of cleared callers, which includes a few dozen friends and family members outside the administration who may contact Trump through this official channel. Among them are his sons Eric and Donald Jr., Stephen Schwarzman, Rupert Murdoch, real-estate billionaire Tom Barrack, Patriots owner and also-billionaire Robert Kraft and Hannity. Trump’s television consumption is what a White House official called “mainly a complete dosage of Fox.” The White House official assessed the influence of White House officials and other administration personnel as exactly equal to that of Fox News.[32] Stephen Ryan, attorney to President Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, was forced to reveal in court that his only three legal clients over the past 15 months were Trump, his fundraiser Elliott Broidy and Hannity.[33]

“Generally, the feeling is that Sean is the leader of the outside kitchen cabinet,” one White House official said, echoing the opinion of other staffers.[34] Hannity “fills the political void” left by Steve Bannon, said one official, a statement Bannon seemed to agree with: “Sean Hannity understands the basic issues of economic nationalism and ‘America First’ foreign policy at a deeper level than the august staff of Jonathan Chait and the fuckin’ clowns at New York Magazine,” he said.[35] Trump and Hannity usually speak several times a week, according to people familiar with their relationship. They discuss ideas for Hannity’s show, Trump’s frustration with the ongoing Russia investigation, or what the president should tweet. David Bossie said of Hannity, “The president sees him as an incredibly smart and articulate spokesman for the agenda.”[36]

According to Nicole Wallace, Hannity “plays a big role in personnel decisions,” advocating for figures like Mercedes Schlapp, Anthony Scaramucci, Jay Sekulow and John Bolton were all highly recommended by Hannity, all people who are frequently guests of Fox News.[37]

As noted by Jane Mayer, the extent of the relationship between Fox and the White House was formalized in July, 2018, when Hannity proposed the appointment of Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News, as director of communications and deputy chief of staff at the White House.[38] Shine became co-president of Fox in 2016, after Roger Ailes was fired for allegations of sexual harassment. But within a year, Shine too was forced out, amid a second slew of allegations, some of them against Bill O’Reilly. Shine wasn’t accused personally, several lawsuits named him as complicit in a workplace culture of coverups, payoffs, and intimidation. According to the stockholder suit, Ailes was abetted by “the direct involvement of Shine,” who scheduled the encounters as work meetings. Nevertheless, the Hollywood Reporter obtained financial-disclosure forms revealing that Fox has been paying Shine millions of dollars since he joined the Administration.[39]

As well, Pete Hegseth and Lou Dobbs, both hosts on Fox Business, have each been brought into Oval Office meetings by speakerphone to offer their policy advice.[40] Among others, Trump appointed the former Fox contributor Ben Carson to be his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the former Fox commentator John Bolton to be his national-security adviser, and the former Fox commentator K.T. McFarland as his deputy national-security adviser. The relationship was reciprocal. Hope Hicks, Shine’s predecessor in the communications job, became the top public-relations officer at 21st Century Fox. Several others who have left the Trump White House, including Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser on national security, regularly appear on Fox.

Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former co-host of “The Five,” left Fox in July 2018, to work for a Pro-Donald Trump Super PAC and is now working on Trump’s reelection campaign and dating Donald Trump, Jr.. Guilfoyle left Fox News in July 2018, reportedly. A week after her announcement, the Huffington Post reported claims by an anonymous source who said that Guilfoyle did not leave the network voluntarily, but rather had been forced out due to allegations that she was sharing lewd images and had engaged in sexual harassment.[41] To the amazement of her colleagues, Guilfoyle often prepared for her show by relying on information provided by an avid fan, a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, a frequent contributor to the fringe social-media site Gab, which Wired has called a “haven for the far right,” for neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right.[42] As of 2018, the Gab’s most-followed users included Richard B. Spencer, Mike Cernovich, and Alex Jones.[43]

Kochtopus

Rupert Murdoch has also been a member of the Cato Institute, founded by the infamous Koch brothers.[44] Effectively, the Koch brothers have used their millions to cultivate a conspiratorial view of politics to exploit fears of “Big Government,” culminating in the Tea Party, to advance a neoliberal agenda for the reduction of taxes and the dismantling of social programs. According to Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, the Koch brothers’ libertarian thinking “entails restrictions on the freedom of the great majority in order to protect property rights and the prerogatives of the most well off.”[45] As Frank Rich remarked in the New York Times, “The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests.”[46] As Yasha Levine rightly asks, “At the bottom of it all, is the Koch Method that funds all the libertarians nothing but old-fashioned theft?” [47]

Jane Mayer is the author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, which in particular discusses the Koch family and their political activities, along with Richard Mellon Scaife, John M. Olin, and the DeVos and Coors families, who work in tandem to influence academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and the American presidency for their own benefit. According to Kenneth P. Vogel:

“[Charles] Koch and his brother David Koch have quietly assembled, piece by piece, a privatized political and policy advocacy operation like no other in American history that today includes hundreds of donors and employs 1,200 full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide. That’s about 3½ times as many employees as the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms.”[48]

In 1997, the Cato Institute held a joint conference with the Atlas Society, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Shrugged received largely negative reviews after its 1957 publication, but achieved enduring popularity and consistent sales in the following decades. A 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated Atlas Shrugged as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible. Conservative commentators Neal Boortz, Fox News’ Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh have offered high praise of the book on their respective radio and television programs. In 2005, the Koch-affiliated Republican Congressman Paul Ryan said that Rand was “the reason I got into public service,” and he later required his staff members to read Atlas Shrugged.[49] David Nolan, one of the founders of the Libertarian Party, stated that “without Ayn Rand, the libertarian movement would not exist.”[50]

During the 1980s, Charles and David Koch had a falling out with their brother William, who accused Koch Industries of being a criminal enterprise. With its extensive oil pipeline network, and while acting as an oil middleman, Koch Industries skimmed a little off the top of each transaction, or what is called “cheating measurements.” In 1999, William sued Koch Industries in civil court under the False Claims Act, when 50 former Koch gaugers testified against the company, some in video depositions. Employees even had a term for cheating on the measurements. "We in the company referred to it as the Koch Method because it was a system for cheating the producer out of oil," said Mark Wilson, one of the gaugers. The brothers settled the case two years later, with Charles agreeing to pay just $25 million in penalties to the federal government to have the suit dismissed.[51]

David Koch served on the National Council of the neoconservatives’ American Enterprise Institute as recently as 2014. The Koch brothers have given more than $100 million to conservative and libertarian policy and advocacy groups in the United States, including the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, and more recently Americans for Prosperity, whose director, Tim Phillips, is a member of the CNP. Most of Americans for Prosperity’s funds are provided by Donors Trust. Donors Trust account holders have included the John M. Olin Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, and the Bradley Foundation.[52] In 2005, the Bradley Foundation earmarked funds to help Koch Industries establish the Americans for Prosperity office in Wisconsin, and from 2005–2009, donated about $200,000 to Americans for Prosperity Wisconsin (also called Fight Back Wisconsin).[53] The DeVos family foundation contributed $1 million in 2009 and $1.5 million in 2010 to Donors Trust.[54] Donors Trust recipients have included the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association, the Cato Institute and the Federalist Society.[55]

As James M. Buchanan told his collaborators, “conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential,” in pursuit of what George Monbiot has described as “a hidden program for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich.”[56] Instead of revealing their ultimate aim, they would proceed by incremental steps. For example, in seeking to destroy the social security system, they would claim to be saving it, arguing that it would fail without a series of substantial “reforms.” Gradually they would build a “counter-intelligentsia,” allied to a “vast network of political power” that would become the new establishment. As George Monbiot summarized:

Through the network of thinktanks that Koch and other billionaires have sponsored, through their transformation of the Republican party, and the hundreds of millions they have poured into state congressional and judicial races, through the mass colonisation of Trump’s administration by members of this network and lethally effective campaigns against everything from public health to action on climate change, it would be fair to say that Buchanan’s vision is maturing in the US.[57]

As John Wagner noted in “Do Trump’s Cabinet picks want to run the government — or dismantle it?” for The Washington Post, most of Trump’s appointees have views diametrically opposed to the missions of the agencies they have been appointed to run.[58] Behind it all were the Koch brothers, cynically exploiting white nationalism to advance neoliberal policies designed to reduce their tax burden and to eliminate regulations that impeded an unhindered accumulation of profits. Koch insiders generally agree with their critics that by helping to empower the “anti-establishment” Tea Party, the Koch network inadvertently laid the groundwork for a movement that advanced anti-immigrant sentiments and anti-Free Trade protectionism that is contrary to the Koch’s ideology, but which provided the base of support for Trump’s nationalist brand of populism. “We are partly responsible,” said one former network staffer. “We invested a lot in training and arming a grassroots army that was not controllable, and some of these people have used it in ways that are not consistent with our principles, with our goal of advancing a free society, and instead they have furthered the alt-right.”[59]

However, given their reputation, the Koch brothers could not have come out openly in support of Trump, without completely sabotaging the success of his campaign as an “anti-establishment” candidate. In 2015, the Koch brothers had pledged to spend an astounding $889 million through an infrastructure that rivaled that of the Republican National Committee. With Trump’s immanent election win in sight, the Koch brothers announced that they were substantially downsizing their funding and operations, purportedly out of protest and an admission of failure. They went so far as to feign support for Hillary Clinton, which they would have known that, due their notoriety, would certainly undermined her chances.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo, researchers who have been tracking the long-term rise and recent impact of the Koch network, see a very different picture. During the election campaign, Trump relied upon well-established conservative organizational networks that could reach into many states and communities. He made overt deals with the NRA and the Christian right, and he benefitted indirectly from Koch network operations centered Americans for Prosperity (AFP).[60] Despite loud pronouncements from Charles Koch that his network would not support Trump, the Kochs’ massive political operation worked over many months to turn out Republican voters in key states. Above all, AFP was deeply involved in get-out-the-vote efforts, especially in the critical swing states of Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.[61]

Once Trump was in office, he could open the floodgates to Koch-backed appointments. According to Hertel-Fernandez, Skocpol and Tervo:

Although widely unpopular with the mass public, the Koch policy agenda of tax cuts for the rich, union busting, Medicare privatization, business deregulation, and evisceration of environmental and global warming measures is ripe to be rammed through a GOP-dominated Congress and sent to the desk of a president who needs Koch-affiliated personnel, understands very little about policy issues, and will be looking for victorious bills to sign into law.[62]

As reported by AlterNet, a full third of Trump’s team has ties to the Koch brothers.[63] “From the time Trump picked his vice-presidential running mate, Koch favorite Mike Pence, the brothers’ influence on Trump World has grown ever stronger.”[64] Trump’s campaign manager and CNP member Kellyanne Conway was a Republican pollster whose company worked for Pence and for the Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. Conway is also a board member of the Koch-funded Independent Women’s Forum. Paul Ryan as well has long been championed by Americans for Prosperity, and even received its Wisconsin chapter’s “Defending the American Dream” award as far back as 2008. Washington Post reporter Matea Gold has described Ryan as “clearly a favorite of the Koch donor network.”[65] Former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus had strong ties to AFP’s chapter in Wisconsin, a chapter that has been central to all aspects of politics and policy in that state during the ascendancy of Governor Scott Walker.[66]

