On the night of November 8th, 2016, the greatest soul singer of all suffered a stroke while watching the presidential election returns. Sharon Jones had, by virtue of her legendary talent, achieved fame despite "some record label" telling her that she was "too short, too fat, Black and old." Jones had one thing going for her—a voice so powerful, subtle and inhumanly flexible that she had no peer in a professional niche blessed with a ridiculous abundance of magnificent singers. She sang in harmony with world class horn players, but Sharon Jones' voice could soar and shame trumpets and saxophones. The brassy, tensile fierceness of her singing sometimes resolved into a whisper—like a virtuoso flautist drifting into silence.
Sharon Jones had held pancreatic cancer to a draw for several rounds, but metastatic cancer was one thing, and Trump's electoral college victory another. One easily imagines that Sharon Jones, the triumphant conqueror of a heartless music industry, came face to face with a terrifying and immovable barrier - the entire world had been swept into an inescapable vortex. I am not simply speculating—Jones' election night stroke did not kill her on the spot. She died ten days later, but not before identifying her assailant to her friends and bandmates. It was Donald Trump.
Sharon Jones death provides something of a blank slate - a place for the projection of our own anxiety. She may arguably be the first person to pass through the invisible threshold separating the misery and dislocation of life in neoliberal America from the fascist uncertainty to follow. You might think of her as American fascism's first casualty.
We can only speculate about what she endured on November 8th eight years ago, as we prepare to relive her trauma in a few weeks. Sharon Jones, because she did not meet the superficial standards—the image—of a peerless singer, once worked a day job. Before she achieved the big time she supported herself by working at the “correctional facility” on Rikers Island. Did she anticipate that Donald Trump would turn all of creation into an enormous Rikers Island? Sharon Jones, as both a legendary singer and a former prison guard (in one of the most notorious outposts within the prison industrial complex) had access to the whole continuum of human curses and virtues.
She only stood 4’11” but somehow survived the proximity of men at their worst. She must have seen beatings, threats, blood and humiliation until it all congealed into an existential blur. Rikers Island might have hardened Sharon Jones’s heart like a stone, but it did not. When Trump's apparition came to her on November 8th she might have stared him down like he was just one more Rikers inmate. We know that Sharon Jones had a full range of human emotions and vulnerabilities. You can hear it in her voice, and we know her story. Trump and death converged, and she went with them before anyone else.
But it wasn't just Sharon Jones—a suicide hotline serving the LGBTQ community experienced an enormous spike in calls on November 8th, 2016 as the election results imposed a cascading profusion of fearful thoughts. An awful world had suddenly morphed into something improbably worse. Millions of the most ordinary people looked into the abyss eight years ago—suicide hotlines everywhere received a glut of anxious calls. I am not Black, not gay, not Trans, not Central American, not poor, and not at all a supporter of Hillary “neoliberal stooge” Clinton, but my wife and I stared with stricken, numbed, abrupt distress at the 2016 computer screen. A nation that had been destined to drift toward fascism since a collection of white, male slave-owners signed The Declaration of Independence had bizarrely been shocked at how quickly it finally happened.
Neoliberalism has conditioned us to accept abraded environmental protections, minimal health care, defunded schools, human rights abuses, horrific military violence inflicted far away and supported by local propaganda, arbitrary police power, and expanding, privatized prisons. But fascism adds something new...
As a mental health outreach worker in small town Franklin County, Massachusetts, I expected that my poor clients (Franklin County is a collection of mostly decaying mill towns) would have responded to Trump’s 2016 victory with barely an indifferent shrug, but I was wrong. Poor people generally believe that voting is a waste of time—they rather conclude that no nexus exists to connect their struggles with the political theatrics that occasionally murmur as background noise on their TV screens. One of my clients, let's call her Alicia, caught me by surprise on November 9th when she asked, "Phil, can he send me back to Puerto Rico?" No, I told her, Puerto Rico is part of the US. That makes you a US citizen. Alicia may not have heard me at all. Her ex-husband had moved back to the Island. "If I get sent out my ex is going to kill me.”
