What the 2024 Election Is Really About for Trump Supporters
Updated at 9:15 p.m. ET on November 2, 2023
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Twenty‐five years before my first book about Donald Trump was published, I wrote a paperback titled The Right to Bear Arms: The Rise of America’s New Militias. It was written after Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, and tracks the emerging anti-government movement that inspired McVeigh to make war on the federal law-enforcement agencies that he, and many other far‐right activists, believed posed a threat both to America and to themselves.
On the cover of the book is a photograph of the Branch Davidians’ Waco, Texas, compound engulfed in flames. Federal law enforcement learned that the group was stockpiling weapons and explosives and, after a disastrous siege in early 1993, attempted to storm the compound. With agents closing in, several Branch Davidians set fire to the building, apparently preferring to die rather than be captured by authorities. The body of the cult’s leader, David Koresh, was found with a gunshot to the head.
The raid was a colossal failure. To some, though, the debacle represented something far more sinister: a deliberate plot by the government to trap and murder the Branch Davidians.
Waco became a rallying cry for right‐wing activists who believed that Washington, D.C., was out to get them. “Citizens’ militias” stockpiled arms and ammunition as well as food and survival gear. Some played weekend war games in vacant parking lots, on farmland, or in remote woodlands. “The ranks of the militias are made up of factory workers, veterans, computer programmers, farmers, housewives, small‐business owners,” I wrote in the book’s introduction. “The most shocking thing about these ‘paramilitary extremists’ is how normal they are. They are your neighbors. But in another sense, many members of America’s new militias live in a parallel universe, where civil war is already being waged by tyrants within the federal government.”
In the run‐up to publication, I planned a small party and decided to spruce up the invitation with some over‐the‐top words of praise from my friends and colleagues. A couple of my colleagues at the offered up some choice words, and on