Donald McGahn, a lawyer who has worked for Koch-funded Freedom Partners and its affiliated super PAC, would be chief White House counsel. Although they didn’t actively back President Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, the Koch brothers’ Freedom Partners and Americans for Prosperity announced a multimillion-dollar campaign to drive Trump’s tax plan through Congress. “Our principles mirror much of what the White House has already proposed,” said Freedom Partners spokesman James Davis.[67] Additionally, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs talks about the political influences behind President Donald Trump’s decision to leave the Paris climate accord.[68]

Mike Pompeo, a former Tea Party Caucus Congressman from Kansas with close ties to the Koch brothers, was appointed to lead the CIA. Pompeo, a graduate of West Point and Harvard Law School, was elected to Congress in 2010 with substantial financial backing from a political action committee funded by Koch Industries.[69] Pompeo was the single largest recipient of campaign funds from the Koch Brothers in that year. Pompeo was then referred to as the “Koch Brothers’ Congressman” and “the congressman from Koch.”[70] “KOCHPAC is proud to support Mike Pompeo for Congress based on his strong support for market-based policies and economic freedom, which benefits society as a whole,” Mark Nichols, the vice president of government and public affairs for Koch Industries, told Politico.[71]

Pompeo has criticized Obama’s decisions to shut down the CIA’s “black site” prisons and to require all interrogators to strictly adhere to anti-torture laws. Pompeo opposes closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. After a 2013, he said of the prisoners who were on hunger strike, “It looked to me like a lot of them had put on weight.”[72] In 2014, he accused Obama of refusing “to take the war on radical Islamic terrorism seriously.”[73] On March 13, 2018, Trump announced his intention to nominate Pompeo as the new United States Secretary of State, succeeding Rex Tillerson after March 31, 2018. While this was noted as “It’s the same old story—a member of Congress carrying water for his biggest campaign contributor,” by Common Cause’s Mary Boyle, according to John Nichols writing for The Nation, “Now, however, it’s a different story, because Donald Trump wants to put “the congressman from Koch” in charge of the State Department and, by extension, the engagement of the United States government with a world in which the brothers Koch have many, many interests.”[74]

Renaissance Man

According to Jane Mayer, Robert Mercer’s wealth enabled him “to coordinate with the Koch brothers donating tens of millions of dollars to Republican political campaigns and ultra-conservative organizations.”[75] A former high-level Renaissance employee said of Robert Mercer, “He’s happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the President’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it to all fall down.”[76] Zachary Mider, writing for Bloomberg in January 2016, called Mercer “the biggest single donor” in the 2016 U.S. presidential race.[77] On December 3, 2016, days after the election, the Mercer family hosted a victory celebration at Owl’s Nest, the family’s Head of the Harbor estate. Rebekah Mercer, a Heritage board member, welcomed several hundred guests, including Donald Trump. A guest at the party told Jane Mayer, “I was looking around the room, and I thought, No doubt about it—the people whom the Mercers invested in, my comrades, are now in charge.”[78]

In his essay for the Inquirer, David Magerman, a former employee of Mercer’s hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, notes that Mercer “has surrounded our President with his people, and his people have an outsized influence over the running of our country, simply because Robert Mercer paid for their seats.” He writes, “Everyone has a right to express their views.” But, he adds, “when the government becomes more like a corporation, with the richest 0.001% buying shares and demanding board seats, then we cease to be a representative democracy.” Instead, he warns, “we become an oligarchy.”[79]

After the election, Rebekah Mercer, who had strong feelings about who should be nominated to Cabinet positions and other top government jobs, was given a seat on Trump’s transition team. Her pick for National Security Adviser was Michael Flynn, who Trump chose for the job. She unsuccessfully pushed for John Bolton, the hawkish former Ambassador to the United Nations, to be named Secretary of State. However, when after Trump fired H.R. McMaster as National Security Advisor, he appointed John R. Bolton to succeed him. Although Bolton has been labeled a neoconservative, he calls himself a “Goldwater Conservative,” ran his school’s Students For Goldwater campaign in 1964. He was a protégé of conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms.[80] Bolton was involved in Iran-Contra and served as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006 as a recess appointee by President George W. Bush. Bolton has been involved in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Federalist Society, and with a number of politically conservative think tanks, policy institutes and special interest groups, including NRA, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf and the CNP. Bolton is currently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

In 2013, Bolton set up the John Bolton Super PAC, which raised $11.3 million for Republican candidates in the 2014 and 2016 elections and spent $5.6 million, paying Cambridge Analytica at least $650,000 for voter data analysis and digital video ad targeting in support of the campaigns of Senators Thom Tillis, Tom Cotton, Richard Burr, and Scott Brown. “The data and modeling Bolton’s PAC received was derived from the Facebook data,” said Christopher Wylie. “We definitely told them about how we were doing it. We talked about it in conference calls, in meetings.”[81] Major donors to the John Bolton Super PAC reportedly are Robert Mercer, who gave $4 million from 2012 to 2016.[82] The New York Times wrote that the rise of Bolton and Mike Pompeo, coupled with the departure of Rex Tillerson and General McMaster, meant that Trump’s foreign policy team was now “the most radically aggressive foreign policy team around the American president in modern memory,” and compared it to the foreign policy team surrounding George W. Bush, notably with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.[83]

Federalist Society

As reported in Politico, “the Heritage Foundation has emerged as one of the most influential forces shaping President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team.”[84] According to one conservative activist, Heritage is “absolutely the fulcrum, and essential to staffing the administration with people who reflect Trump’s commitments across the board.”[85] The transition is being assisted from Heritage Foundation officials including Becky Norton Dunlop, a distinguished fellow at the foundation; former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, a distinguished fellow emeritus at Heritage; Heritage national security expert James Carafano; and Ed Feulner, who helped found Heritage. Heritage Foundation and its President DeMint served as sponsors of the July 2016 gathering of the CNP, where Dunlop and Meese have also served as past presidents.

Perhaps Heritage’s most significant involvement during the campaign was its shaping of Trump’s list of Supreme Court choices, created in conjunction with the Heritage Foundation and the conservative Federalist Society. The Federalist Society is an organization of conservatives and libertarians seeking reform of the current American legal system in accordance with a textualist or originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. It is one of the nation’s most influential legal organizations.[86] The society was started in 1982 by a group of some of the most prominent conservatives in the country, including Attorney General Edwin Meese, Robert Bork, David M. McIntosh, Lee Liberman Otis, Spencer Abraham, and Steven Calabresi. In The Federalist Society, Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin write that every federal judge appointed by both President George H.W. Bush and President George W. Bush was either a member, or was approved by members of the society.[87]

In addition to the Koch Brothers, donors to the Federalist Society include Google, Chevron, the Scaife and Bradley Foundations, and the Mercer family.[88] Its membership has since included Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia, John G. Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.[89] The executive vice-president of the Federalist Society is Leonard Leo, a board member of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast and a member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta,[90] who has played a pivotal role grooming a generation of conservative lawyers and supplying dozens of names to Trump’s White House for judicial vacancies. “The Supreme Court needs to be an institution that helps to undergird limited constitutional government,” said Leo.[91] “We’re just thrilled with what we see from the transition; it gets better every day. To the extent Heritage is involved in it, hats off to Heritage,” said Richard Viguerie.[92]

On the campaign trail, Trump told evangelicals and other Republicans they had no choice but to vote for him: “You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges.”[93] He repeatedly talked about judges and released a list of 21 potential Supreme Court picks he gathered with the help of the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation from which Donald Trump said he would choose a nominee to replace Federalist Antonin Scalia. Trump entered office with the most judicial vacancies since Bill Clinton, largely thanks to Republican filibustering of Obama’s nominees. Trump has put 26 new judges onto the appeals courts, nominated over 100 district-court judges, 26 of which were confirmed. Federalists included Trump’s picks for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Of the current nine members of the Supreme Court of the United States, six are current or former members of the organization: Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Trump Leadership Council

Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel have been the backers of Club for Growth (CFG), founded by Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore.[94] Before founding the Club for Growth, Moore was the director of fiscal policy at the Cato Institute, and has stayed on as a Senior Fellow. Moore, who worked at the Heritage Foundation from 1983 to 1987 and again since 2014, and is a contributing editor for National Review and a Wall Street Journal editorial writer. On March 15, 2019, Trump announced that Moore would be nominated to serve as a governor of the Federal Reserve, but Moore withdrew his name from consideration.

Along with Richard Gilder, formerly Chairman of the Manhattan Institute, and Thomas Rhodes, President of the National Review, Stephen Moore is co-founded and served as president of the CFG from 1999 to 2004. A small group of financiers is responsible for much of the funding behind the Club for Growth, which has become extremely successful at encouraging conservative voices like as Senator Ted Cruz. According to Politico, “The Club for Growth is the pre-eminent institution promoting Republican adherence to a free-market, free-trade, anti-regulation agenda.”[95] According to Right Wing Watch, the CFG is “associated with a variety of right-wing organizations, including the Heritage Foundation and has been the recipient of much Koch “charitable” financial support.[96]

Three of Trump’s economic advisers, Stephen Moore, then-CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow, economist Arthur Laffer, and Dan DiMicco, joined the Trump Leadership Council, a kitchen Cabinet and advisers from many of America’s leading industries, including energy, finance, transportation, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, defense, construction and health care, bent on a corporate agenda of reducing taxes and dismantling regulations. DiMicco was CEO and chairman of Nucor, which funded a documentary titled Death by China, by Peter Navarro, who was designated by Bannon as one of the exemplars of “economic nationalism” who would contribute to the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” An internal battle emerged, pitting Navarro and DiMicco, forming the “nationalist” wing, against the “globalists,” headed by Gary Cohn and his allies. Navarro alleged that there was a conspiracy to undermine the president spearheaded by executives from Goldman Sachs along with unnamed “globalist elites” and a “self-appointed group of Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers,” all of whom are “part of a Chinese government influenced operation” to pressure the Trump administration into a deal.[97] Cohn left the White House in protest on April 2, 2018, and was replaced by CNBC host Larry Kudlow.

Speaking at the private summer meeting of the Council for National Policy (CNP) in the summer of 2016, Moore claimed that candidate Trump planned to pay for his costly proposals by eliminating the departments of Commerce, Energy and Education; lifting all restrictions on mining, drilling and fracking; ending Temporary Assistance for Needy Families programs, and offering rust-belt factory workers new jobs on oil rigs and steel mills. Moore also described how Jeff Sessions had “infiltrated” Trump’s campaign operation, and how Moore and other supply-side economists were working to urge Trump to be more supportive of free trade. Along with Kudlow, Moore advised the Trump administration during the writing and passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. On March 15, 2019, Trump announced that Stephen Moore would be nominated to serve as a governor of the Federal Reserve. On May 2, 2019, Moore withdrew his name from consideration. “They weren’t conventional Republicans,” Moore explained to Rolling Stone. “They were more maverick business leaders.”[98] Describing the TLC meetings, Moore observed:

What shocked me about these meetings was listening to these business leaders, and they all said the biggest thing is the regulatory state, and it’s just strangling their businesses in every single arena. So the first thing we’re going to do about this is have a regulatory freeze. The day he enters office we’re just going to put a halt on any new regulations.[99]

“Whether it’s community banks or the coal industry or construction, it was pretty universal that the regulatory structure had become a deterrent to growth,” Moore says. “That had an impact on Trump’s thinking to prioritize deregulation if he got into office.”[100] If elected, Trump added, he would eliminate 70 percent of all federal regulations. He called regulation “one of the greatest job killers of them all” and claimed excessive red tape cost the country $2 trillion a year, a number produced by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).[101] NAM, whose leader Jay Timmons was a council member, sent the Trump administration a wish list of 132 regulations that its members wished addressed, including Obama’s climate change legislation, the Clean Power Plan, and the FCC’s net neutrality rule. A recent report by the watchdog group Public Citizen found that the Trump administration has moved to implement 64 percent of NAM’s recommendations.[102]

The 48 members of the TLC comprised of registered lobbyists, including former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, then-president and CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable, the banking industry’s lobbying group; John Lechleiter, then-CEO and chairman of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly; Jerry Howard, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders; and lobbyists for major defense contractors Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. “In my entire career of doing this — we do it every four years, every presidential cycle — I have not given a policy briefing directly to a candidate like that,” remarked Jerry Howard of the home-builders association.[103] Of the council, remarked Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, “With Trump, we’ve had a corporate takeover of government with no parallel in American history.”[104]

Trump’s starting point at these meetings, several attendees told Andy Kroll of Rolling Stone, was to ask: What laws do you want to see repealed, what regulations unwound? [105] Dan DiMicco, the former steel executive and longtime China critic, was put in charge of the transition team for the US Trade Representative and later named to a trade advisory board by Trump. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), who at the council’s first meeting had led a discussion about how to replace Obamacare, was picked to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, though later forced out over a spending scandal. Dr. Mark Esper, a vice president at defense contractor Raytheon, was named secretary of the Army in 2017. “It’s the best time that we’ve ever seen for the defense industry,” Raytheon CEO Thomas Kennedy he observed.[106]

The TLC was the brainchild of Harold Hamm, who acted as an unofficial adviser to Trump’s campaign. Hamm, who never went to college, is worth an estimated $11 billion. Hamm runs the Oklahoma City-based oil and gas company Continental Resources and pioneered the drilling technique known as horizontal fracking. Hamm gave $1 million to groups aligned with the Koch brothers. According to a source familiar with his role, Ham helped secure the final delegates to ensure Trump’s nomination in the final leg of the 2016 Republican primary. It was not a coincidence, according to the source, that Trump announced his immanent nomination before speaking at an oil-industry conference in North Dakota, and that the first person he thanked was his “very good friend” Harold Hamm.[107]  According to Hamm, whom Trump has referred to as the “king of energy,” “Climate change isn’t our biggest problem,” which he said during at the 2016 Republican Convention. “It’s Islamic terrorism.”[108]

The industry best represented on the TLC was energy, led by Hamm, and including coal baron Bob Murray of Murray Energy; Joe Craft of Alliance Resources, one of the America’s biggest coal companies; and Larry Nichols of Devon Energy, the $11 billion oil giant that has long been a fierce opponent of climate regulations. “The council mirrors Trump’s presidency in that even the mainstream polluters wouldn’t be found on this council,” says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “You instead find people who are more extreme, more radical, more dangerous in their views — and who have been shaping Trump’s agenda since before he took office.”[109] Murray submitted to the administration a sixteen-point “action plan” on company letterhead to revive the coal industry. Within a year, Trump officials had moved to implement more than half of them, including shutting the Clean Power Plan and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.

Trump was especially critical of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and called for “complete American energy independence,” one of Hamm’s favorite talking points.[110] Trump’s pick to head the EPA is Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a former lobbyist for Murray Energy, who recently sued it over its plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Koch Industries PAC also funded Pruitt’s attorney general campaigns in 2010 and 2014. While in Oklahoma, Hamm had donated the maximum to the industry-friendly 2014 attorney-general campaign for Scott Pruitt, who Trump later tapped to head the EPA.[111] Joe Craft, of Alliance Resources, met with Pruitt at least seven times during Pruitt’s first fourteen months at the EPA, according to official calendars. EPA head Andrew Wheeler, Pruitt’s replacement and, has moved forward with weakening methane-emissions protections, mercury regulations and fuel-efficiency standards for cars.

Trump also nominated Erik Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, to serve as Secretary of Education. DeVos is married to CNP member Dick DeVos, the former CEO of multi-level marketing company Amway. She is the daughter-in-law of billionaire and Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, who described the CNP as bringing together the “donors and the doers.”[112] Rachel Tabachnik, a writer on the conservative movement, has pointed out, “The Prince and DeVos families are at the intersection of radical free market privatization and the Religious Right, and have made an enormous impact on the current political atmosphere.”[113] DeVos’ foundation has contributed millions to Americans for Prosperity and to other conservative political groups backed by the Kochs.[114] The Koch brothers have favored privatizing schools for decades, a subject dear to DeVos, who is known for her advocacy of school choice, voucher programs.[115] According to The New York Times, it “is hard to find anyone more passionate about the idea of steering public dollars away from traditional public schools than Betsy DeVos.”[116]

The Koch brothers have also financially backed Rick Perry who was nominated to lead the Department of Energy, a department that he said he wanted to eliminate during the 2012 presidential campaign. Trump’s likely energy policy is being rewritten by a former lobbyist for Koch Industries named Thomas Pyle. It includes a plan is a withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, increasing federal oil and gas leasing and green-lighting pipelines such as the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. Reuters reported that, given their deep involvement in the Canadian oil industry, the Koch brothers’ stands to “snare some of the windfall” from the Keystone project as well.[117] And according to a 2012 report from researchers at Cornell University, Evraz, a firm partly owned by Abramovich, has contracts to provide 40 percent of the steel for the Keystone Pipeline, a project whose completion was finally approved by Trump in March 2017, after years of delay.

Generals

In addition to hard-core Zionists and notorious Islamophobes, Trump’s cabinet is not only dominated by Big Oil and banksters, but also by the Military-Industrial Complex. Previous governments have confirmed generals for key cabinet positions, but never would so many end up serving together at the same time.[118] Trump has picked three retired generals, marine John Kelly for secretary of Homeland Security, marine James Mattis for Secretary of Defence, and soldier Michael Flynn for National Security Adviser. “Mad Dog” Mattis is a retired United States Marine Corps general who was NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation and was responsible for American military operations in the Middle East, Northeast Africa and Central Asia, from August 11, 2010 to March 22, 2013. Since retirement from the military, Mattis has worked for FWA Consultants and also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of General Dynamics, an American aerospace and defense multinational corporation that heavily relies on Pentagon contracts overseen by the Defense Secretary, and one of the original backers of the American Security Council (ASC). The International Business Times have shown that Mattis has been paid $594,369 by General Dynamics, and has amassed more than $900,000 worth of company stock. While on the General Dynamics board, Mattis testified before Congress, where he called caps on defense spending a national security threat.[119]

Since 2013, Mattis has been a board member of the controversial Silicon Valley biotech company Theranos, founded in 2003 by Elizabeth Holmes when he was only 19. In July 2011, Holmes was introduced to former Secretary of State George Shultz, who joined the Theranos board of directors. Shultz helped to introduce almost all the outside directors which included William Perry (former Secretary of Defense), Henry Kissinger (former Secretary of State), Sam Nunn (former U.S. Senator), Bill Frist (former U.S. Senator and heart-transplant surgeon), Gary Roughead (Admiral, USN, retired), James Mattis (General, USMC), Richard Kovacevich (former Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO) and Riley Bechtel (chairman of the board and former CEO at Bechtel Group). The board was criticized for consisting “mainly of directors with diplomatic or military backgrounds.”[120] On June 15, 2018, Federal prosecutors indicted Holmes on criminal fraud charges for allegedly defrauding investors, doctors and the public.[121]

Donald Trump has nominated retired Marine Corps genera John Kelly as homeland security secretary. Kelly stepped down in 2016 as commander of the US southern command, where he was responsible for US military activities and relationships in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Kelly said the American people had voted in November “to stop terrorism, take back sovereignty at our borders, and put a stop to political correctness that for too long has dictated our approach to national security”. He added: “I will tackle those issues with a seriousness of purpose and a deep respect for our laws and constitution.”[122]

In February 2017, H.R. McMaster, a United States Army officer, succeeded Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor. He is also known for his roles in the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. After the Persian Gulf War, McMaster served as a military history professor at the United States Military Academy from 1994 to 1996, became a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Consulting Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). He held a series of staff positions in the United States Central Command.

Islamophobes

Adding fuel to the fire, in November 2016, it was reported that Trump appointed notorious Islamophobe Frank Gaffney, founder of the rabid Center for Security Policy (CSP), to his transition team, to oversee the appointment of his national security advisers.[123] In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labeled the CSP as a hate group and a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement.”[124] Gaffney counts Rick Joyner as a “personal hero,” and the two work together to fight against the “Chrislam” movement, that seeks to combine both religions.[125] Gaffney has also been associated with David Yerushalmi for being responsible in spreading misinformation about Islam and for encouraging the enactment of anti-Muslim laws, including anti-Sharia legislation in the United States.[126] In 2010, James Woolsey and Joseph E. Schmitz, former executive with Blackwater and Knight of Malta, co-authored a CSP report that claimed sharia law was a major threat to the national security of the United States.[127]

The Military Committee Chairman for the CSP is retired Major General Paul E. Vallely, who wrote the 1980 MindWar article with Michael Aquino of the Temple of Set. During an interview on Veterans Today Radio Show with Stew Webb, Senior Editor Gordon Duff of VeteransToday.com stated that the CIA, Mossad and Saudi Intelligence created ISIS, and led by Vallely. Professor Jim Fetzer of VeteransToday further stated that Alan Sabrosky, “will have a report that a retired U.S. Army Major General Paul E. Valley, Commander of the 7th PSYOP Group, is guiding the terrorists and their operations against Assad.” Professor Jim Fetzer then asked Duff if he could confirm or deny the charge, after which Duff responded: “Vallely is the commander of ISIS, yes.”[128]

Recently, Vallely has been serving as a senior military analyst for Fox News. He co-authored a book with retired Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, titled Endgame—Blueprint for Victory for Winning the War on Terror, published by Regnery Publishing, which borrows, philosophically from MindWar. In 2005, Vallely founded a conservative political organization called Stand Up America US, that promotes the following issues: “First amendment rights, Second amendment rights, strong national defense and secure borders, national sovereignty, support of the armed forces, individual liberties and personal responsibility, fiscally responsible, limited government.” It consists mostly of links to far-right and Islamophobic news stories from conservative news outlets, and endorses the views of Glenn Beck. Vallely also hosted a radio program on Stand Up America, in which he regularly invited as guests neoconservatives and hardliners like Michael Ledeen.

In his position as FOX News military analyst from 2001 to 2007, Vallely unwaveringly promoted the US wars of naked aggression against Iraq and provided the personal defense of Donald Rumsfeld in the media as well as initiated a cover-up of the Valerie Plame affair. Vallely has continued to serve in disinformation of all kinds. As the Institute For Policy Studies (Right Web) writes:

Retired Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely is a former military analyst for Fox News and is the host of the conservative radio show, “Stand Up America.” Vallely, who serves on the boards of a number of hawkish policy groups that have pushed interventionist U.S. policies in the Middle East as part of the “war on terror,” was one of several retired military figures who was involved in a controversial Pentagon program aimed at disseminating favorable views of U.S. policies in the Iraq War by debriefing analysts like Vallely before their appearances on TV news programs.[129]

Some of his public statements have caused controversy, such as saying “we are not going to permit” a Shiite victory in an Iraqi election, and claiming that the war on terror is a war between Islam and Judeo-Christianity: “That’s what’s going on. If you don’t understand that, then you don’t get it.”[130] Vallely has recently lent his support to an organization called Veteran Defenders of America. In his letter of support he stated that, “Perhaps the greatest threat to our safety and liberty is the threat of radical Islam. This threat goes well beyond the threat of terrorism. Islamists, both inside and outside of America, are looking for any and every way to infiltrate and subvert our country through what is known as “stealth jihad.” He encourages US civilians (veterans) to be “eyes and ears of freedom, because we know freedom isn’t free.”[131]

Vallely is also a supporter of the Jerusalem Summit organization and an advocate of the its proposal to “relocate”/”resettle” Palestine and the Palestinian people to surrounding Arab countries as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to bring about the organization’s belief “Billions of people believe that Jerusalem’s spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world’s unity… that one of the objectives of Israel’s divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets… Just as in the past the Free World stood together against Fascism and Communism, so it today must do to combat the third challenge: radical Islam.”[132]

Trump also promoted Michael Glassner, who formulated Trump’s infamous Muslim ban. A longtime aide to former US Senator Bob Dole, to deputy campaign manager, Glassner helped to hire former Scott Walker campaign manager Rick Wiley as well as former Chris Christie campaign manager Ken McKay. In 2014, Glassner joined the pro-Israel lobby, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) where he was the Southwest regional political director. In February 2016, Glassner said, “My interest in pro-Israel politics had grown exponentially. Particularly since 9-11, which represented a real credible threat to all Americans and in particular as a Jew, I felt very strongly about the threat of radical Islam and so I became more and more involved with AIPAC.”[133]

Retired General Michael T. Flynn, who would become Trump’s controversial National Security Advisor, is the co-author of The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, with Michael Ledeen, published in 2016. Flynn sees Islam as one of the root causes of Islamist terrorism, describing the religion as a political ideology and a “cancer.” He stated in a Twitter post that “fear of Muslims is RATIONAL” and included a video link claiming that Islam wants “80% of people enslaved or exterminated.”[134] Flynn has been a board member of ACT! for America, an American conservative political group founded in 2007 to “promot[e] national security and defeat terrorism.” Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times states that it “draws on three rather religious and partisan streams in American politics: evangelical Christian conservatives, hard-line defenders of Israel (both Jews and Christians) and Tea Party Republicans.”[135] ACT! members have introduced David Yerushalmi’s anti-foreign law bill (also known as anti-Shariah bill) in several state legislatures, accompanying it with “a public outreach blitz about the ‘threat’ of Sharia to America.”[136]

On April 25, 2018, it was reported that Trump intends to nominate another signatory of the PNAC, Paula Dobriansky.[137] At the end of May 2018, Trump appointed another PNAC signatory, Gary Bauer, a close associate of Erik Prince, for the position of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. The commission is an independent body that tracks religious freedoms overseas. “We have seen a disturbing rise in anti-Semitism and persecution of Christians around the world, but especially in the Middle East,” Bauer, a veteran of top Education Department posts in the Reagan administration, said in a CUFI release on Thursday. “We must confront these two threats. Through this post, I will work to ensure the President and Congress are provided real policy options for contending with religious persecution in the world.”[138] Bauer also serves on the Executive Board of Christians United for Israel, the Christian-Zionist lobby group headed by John Hagee.[139]

Trump Prophecies

Fox, the Koch brothers and their network of right-wing political backers fanned white resentment against the “liberal establishment” to appeal to a base of evangelical Christian Zionists to advance the foreign policy goals of Israel. Despite many of them questioning his moral character, 81% of white evangelicals, comprising a record 26 percent of the electorate, voted for Trump.[140] Given the size of the Southern population, it represents 45 percent of Trump’s 46.1 percent of the popular vote. According to Gallup’s estimates, the portion of the adult population that is evangelical have ranged from 35 percent in 1976 to 47 percent in 1998, and 41 percent in 2008.[141]

Evangelical pastor Tony Campolo said in 2010 that conservative evangelicals respond to Fox News’ Glenn Beck through his framing of conservative economic principles. According to Campolo, the “marriage between evangelicalism and patriotic nationalism” of Beck and those like him, “is so strong that anybody who is raising questions about loyalty to the old, laissez-faire capitalist system is ex post facto unpatriotic, un-American, and by association non-Christian.”[142] According to Lisa Miller of Newsweek:

Evangelicals characteristically see themselves as a persecuted group whose values are under assault by the mainstream culture, and Beck has most successfully (and visibly) reframed those values in terms of patriotism. The enemy is no longer “moral relativism,” a term that encompasses sexual promiscuity, divorce, homosexuality, and pornography. It’s socialism, the redistribution of wealth, immigrants—a kind of “global relativism” that makes no moral distinction between America and every other place.[143]

Frances FitzGerald, in The Evangelicals, her history of white evangelical movement from colonial times to the present, explained, “The simplest explanation was that those evangelicals who voted for Trump had affinities with the Tea Party.” [144] They were more concerned about reducing the size of the government, creating jobs, and deporting illegal immigrants than about enforcing Christian morals. As Amy Sullivan wrote in the New York Times, “The regular Fox News viewer,” she adds, “whether or not he is a churchgoer, takes in a steady stream of messages that conflate being white and conservative and evangelical with being American.” “A pastor has about 30 to 40 minutes each week to teach about Scripture,” said Jonathan Martin, an Oklahoma pastor and popular evangelical writer. “They’ve been exposed to Fox News potentially three to four hours a day… Now the Bible’s increasingly irrelevant. It’s just ‘us versus them.’” [145]

According to Peter Montgomery, writing in the Public Eye, “The Koch brothers, who describe themselves as libertarians uninterested in social conservatives’ culture wars, are more than willing to use Christian Right voters as well as mountains of cash to achieve their anti-government, anti-union ends.”[146] According to Randall Balmer, referring to the legacy of the Christian Right, “Evangelical voting behavior suggests that the religious right was merely reverting to the racism that prompted its entry into the political arena in the late 1970s.”[147] Billy Graham’s son Franklin Graham cried “shame” on those who were trying to blame Trump for what happened in Charlottesville. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, who recently disclosed that God had authorized Trump to assassinate North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, said that “racism comes in all shapes, all sizes and, yes, all colors.” Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the founder of Moral Majority, and his father’s successor as president of Liberty University, applauded Trump’s “bold truthful statement about Charlottesville tragedy.”[148]

Tim Phillips, president of the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a member of the CNP, has deep ties to the evangelical Right, most notably with Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Rev. Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, who now heads a new entity, the Faith and Freedom Coalition (FFC). According to David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Faith and Freedom Coalition has a database of 20 million evangelical voters.[149] In 2009, the AFP and the FFC joined the Freedom Federation, a coalition of the leading organizations of the Christian Right, including Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, the American Family Association, CNP member James Dobson’s Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, founded in 1979 by Beverly LaHaye, wife of CNP member Timothy LaHaye.[150] In 2102, the Freedom Federation hosted the Awakening conference at Liberty University, which showcased the Tea Party’s Congresswoman Michelle Bachman.

The Freedom Federation also includes Strang Communications and Morning Star Ministries. Strang was founded by Stephen Strang, who TIME in 2005 as one of “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.”[151] Strang continues to run Charisma, a monthly Christian magazine aimed at Pentecostals and charismatics. Morning Star Ministries is a multi-faceted mission organization which includes Heritage International Ministries, a former American Christian theme park, water park, and residential complex built in Fort Mill, South Carolina by PTL Club founders televangelist Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. The assets had previously been purchased in 1990 from the United States Federal Bankruptcy Court in Columbia, South Carolina, by Dr. Morris Cerullo, who hosts Victory Today, a daily television program, and has published more than 80 books.[152] Cerullo was born to a Russo-Jewish/Italian family, but claims to have received Jesus Christ at age 14 by a nurse at the Orthodox Jewish orphanage where he was kept.

In 1990, Cerullo purchased Heritage USA of Jim Bakker’s bankrupt ministry, before the remaining assets were finally bought by a South Carolina minister named Rick Joyner, the Founder and Executive Director of Morning Star, in 2004. More than 200,000 follow Joyner’s Facebook page, where he frequently posts about U.S. politics. Many evangelicals view Joyner as a prophetic voice who describes hearing and seeing divine revelations from God, often on current events. Joyner Says he has had encounters with Enoch and Elijah.[153]

There has also been some controversy about Joyner joining the Knights of Malta, or the Order of St. John. Joyner claims he was introduced to the Knights by Lieutenant Colonel Eugene K. Bird, who was US Commandant of the Spandau Allied Prison from 1964 to 1972 where, together with six others, Rudolf Hess was incarcerated. Over the years, the two developed friendship and they began collaboration on a book about Hess and his flight to Scotland in 1941. Bird’s book about Hess, The Loneliest Man in the World, was published by Secker & Warburg in 1974. Bird introduced Joyner to a Austrian Baron and associate of Kurt Waldheim, the former president of Austria who was disgraced when his former ties to the Nazis were exposed. Joyner explains his motivation for joining the order as follows:

Just as Count Zinzendorf, the true father of modern missions, created the Order of the Mustard Seed, which touched and inspired men like John Wesley to release a spiritual fire in the earth that created the First Great Awakening in America and Europe, I think that the church is in desperate need of groups who will join together to press beyond the state of modern Christianity as it is generally found in most of the world. Call these “elitist” groups if you want, but we need them to call all Christians to higher standards of faith and life. I make no apologies for my plans to start one (which I will explain later), and to assist the OSJ to accomplish its mandate. Such a thing will only be offensive to the lukewarm and the fearful, which in the midst of our present distress, I do not believe we have the time to care about offending.[154]

Joyner met with Trump at Trump Tower on May 12, 2016.[155] Joyner said in the Jim Bakker Show, “You look at the type of leaders that Jesus chose, they were more like Donald Trumps.”[156] On the morning of the election on November 8, 2016, Joyner wrote on Facebook that the polls were not to be believed, and that Donald Trump would win the election.[157]

After speaking at a meeting of more than 1,000 Evangelicals and some Catholics on June 21, 2017, Trump announced his appointment of an “evangelical executive advisory board” to lead a larger “Faith and Cultural Advisory Committee.” The line-up of advisors represented a “who’s who of conservative Christian leaders,” According to The Atlantic. “The ‘90s are back in Trumpland, and the old-guard religious right is making its return.”[158] The committee included Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University. Falwell said in 1981: “To stand against Israel is to stand against God. We believe that history and scripture prove that God deals with nations in relation to how they deal with Israel.”[159]

In January 2017, Trump also appointed Jerry Falwell Jr. to chair a taskforce on reforms for the US Department of Education. Len Stevens, Liberty University’s chief spokesman, told NBC News that Falwell would bring a focus on “overregulation and micromanagement of higher education” to the task force.[160] Falwell Jr. called Trump “America’s blue collar billionaire” and “one of the greatest visionaries of our time” in his endorsement of the candidate he felt most likely to defend the “right to bear arms,” “stop Iran… from becoming a nuclear power,” and “appoint conservative pro-life justices to the Supreme Court.”[161] In an August 19, 2016 editorial in the Washington Post, Falwell compared Trump to Winston Churchill: “We need a leader with qualities that resemble those of Winston Churchill, and I believe that leader is Donald Trump.”[162]

In addition to Jerry Falwell Jr., Trump’s faith-based committee included Michele Bachmann of the Tea Party, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, James Dobson, Paula White, Mark Burns and Mark Burns among others. Richard Land is considered the chief spokesman for Southern Baptists, a culture warrior and “one of the few remaining scions of the Religious Right.”[163] Land was president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention in the United States, and is currently the president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, a post he has held since July 2013.

James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, now hosts a radio program called My Family Talk. Although never an ordained minister, he was called “the nation’s most influential evangelical leader” by The New York Times while Slate portrayed him as a successor to evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.[164] Dobson frequently appears as a guest on Fox News. Dobson’s Family Research Council is currently led by Tony Perkins, who served as vice-president of the CNP. Perkins is a graduate of Liberty University. In 2001, Perkins gave a speech to the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). His mentor was Woody Jenkins, one of the founding members of the CNP. In 1996 while managing Jenkins’ unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign, Perkins paid David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. The Federal Election Commission fined the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for attempting to hide the money paid to Duke.[165] In 2014, Perkins released an editorial explaining why he supports Israel, and travelled to the country with Michelle Bachman in 2015.[166]

Kenneth Copeland was Oral Roberts’ pilot and chauffer. He and his wife’s daily television program, which is available on Christian networks and their website, has been broadcasting since 1989. The Copelands were among the televangelists targeted in a 2007 Senate investigation, and more recently, the couple’s tax-free ministry status was mocked by Last Week Tonight host John Oliver.[167] Jeffress is pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas. He has made more than 2,000 guest appearances in the media, and he regularly appears alongside Sean Hannity and others as a contributor on Fox News. First Baptist is a historic congregation in Texas, founded nearly 150 years ago, and Jeffress follows former lead pastors George Truett and W.A. Criswell, both prominent Southern Baptists and Freemasons. Jeffress said, “God intervened in our election and put Donald Trump in the Oval Office for a great purpose.”[168]

Florida preacher and televangelist Paula White was named as a chair of Trump’s advisory board. White converted to Christianity at the age of 18, after claiming to have seen a vision in which God told her that he wanted her to preach the Gospel. She and her former husband Randy White founded Without Walls International, a Tampa megachurch which grew to 25,000 members over 15 years. In 2007, the couple separated as the church underwent a US Senate investigation. Later, White and televangelist and faith healer Benny Hinn admitted to having an affair following her divorce.[169] Toufik Benedictus “Benny” Hinn is an Israeli televangelist, best known for his regular “Miracle Crusades,” faith healing summits that are usually held in stadiums in major cities, which are later broadcast worldwide on his television program, This Is Your Day. Hinn claims that while on his Miracle Crusades, he has been able to heal audience members of blindness, cancer, AIDS, severe physical injuries, and deafness. However, these claims have come under a lot of questioning in terms of their legitimacy in reports done by the Los Angeles Times, NBC’s Dateline, and CBC’s The Fifth Estate. Hinn’s house was raided by the FBI and IRS for claims of fraud.

White’s present husband is Jonathan Cain, the musician who wrote Journey’s hit song “Don’t Stop Believin.” White considers T.D. Jakes her spiritual father. She has ministered to some well-known people including Michael Jackson, Gary Sheffield, and Darryl Strawberry, and she is the “personal life coach” of Tyra Banks.

White recorded the first broadcast of Paula White Today in December 2001 and, by 2006, her show appeared on nine television networks, including Daystar, an American evangelical Christian-based religious broadcast television network that is owned by the Word of God Fellowship, founded by Marcus Lamb in 1993. Daystar is the second largest Christian television network in the entire world that has 90 TV stations via cable and satellite. Daystar has faced controversy in Israel when it became the first foreign Christian network to be given a broadcast license by its government in 2006. The announcement drew criticism from Jewish leaders in both Israel and the United States, who believed the network aimed at converting Israeli Jews through its numerous Messianic Jewish programs.[170] In 2010, Lamb made a public confession in front of his television audience that he was having an extramarital affair. He also added that he was confessing to this because he was being blackmailed with a $7.5 million extortion threat.

The reach of Christian television and particularly DayStar was significant in building support for Trump says White, as well as these pastors’ social media.[171]Along with Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, as well as Paula White and other fellow televangelists, the Copelands prayed with Trump in September 2015.[172] White has been a personal minister Trump who discovered White by watching her TV show.[173] White claims that Trump asked her to introduce him Dr. Morris Cerullo.[174] Trump would often bring White to Atlantic City for private Bible studies, and he has appeared on her television show.[175] White was credited in June 2016 by Dobson as having converted Trump to Christianity.[176] Since Trump took office White has served as one of the president’s spiritual advisors, and has held Oval Office prayer circles with her.[177] Following a meeting with Trump in the White House, which White also attended Johnnie Moore, a Christian activist and member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, told Newsweek “[She’s] like another daughter to the president and another sister to Ivanka.”[178] White delivered the invocation at his inauguration, and enthusiastically supported Trump’s 2017 decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.[179]

Also a member of Trump’s team of Evangelicals is Mary Colbert. Mary is married to Dr. Don Colbert, who co-authored the New York Times bestseller Seven Pillars of Health with Mary, and has written over 40 books that together have sold millions of copies. Don is a frequent guest on the programs of John Hagee, Joyce Meyer, Kenneth Copeland and other Evangelical Christians. Colbert has also been featured in Readers Digest, Prevention, Charisma and Newsweek. Dr. Colbert was introduced to Mark Taylor, who had started experiencing visions where he believed the “Spirit of God” spoke to him. On the first visit, Colbert began “prophesying” over Taylor, and said, “Mark, I feel like the Sprit of God is saying, one of these days you are going to start waking up and hearing the voice of God, and writing in prophetic words. Taylor then shared with him the transcriptions of the messages he had already started receiving, which told him April 28, 2011, that predicted that Donald Trump would become president. According to Taylor, the “Spirit of God” told him:

I have chosen this man Donald Trump for such a time as this. For as Benjamin Netanyahu is to Israel, so shall this man be to the United States of America. For I will use this man to bring honour, respect and restoration to America. American will be respected once again as the most powerful, prosperous nation on Earth, other than Israel… For America will be protected by Israel… America will once again stand hand in hand with Israel, and the two shall be as one.

Mary Colbert has since started collaborating with Taylor, to team up to tell the world about what they call the Trump Prophecies, in order “to understand what led to the miracle of the 2016 election… to find out the role of unity and intercession of God’s people has accomplished in electing Trump as President. Discover what continued intercession will bring about concerning God’s future blessings for our nation, for Israel and for the nations of the world.”[180] Mary Colbert claims that Trump is not perfect, but God chooses who he will work his plan through. And she warns that if you “come against the chosen one of God, okay. You are bringing upon you, and your children, and your children’s children, curses like you have never seen.”[181]

The Trump Prophecies are promoted by Sid Roth, a televangelist who hosts Sid Roth’s It’s Supernatural!, a talk show to promote the supernatural as it relates to evangelism. The show is broadcast in the US on Daystar. Roth, who was born Jewish, converted to Christianity following a supernatural encounter with Jesus. In 1977 Sid started a ministry called “Messianic Vision” to reach out with the good news of the Messiah. According to Roth, God’s heart is to reach all people, but His strategy is “to the Jew first.” (Romans 1:16).[182] Some of the authors and guests featured on Sid Roth’s It’s Supernatural! include Jonathan Cahn, Bill Johnson, John Waller, Guillermo Maldonado, Misty Edwards, John Paul Jackson. Cahn a Messianic rabbi and author of The Harbinger, in which he compares the United States and the September 11 attacks to ancient Israel and the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel. In The Paradigm & The Paradigm Revealed he purports to show the “uncanny parallels” between events in America today and those of ancient Israel nearly 3,000 years ago. Cahn asks, “Have the dramas of Israel past found expression in the White House and America’s political scene for almost four decades?”[183]

Johnson is the founder of Bethel Church, a non-denominational charismatic megachurch, was established in 1954 in Redding, California, which is notable for their controversial ministry style, supernatural ministry school, and the church’s music team. John Waller, Christian singer-songwriter known for writing the theme song for Fireproof, a 2008 American Christian drama film starring Kirk Cameron. Guillermo Maldonado is the co-founder and senior pastor of El Rey Jesús, Maldonado together with his wife is also the president and co-founder of the University of the Supernatural Ministry. A non-denominational Christian entity affiliated with King Jesus Ministry.

John Paul Jackson, the founder of Streams Ministries International, often focused on supernatural topics like dreams, visions, and dream interpretation as found in the Bible. In what he referred to as a revelation from the Lord, Jackson released a statement in 2008 called The Coming Perfect Storm, in which he spoke of a time coming to America and the world in which economic, military, religious, political, and geophysical issues and events would occur. In the summer of 2009, Jackson was a guest on Sid Roth’s It’s Supernatural!, where he describes in detail the events that an “angel” revealed to him. “I saw the year 2010 was going to be very difficult, especially as you get further into 2010. I saw the year, I kept hearing an angel saying in a deep loud voice, “The woes of 2012. The woes of 2012. The woes of 2012.”[184]

Roth also supports the work of Lance Wallnau, who is promoted by Rick Joyner’s MorningStar Ministries. Lance Wallnau, a Dallas-based business consultant, has been speaking and prophesying about Trump for over a year in videos to his Facebook page, which features 200,000-plus followers. He also heavily promotes his book released in September that describes “Donald Trump being God’s Chaos candidate.”[185]

Russophilia

Taylor has also shared his prophecies with Komorusan714, a videoblogger on YouTube, who lets his listeners know that Trump was chosen and appointed by God to end the New World Oder and Luciferian reign on Earth. “The complete and total containment of evil has begun,” he pronounced.[186] On October 30, 2016, Komorusan714 announced that God told Taylor that He will also use Russia, along with the United States and her allies, to defeat ISIS and the New World Order.[187]

Franklin Graham sees Putin as a powerful partner in the quest to protect Christian religious minorities. In war zones like Syria, says Graham, Putin has been a stronger defender of Christians than American leaders. “Islam teaches to kill Christians and Jews,” claims Graham. Putin, however, “sees himself in the Middle East as defending the Christian remnant that is left in Syria.” In December 2015, Graham met privately with Putin for 45 minutes, securing from him an offer to help with an upcoming conference on the persecution of Christians.[188]

In 2015 Graham met privately with Putin, who has supported Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, while visiting Moscow at the Russian Orthodox Church’s invitation. They planned a conference on persecuted Christians, which will be held in Washington in May. “He was very supportive,” says Graham. “He said he would do all he could from his office to help.”

Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, has visited Moscow four times in four years, including a 2013 trip during which he testified before the Duma as Russia adopted a series of anti-gay laws, believes that in Russia “There was a real push to re-instill Christian values in the public square.” Brown said activists in both countries are simply “uniting together under the values we share.”[189] “Is it possible that these are just well-meaning people who are reaching out to Americans with shared interests? It is possible,” said Steven L. Hall, who retired from the CIA in 2015 after 30 years managing Russia operations. “Is it likely? I don’t think it’s likely at all… My assessment is that it’s definitely part of something bigger.”[190]

The tendency for positive regard for Russia is consistent across the right. In general, Republicans' positive views towards Putin increased from 12% in 2015 to 32% in February 2017.[191] Ann Coulter told the Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo, “Right now the real enemy of the United States and all of Western civilization is radical Islam and Putin is obviously a much better ally in that fight than Merkel is.”[192] Coulter said Germany’s open door migrant policy is destroying all of Western Europe. She dismisses claims of Russian obstruction of the 2017 election as hysteria drummed up by conniving liberals. She attributes Trump’s success to his focus on the immigrant issue, and warned that if Republicans did not remain tough on immigration, “that’s it, you organize the death squads” for the politicians who “wrecked America.”[193]

What all the rabid white supremacists seemed to have in common was a support for Russia and Putin. As Cliff Kincaid noted, another of the “Modern-Day Russian Dupes” is Pat Buchanan, who recently wrote, “Is God Now on Russia’s Side?” in which he claimed he “third Rome” and the West “is Gomorrah.” Although Buchanan claimed “Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity,” as Kincaid remarked, there is no indication of Russia’s genuine commitment to Christianity: “Instead, what we are witnessing is a massive Russian ‘active measures’ campaign that has ensnared many American conservatives, convincing them that Putin is somehow a legitimate alternative to President Obama’s decadent worldview.”[194] Nevertheless, Buchanan claimed Russia’s annexation of Crimea was part of Putin’s master plan to fight the moral war against the West, and cited the country’s ban on “homosexual propaganda” as proof the battle is being won.

In an article for American Renaissance, titled “Is Putin the ‘Preeminent Statesman’ of Our Times?” Buchanan declared:

Putin stands against the Western progressive vision of what mankind’s future ought to be. Years ago, he aligned himself with traditionalists, nationalists and populists of the West, and against what they had come to despise in their own decadent civilization.

What they abhorred, Putin abhorred. He is a God-and-country Russian patriot. He rejects the New World Order established at the Cold War’s end by the United States. Putin puts Russia first.

And in defying the Americans he speaks for those millions of Europeans who wish to restore their national identities and recapture their lost sovereignty from the supranational European Union. Putin also stands against the progressive moral relativism of a Western elite that has cut its Christian roots to embrace secularism and hedonism.[195]

Likewise, Trad Youth founder Matt Heimbach believes Putin is the “leader of the free world,” one who has helped morph Russia into an “axis for nationalists.”[196] Matt Heimbach and Parrott of the Traditionalist Youth Network are using a map of Trump strongholds to target areas where white nationalism would play best. “If they’re ready to vote for Trump, they can’t be too far away from being ready to support a real nationalist party,” Heimbach explained. [197] “Trump has opened up space for a new kind of discourse,” Richard Spencer explained. “He’s opened up space for talking about nationalism.” As Spencer added, “I don’t think that Donald Trump set out to inspire the alt-right, but we’ve been thrown into the same boat by our shared enemies, so he’s become an alt-right god.”[198] A columnist on The Daily Stormer wrote about Trump, “This man is 88% woke.”[199] Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer referred to Putin as “Czar Putin I, defender of human civilization.” For Anglin, Putin was a great white savior, a “being of immense power.”[200]

It is therefore not surprising that Trump’s platform is based on the same Islamophobic fear-mongering, and therefore also endorsed by Marine le Pen, Nick Griffin of the neo-Nazi British National Party, Geert Wilders, Ilias Panagiotaros, Nigel Farage and most importantly, Alexander Dugin. According to the Farage’s aides, Trump will consult him about any policy proposals, which will affect Britain before he contacts Prime Minster Theresa May.[201] Farage voiced his support for the Putin as the leader he most admired, in a 2014 interview. It was also in 2013 that Farage met Russia’s London Ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko. Two years before, Russia successfully boasted that its controversial elections had been monitored by a British MEP. It was less vocal that the identity of the MEP was BNP leader Nick Griffin. Since then, six UKIP’s MEPs have made appearances on RT, with Farage making almost monthly appearances.

In February 2016, Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen tweeted: “If I were American, I would vote Donald Trump… but may God protect him!”[202] Pat Buchanan, along with Richard B. Spencer and David Duke, who are part of the same strategy pursued by Dugin of exploiting far-right and racist ideologies, have all endorsed the candidacy of Donald Trump. Duke had traveled to Russia in 2001 to promote his new book, Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question. Former Yeltsin press minister Boris Mironov wrote an introduction for the Russian edition. In addition to headlining the “White Forum” conference in Moscow in 2007, Duke once lived in Russia. He owns an apartment in Moscow, which he reportedly sub-let to American Neo-Nazi Preston Wiginton, who has in turn hosted web chats by Dugin at the University of Texas A&M college.[203] Duke has routinely encouraged his supporters to rally for Trump and calls him America’s “white knight.” He believes Trump will be the candidate to uphold his values and morals.[204]

Across Western Europe, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in spring 2016, those who favor right-wing populist parties are also significantly more likely to express confidence in Putin.[205] At the fascist conference in St. Petersburg in 2015, Nick Griffin warned the audience that Christendom would succumb to “a terrible civil war,” become and Islamist caliphate “or perhaps both”, and that “the survival of Christendom” is “absolutely impossible without the rise of the Third Rome: Moscow.”[206] In 2016, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, signed a “cooperation agreement” with Putin’s United Russia party, and offered to act as a go-between for Donald Trump.[207] On March 24, 2017, Marine le Pen confirmed that she supported Russia’ annexation of Crimea, and her opposition to the sanctions subsequently imposed by the EU. If elected president, she pledged: “I would envisage lifting the sanctions quite quickly.”[208] According to Alain de Benoist, Trump’s victory “is clearly a positive thing, which shows that the surging wave of what is known in Europe as ‘populism’ has now reached the United States.”[209] De Benoist still publishes Dugin’s works through his publications Elements, Nouvelle Ecole and Krisis.[210]

The Breitbart “Embassy” on Capitol Hill was packed on August 24, 2016, as conservative journalists, Trump aides and other reporters congregated to celebrate Coulter’s new book, In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, repeating Dugin’s phrase made a few months earlier.[211] In March 2016, Dugin had tweeted, “the real rightwing in America… which has found itself caught in the liberal globalist sect’s trap, obsessed with the new world order and focused on the interests of the world financial elite.” He ended by declaring: “In Trump we trust!”[212]

Similarly, Alex Jones denounces all claims of Trump’s collusion with the Russians as “fake news,” and maintains the myth of Trump’s status as an anti-establishment hero by claiming that the assertions are part of a “counter coup” by what he has called “criminal, corporate elements inside the CIA” working “to basically overthrow Trump.”[213] Jones claims that Trump called him after winning the election, to thank him and his fans for their support. Jones cited Trump as saying, “He wanted to directly talk to you and thank you because you’re the people, you’re the Americans, you’re the bitter clingers, you’re the people they couldn’t break your will, they couldn’t mind-control you, you’re the core that’s going to restore the republic.”[214]

Following Trump’s election win, Jones was interviewed live on Tsargrad TV on December 20, 2016, together with Alexander Dugin. Jones was introduced as the “legendary American journalist Alex Jones.” Dugin was effusive, saying to Jones, “For us, you are the example of a true American man, the true American spirit. You, Alex, have changed our view of who a real American is.” Dugin concluded, “And when Donald Trump won, whom you supported, and whom we were all also in solidarity with. When you and him and all of us won I said this: anti-Americanism is over. Now the people of the free United States, free Russia and all the anti-globalists powers worldwide have to build a new world, new architecture.” Jones, who posted a translation of the interview on his YouTube channel, ended it with an amateurish spoof comedy skit where he made fun of what would be the inevitable ensuing criticism that he is a brainwashed Russian agent.[215]

[1] Jeet Heer. “The Breitbartization of Fox News.” New Republic (March 22, 2018).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ross Douthat. “Trump Hacked the Media Right Before Our Eyes.” New York Times (March 21, 2018).

[4] Heer. “The Breitbartization of Fox News.”

[5] Joe Otterson. “Cable News Ratings: MSNBC, CNN, Fox News Post Double-Digit Growth in Q2.” Variety (June 27, 2017).

[6] Elizabeth Schroeder & Daniel F. Stone. “Fox News and political knowledge.” Journal of Public Economics, 126 (2015), p. 1.

[7] Kevin Arceneaux, Martin Johnson, René Lindstädt & Ryan J. Vander Wielen. “The Influence of News Media on Political Elites: Investigating Strategic Responsiveness in Congress.” American Journal of Political Science (February 2, 2015).

[8] Gregory J. Martin & Ali Yurukoglu. “Bias in Cable News: Persuasion and Polarization.” American Economic Review (April 5, 2017).

[9] Dylan Matthews. “A stunning new study shows that Fox News is more powerful than we ever imagined.” Vox (September 8, 2017).

[10] Jane Mayer. “The Making of the Fox News White House.” The New Yorker (March 11, 2019 Issue).

[11] Ibid.

[12] Amy Chozick. “Rupert Murdoch and President Trump: A Friendship of Convenience.” New York Times (December 23, 2017).

[13] Jack Moore. “Jared Kushner Once Allegedly Admitted That Donald Trump Lies to His Base Because He Thinks They’re Stupid.” GQ (May 30, 2017).

[14] Ibid.

[15] Matt Wilstein. “Nicolle Wallace: Hannity Runs Trump ‘Like an Asset.’” The Daily Beast (April 18, 2018).

[16] Jane Mayer. “The Making of the Fox News White House.” The New Yorker (March 11, 2019 Issue).

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Amy Chozik. “Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump: A friendship of convenience.” The Sydney Morning Herald (December 24, 2017).

[23] Lucia Graves. “Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch: inside the billionaire bromance.” The Guardian (June 16, 2017).

[24] Edward Luce. “Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump and the politics of resentment.” The Financial Times (May 2, 2018).

[25] Ibid.

[26] Amy Chozick. “Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump: A friendship of convenience.”

[27] Gabriel Sherman. “Why Rupert Murdoch Decided to Back Donald Trump.” New York Magazine (May 17, 2016).

[28] Jennifer Senior. “Review: Megyn Kelly Tells Tales Out of Fox News in Her Memoir, ‘Settle for More’.” New York Times (November 10, 2016).

[29] Nicole Hemmer. “Fox News = Trump TV.” US News (January 24, 2017).

[30] David A. Bell. “Fake News Is Not the Real Media Threat We’re Facing.” The Nation (December 22, 2016).

[31] Robert Costa, Sarah Ellison & Josh Dawsey. “Hannity’s rising role in Trump’s world: ‘He basically has a desk in the place’” The Washington Post (April 17, 2018).

[32] Olivia Nuzzi. “Donald Trump and Sean Hannity Like to Talk Before Bedtime.” New York Magazine (May 13, 2018).

[33] Phillip Bump. “Yes, Sean Hannity was a legal client of Michael Cohen’s.” The Washington Post (April 17, 2018).

[34] Nuzzi. “Donald Trump and Sean Hannity Like to Talk Before Bedtime.”.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Robert Costa, Sarah Ellison & Josh Dawsey. “Hannity’s rising role in Trump’s world: ‘He basically has a desk in the place’.” The Washington Post (April 17, 2018).

[37] Matt Wilstein. “Nicolle Wallace: Hannity Runs Trump ‘Like an Asset’.” The Daily Beast (April 18, 2018).

[38] Jane Mayer. “The Making of the Fox News White House.” The New Yorker (March 11, 2019 Issue).

[39] Jeremy Barr. “Bill Shine’s Massive Fox News Severance Package Revealed.” The Hollywood Reporter (November 23, 2018).

[40] Mayer. “The Making of the Fox News White House.”

[41] Yashar Ali. “Exclusive: Kimberly Guilfoyle Left Fox News After Investigation Into Misconduct Allegations, Sources Say.” Huffington Post (July 27, 2018).

[42] Nicholas Thompson. “Goodbye Gab, A Haven of for the Far Right.” Wired (October 29, 2018).

[43] Savvas Zannettou, et al. “What is Gab.” What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber? (March 13, 2018). pp. 1007–1014.

[44] James Robert Compton. The Integrated News Spectacle: A Political Economy of Cultural Performance (Peter Lang, 2004), p. 204; Paul La Monica. Inside Rupert’s Brain (Peter Lang, 2009), p. 5; “Media Sources: Distinct Favorites Emerge on the Left and Right.” Pew Research Center (October 21, 2014).

[45] Kristin Miller. “The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.” Moyers & Company (July 13, 2017).

[46] Frank Rich. “The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party.” New York Times (August 28, 2010).

[47] Ibid.

[48] Kenneth P. Vogel. “How the Koch network rivals the GOP.” Politico (December 30, 2015).

[49] Jonathan Chait. “Paul Ryan And Ayn Rand.” The New Republic (December 28, 2010).

[50] Barbara Branden. The Passion of Ayn Rand (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1986), p. 414.

[51] As cited in Yasha Levine. “The Roots of Stalin in the Tea Party Movement.” Alternet (April 16, 2010).

[52] Paul Abowd. “Koch-funded charity passes money to free-market think tanks in states.” NBC News. Center for Public Integrity (February 14, 2013).

[53] Lee Fang. “How John Birch Society Extremism Never Dies: The Fortune Behind Scott Walker’s Union-Busting Campaign.” ThinkProgress (February 21, 2011).

[54] Andy Kroll. “Exposed: The Dark-Money ATM of the Conservative Movement.” Mother Jones (February 5, 2013).

[55] James Oliphant. “Giuliani hitches star to conservative legal group.” Chicago Tribune (September 6, 2007).

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid.

[58] John Wagner. “Do Trump’s Cabinet picks want to run the government — or dismantle it?” The Washington Post (December 9, 2016).

[59] Kenneth P. Vogel. “Behind the retreat of the Koch brothers’ operation.” Politico (October 27, 2016).

[60] Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Theda Skocpol & Caroline Tervo. “Behind ‘Make America Great,’ the Koch Agenda Returns with a Vengeance.” Talking Points Memo (November 21, 2016).

[61] Ibid.

[62] Hertel-Fernandez, Skocpol & Tervo. “Behind ‘Make America Great,’ the Koch Agenda Returns with a Vengeance.”

[63] Alex Kotch. “The Koch Brothers Are Smiling: The White House Will Be Packed With Some of Their Most Loyal Servants.” AlterNet (January 10, 2017).

[64] Ibid.

[65] Hertel-Fernandez, Skocpol & Tervo. “Behind “Make America Great,” the Koch Agenda Returns with a Vengeance.”

[66] Ibid.

[67] David Sherfinski. “Kochs say they will back Trump tax reform plan.” Washington Times (May 21, 2017).

[68] “Koch Brothers Behind Trump’s Climate Exit, Sachs Says.” Bloomberg (June 2, 2017).

[69] Lee Fang. “Meet Mike Pompeo: The Congressional Candidate Spawned By The ‘Kochtopus’.” Think Progress (September 21, 2010).

[70] John Nichols. “The Koch Brothers Get Their Very Own Secretary of State.” The Nation (March 13, 2018).

[71] Byron Tau. “Koch Industries backs Pompeo.” Politico (July 7, 2014).

[72] “GOP Rep: ‘No crisis’ at Gitmo, detainees ‘have put on weight.’” MSNBC (May 26, 2013).

[73] Julie Hirschfeld Davis. “Trump Turns to His Right Flank to Fill National Security Posts.” New York Times (November 18, 2016).

[74] John Nichols. “The Koch Brothers Get Their Very Own Secretary of State.” The Nation (March 13, 2018).

[75] Ibid.

[76] Jane Mayer. “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency.” The New Yorker (March 27, 2017 Issue).

[77] Zachary Mider. “What Kind of Man Spends Millions to Elect Ted Cruz?” Bloomberg (20 January 2016).

[78] Mayer. “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency.”

[79] Ibid.

[80] Jacob Heilbrunn. They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (Knopf Doubleday, 2009), p. 230.

[81] Matthew Rosenberg. “Bolton Was Early Beneficiary of Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook Data.” New York Times (March 23, 2018).

[82] Paul Blumenthal. “John Bolton’s Super PAC Spent Millions On Senators Who Might Vote To Confirm Him.” The Huffington Post (December 12, 2016).

[83] David E. Sanger. “With Bolton, Trump Creates a Historically Hard-Line Foreign Policy Team.” The New York Times (March 22, 2018).

[84] Katie Glueck. “Trump’s shadow transition team.” Politico (November 22, 2016).

[85] Ibid.

[86] Michael Fletcher. “What the Federalist Society Stands For.” Washington Post (July 29, 2005).

[87] Jeffrey Rosen. “Packing the Courts.” Sunday Book Review. New York Times (May 10, 2013).

[88] Ibid.

[89] James Oliphant. “Giuliani hitches star to conservative legal group.” Chicago Tribune (September 6, 2007).

[90] “A Judicial Renaissance? The Trump Administration & the Future of the Federal Judiciary- Leonard Leo.” Acton Institute. Retrieved from https://acton.org/event/2017/05/11/leonard-leo

[91] Lipton & Peters. “In Gorsuch, Conservative Activist Sees Test Case for Reshaping the Judiciary.”

[92] Ibid.

[93] Andy Kroll. “Inside Trump’s Judicial Takeover.” Rolling Stone (August 19, 2018).

[94] Jia Lynn Yang. “Here’s who pays the bills for Ted Cruz’s crusade.” The Washington Post (October 11, 2013).

[95] Burns Alexander & Anna Palmer. “Inside the Club for Growth's art of war.” Politico. (April 7, 2014).

[96] Eric Zuesse. “How the Koch Brothers Organized the Federal Shutdown.” Huffington Post (October 28, 2013).

[97] Paul McLeary. “Trump Advisor Charges “Globalist” Conspiracy to Undermine China Trade Deal.” Breaking Defence (November 9, 2018). Retrieved from https://breakingdefense.com/2018/11/trump-advisor-charges-globalist-conspiracy-to-undermine-china-trade-deal/

[98] Kroll. “The Shadow Cabinet.”

[99] Christina Wilkie. “Behind Closed Doors, Donald Trump's Adviser Explains His Real Economic Plan.” Huffington Post (September 14, 2016).

[100] Andy Kroll. “The Shadow Cabinet.”.

[101] Ibid.

[102] Your Wish is My Command. Public Citizen (May 9, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/Wishlist_report.pdf

[103] Andy Kroll. “The Shadow Cabinet: How a Group of Powerful Business Leaders Drove Trump’s Agenda.” Rolling Stone (June 19, 2019).

[104] Ibid.

[105] Andy Kroll. “The Shadow Cabinet.”

[106] Ibid.

[107] Ibid.

[108] Ibid.

[109] Ibid.

[110] Ibid.

[111] Ibid.

[112] “Meet the DeVos family — super-wealthy right-wingers working with the religious right to destroy public education.” Alternet (November 24, 2016).

[113] Bill Berkowitz. “Betsy DeVos’ Plan to Destroy Public Education.” BuzzFlash (November 30, 2016)

[114] AlterNet. “The Koch Brothers’ most loyal servants are serving in Donald Trump’s White House.” Salon (January 11, 2017).

[115] David W. Hursh. “Marketing Education: The Rise of Standardized Testing, Accountability, Competition, and Markets in Public Education.” Neoliberalism and Education Reform (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2006).

[116] Kate Zernike. “Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Education Pick, Has Steered Money From Public Schools.” The New York Times (November 23, 2016).

[117] David Sassoon. “Koch Brothers Positioned To Be Big Winners If Keystone XL Pipeline Is Approved.” Reuters (February 10, 2011).

[118] Matt Kwong. “Donald Trump’s choice of generals for top posts ‘extremely unusual.’” CBC News (December 9, 2016).

[119] Avi Asher-Schapiro. “Trump’s defense head will usher in new era of military-industrial complex growth.” International Business Times (December 3, 2016).

[120] Ron Leuty. “Theranos: The biggest biotech you’ve never heard of.” San Francisco Business Times (30 August 2013)

[121] Ken Sweet. “Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes charged with criminal fraud.” AP (June 15, 2018).

[122] Spencer Ackerman. “Trump picks retired general John Kelly for homeland security.” The Guardian (December 12, 2016).

[123] Charlotte England. “Donald Trump ‘appoints Islamophobic conspiracy theorist to transition team’.” Independent (November 16, 2016).

[124] “Center for Security Policy.” Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20160411234113/https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/center-security-policy

[125] Kyle Mantyla. “Merging Anti-Islam Activism With Prophetic Dominionism.” Right Wing Watch (August 18, 2011).

[126] Todd Green. The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Fortress Press, 2015)

[127] Peter Bergen. “The Republicans' Muslim 'problem'". CNN. (September 21, 2015). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20150929022053/http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/21/opinions/bergen-muslim-religious-tolerance/

[128] “ISIS Commander Confirmed by VeteransToday.” Retrieved from http://www.wikiarmy.com/index.php/15-breaking-news/97-isis-commander-confirmed-by-veteranstoday; Preston James, Ph.D. “Historic Speech in Damascus sends Shockwaves around the World.” Veterans Today (December 13, 2014).

[129] “Vallely, Paul” Right Web. Retrieved from http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/vallely_paul/

[130] “Paul E. Vallely,” Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_E._Vallely

[131] Retrieved from http://www.veterandefenders.org/intro/vallely.htm

[132] Jeff Halper. “Israel as an Extension of American Empire.” CounterPunch (January 24, 2005)

[133] “From AIPAC to Trump: Michael Glassner’s journey.” Jewish Journal (February 19, 2016).

[134] Mariam Khan. “Trump’s National Security Adviser Has Called Islam ‘a Cancer.’” ABC News (November 18, 2016); “Donald Trump’s national-security team takes shape: Jim Mattis would be a reassuring choice; Mike Flynn is an alarming one.” The Economist (November 26, 2016).

[135] Laurie Goldstein. “Drawing U.S. Crowds With Anti-Islam Message.” New York Times (March 7, 2011).

[136] Nathan Lean. “Hirsi Ali Teams Up With Act for America for Event on Islam.” Huffington Post (August 12, 2015).

[137] Nick Wadhams. “Trump to Pick Paula Dobriansky for Top State Department Job, Sources Say.” Bloomberg (April 25, 2018).

[138] “Trump names Gary Bauer, an evangelical pro-Israel activist, to religious freedoms commission.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (June 1, 2018).

[139] “EXECUTIVE BOARD.” Christians United For Israel website. Retrieved from http://support.cufi.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_executive_board

[140] Josh Hefner. “Meet the evangelicals who prophesied a Trump win.” USA Today (November 10, 2016).

[141] Jay Tolson. “The Evangelical Vote: How Big Is It Really?” US News (September 4, 2008).

[142] Lisa Miller. “One Nation Under God.” Newsweek (December 9, 2010).

[143] Ibid.

[144] Molly Werthen. “A Match Made in Heaven.” The Atlantic (May 2017 Issue).

[145] Amy Sullivan. “America’s New Religion: Fox Evangelicalism.” New York Times (December 15, 2017).

[146] Peter Montgomery. “Biblical Economics: The Divine Laissez-Faire Mandate.” The Public Eye (April 21, 2015).

[147] Randall Balmer. “Under Trump, evangelicals show their true racist colors.” New York Times (August 23, 2017).

[148] Ibid.

[149] Peter Montgomery. “Tea Party Jesus: Koch’s Americans For Prosperity Sidles Up to Religious Right for 2012 Campaign.” AlterNet (April 15, 2011).

[150] Kyle Mantyla. “When The Going Gets Tough, The Right Starts A New Group.” Right Wing Watch (June 30, 2009).

[151] “Stephen Strang.” Time Magazine (February 07, 2005).

[152] Paula White Ministries. “Paula White-Cain at World Conference 2017.” YouTube (October 19, 2017).

[153] “Video Clip: Rick Joyner Says He Has Had Encounters With Enoch & Elijah.” Worldview Weekend Hour (March 20, 2017).

[154] “Knights of Malta Rick Joyner.” MorningStar Ministries.

[155] Kami Klein. “Rick Joyner meets with Donald Trump.” The Jim Bakker Show (May 13, 2016).

[156] Brian Tashman. “Rick Joyner: Donald Trump Acts Just Like Jesus And His Disciples.” Right Wing Watch (March 10, 2016).

[157] Josh Hefner. “Meet the evangelicals who prophesied a Trump win.” USA Today (November 10, 2016).

[158] Emma Green. “Trump Is Surrounding Himself With Evangelical Pastors.” The Atlantic (June 21, 2016).

[159] Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the land: Blacks, Jews, post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 110.

[160] Alex Johnson. “Jerry Falwell J. Asked to Lead Trump Higher Education Task Force.” NBC News (January 31, 2017).

[161] Alex Rohr. “Falwell’s GOP convention speech echoes his father.” Lynchburgh News and Advance (21 July 2016).

[162] Jerry Jr. Falwell. “Jerry Falwell Jr.: Trump is the Churchillian leader we need.” Washington Post (August 19, 2016).

[163] Darcy Cohan. “Richard Land vs. Russell Moore: The Changing Face of the Southern Baptist Convention.” PRRI (July 16, 2014).

[164] David Kirkpatrick. “Evangelical Leader Threatens to Use His Political Muscle Against Some Democrats.” The New York Times (January 1, 2005); Michael Crowley. “James Dobson: The Religious Right’s New Kingmaker.” Slate (November 12, 2004).

[165] Max Blumenthal. “Justice Sunday Preachers.” The Nation (April 26, 2005).

[166] “Tony Perkins: My Journey to the Holy Land, Spending Time In Bomb Shelters and Why America Needs to Support Israel.” Christian Post (August 29, 2014).

[167] Ted Olson. “Senate Committee Investigating Six Major Ministries.” Christianity Today (November 6, 2007).

[168] Sullivan. “America’s New Religion: Fox Evangelicalism.”

[169] Adrienne S. Gaines. “Benny Hinn Admits ‘Friendship’ With Paula White But Tells TV Audience It’s Over.” Charisma News (August 10, 2010).

[170] “Daystar creeps back into Israel.” Jewish Israel (October 19, 2009).

[171] Elizabeth Dias. “How Evangelicals Helped Donald Trump Win.” Time (November 9, 2016).

[172] Kate Shellnutt and Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra. “Who’s Who of Trump’s ‘Tremendous’ Faith Advisers.” Christianity Today (June 22, 2016).

[173] Kate Shellnutt. “The Story Behind Trump’s Controversial Prayer Partner.” Christianity Today (January 19, 2017).

[174] Paula White Ministries. “Paula White-Cain at World Conference 2017.” YouTube (October 19, 2017).

[175] Shayne Lee & Phillip Luke Sinitiere. Holy Mavericks (New York University Press, 2009). pp. 107–128.

[176] Samuel Smith. “James Dobson says Paula White led Donald Trump to Jesus Christ.” Christian Post (June 29, 2016).

[177] Hilary Weaver. “Donald Trump’s Oval Office Prayer Circle, Explained.” Vanities (July 12, 2017).

[178] Conor Gaffey. “Who Is Paula White, Donald Trump’s Favorite Pastor?” Newsweek (August 25, 2017).

[179] “Christianity and Jerusalem: Donald Trump’s Jerusalem move sparks Christian disputes.” The Economist (December 7, 2017).

[180] “The Trump Prophecies.” SidRoth.org. Retrieved from https://sidroth.org/sem/the-trump-prophecies/

[181] RWW Blog. “RWW News: Mary Colbert: God Will Curse Trump’s Critics And Their Children, Grandchildren.” YouTube (April 3, 2017).

[182] “About.” SidRoth.org. Retrieved from https://sidroth.org/about/about-sid/

[183] “Store.” SidRoth.org. Retrieved from https://sidroth.org/store/

[184] “Interview with John Paul Jackson August 24–30, 2009”. It’s Supernatural (Season 7. Episode 32)

[185] Josh Hefner. “Meet the evangelicals who prophesied a Trump win.” USA Today (November 10, 2016).

[186] Komorusan714. “Trump Chosen and Appointed by God to End The Luciferian Reign on Earth.” YouTube (May 25, 2017).

[187] Komorusan714. “Mark Taylor’s New Prophetic Word.” YouTube (October 30, 2017).

[188] Rosalind S. Helderman & Tom Hamburger. “Guns and religion: How American conservatives grew closer to Putin’s Russia.” The Washington Post (April 30, 2017).

[189] Ibid.

[190] Ibid.

[191] Art Swift. “Putin’s Image Rises in U.S., Mostly Among Republicans.” Gallup News (February 21, 2017).

[192] Julia Limitone. “Ann Coulter: Putin is a Better Ally for Trump than Merkel.” FOX Business (March 17, 2017).

[193] “Ann Coulter Called the Situation With Russia ‘Hilarious.’” PJ Media (March 13, 2017).

[194] Cliff Kincaid. “Modern-Day Russian ‘Dupes’” Accuracy in Media (April 4, 2014)a

[195] Pat Buchanan. “Is Putin the ‘Preeminent Statesman’ of Our Times?” American Renaissance (March 32, 2017).

[196] Natasha Bertrand. “‘A model for civilization’: Putin’s Russia has emerged as ‘a beacon for nationalists’ and the American alt-right.” Business Insider (December 10, 2016).

[197] Luke O’Brien. “My Journey to the Centre of the alt-right.” The Huffington Post (November 03, 2016).

[198] Ibid.

[199] Ibid.

[200] Luke O’Brien. “The Making of an American Nazi.” The Atlantic (December 2017).

[201] Christopher Hope & Peter Dominiczak. “Exclusive: Donald Trump’s new chief strategist Steve Bannon ‘will call Nigel Farage before Theresa May’.” The Telegraph (November 15, 2016).

[202] Rob Bryan. “How a Violent Jewish Extremist Group Went From the Fringes to the Mainstream French Right-Wing.” AlterNet (August 24, 2016).

[203] Tom Porter. “Charlottesville’s Alt-right Leaders Have a Passion for Vladimir Putin.” Newsweek (August 16, 2017).

[204] Dustin DeMoss. “From Russia With Love: Trump’s Alliances With Putin.” Huffington Post (June 30, 2016). Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/from-russia-with-love-trumps-allegiance-ties-to-putin_us_577589dfe4b0746f56479290]

[205] Kyle Taylor. “Europeans favoring right-wing populist parties are more positive on Putin.” Pew Research Centre (January 24, 2017).

[206] Kashmira Gander. “Ex-BNP leader Nick Griffin tells right-wing conference Russia will save Europe.” Independent (March 23, 2015).

[207] “Austrian far right signs deal with Putin’s party, touts Trump ties.” Reuters (December 19, 2016).

[208] Gabriel Gatehouse. “Marine Le Pen: Who’s funding France’s far right?” BBC News (April 3, 2017).

[209] Alain de Benoist. “Alain de Benoist on Trump & Le Pen.” Counter-Currents.com (March 28, 2017).

[210] Jean-Yves Camus. “A Long-Lasting Friendship.” Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe–Russia Relationship, edited by Marlene Laruelle (Lexington Books, 2015), p. 89.

[211] Betsy Rothstein, “Breitbart News Hosts Book Party For Ann Coulter And Features An alt-right Toilet.” The Mirror (August 25, 2016).

[212] Matthew d’Ancona. “Putin and Trump could be on the same side in this troubling new world order.” The Guardian (December 19, 2016).

[213] Jim Rutenberg. “In Trump’s Volleys, Echoes of Alex Jones’s Conspiracy Theories.” New York Times (February 19, 2017).

[214] Max Greenwood. “Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones Says Donald Trump Called To Thank Him After The Election.” Huffington Post (November 14, 2016).

[215] “Наша точка зрения: Информационный таран.” YouTube (December 20, 2016); “Alex Jones Instrumental In Changing Russians’ Perception of Americans.” The Alex Jones Channel, YouTube (December 30, 2016).

Volume Six

1. Culture Wars

2. Red Mafia

3. From Russia With Love

4. #MeToo

5. Conservative Media

6. Atl-Reich

7. Multipolar World Order

8. Katehon

9. Collusion

10. Russia House

11. Techno-Libertarianism

12. Military-Digital Complex

13. Fake News

14. Memetic Warfare

15. Big Data

16. Make America White Again!

17. In Trump We Trust

18. Israel First