Neoliberalism has conditioned us to accept abraded environmental protections, minimal health care, defunded schools, human rights abuses, horrific military violence inflicted far away and supported by local propaganda, arbitrary police power, and expanding, privatized prisons. But fascism adds something new—the performance of violence as a public spectacle. George Monbiot has deemed both neoliberalism and fascism as corporate responses to the problem of democracy. A society driven by the collective power of the public will inevitably collide with corporate hegemony. Whereas neoliberalism depends on an oblivious citizenry, lobotomized by the surgical blade of corporate media, fascists have less faith in brain washing alone. Fascism requires a stronger incentive for public obedience—naked fear.
A society driven by the collective power of the public will inevitably collide with corporate hegemony.
One cannot weigh and measure aggregate levels of anxiety, depression, hopelessness or fear. Some of the worst suffering that fascism inflicts takes place in the private spaces inside of our skulls. Sharon Jones was not struck in the head with a truncheon—she had been assaulted by an inevitable and widely shared vision, a sense that Donald Trump was not just another ghoul in the long line of presidential succession, but something even more rapaciously hostile, violent and unstoppable.
It is a tribute to Trump’s cultural power that he entered the awareness of my poorest clients in ways that no other political figure ever did. Over and over again I was asked if Trump’s election would end rent subsidies, Mass Health medical insurance and food stamps. I had no way to honestly reassure my clients and I resorted to platitudes about the rule of law and protections in the constitution.
Poor people are the only category of the public having the ability to experience unrestricted state violence—even within a nominally functioning democracy. Think of poverty as a paradoxical privilege—the power to see beneath the opaque curtain of capitalism. You might also think of the public housing project is an experiment in fascism—a laboratory where force and intimidation can be refined and honed for expanded use as society collapses. People in housing projects witness police beatings, local crime, evictions, arrests and child protective services taking custody of children. My poor clients had a sophisticated intuitive sense of what Trump might do. Anyone with daily exposure to arbitrary and capricious power knows that things can get worse.
Trump, if we consider him as a peculiar human/political specimen—apart from his convenient label as a fascist or authoritarian – rather stymies our efforts to analyze him. He is inarticulate, notably stupid, illogical and self-oblivious, and yet there he is – plain as a granite boulder, centered eternally within the public eye. His prominence in the media forced the invention of the term “sane-washing.” Any serious discussion of Trump leads to one conclusion—something terrible, vast and irredeemable has befallen us and we have no language to describe our predicament. Few things highlight our depths of decay more aptly than our upright, formal, straight faced, intellectualized reflections on utter madness. We talk about Trump as if he were a math equation with a correct answer. Imagine three or four pundits in free fall from atop the Grand Canyon discussing their dinner plans—that conveys the Trump-centered discourse on the nightly news.
Think of poverty as a paradoxical privilege—the power to see beneath the opaque curtain of capitalism. You might also think of the public housing project is an experiment in fascism—a laboratory where force and intimidation can be refined and honed for expanded use as society collapses.
It is as likely as not that Trump will be president within a few months. On election night there will be strokes, heart attacks and suicides in the wake of Trump’s election as people anticipate the expansion of Trump’s fascist death cult. Last time Trump occupied the throne, suicides spiked to unprecedented levels in 2017 1nd 2018. Fascism will unleash a mental health catastrophe. Obviously, the most targeted victims, sexual minorities and people without U.S. citizenship, or citizens related to those without citizenship, will be overwhelmed with anxiety.
Paradoxically, Trump’s own base will be prominent death cult victims. White men living in rural areas kill themselves at a rate higher than any other demographic, and more often than not they employ an iconic symbol of Republican Party violence —fire arms. We never know if deaths of despair involve a disproportionate contingent of Trump’s acolytes, but the COVID contrarian death event that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives defined Trump’s legacy. A death cult propaganda empire, largely funded by the oil industry (that lost profits during Covid-19 economic slowdowns) urged the public to fight back against the “emasculating” decrees of public health agencies. Research conducted by Dr. Ryon McDermott, a psychiatrist from South Alabama has linked anti-vax beliefs to fanatic masculine tropes:
“What we find is that men who endorse these beliefs are much less likely to engage in proactive health behaviors, like getting a vaccine, because it’s somehow seen as being feminine, or being weak.”
Dan Patrick, the elderly lieutenant governor of Texas, said the quiet part out loud during a COVID spike when he offered himself, and all elderly people, as a sacrifice to the greater cause of the US economy. His COVID death would be well worth the economic benefits, he argued. Patrick’s alleged bravery was nothing more than narcissistic prancing. But the strident, bellicose, confrontational display of performative anti-vax voices on social media demonstrated that macho contempt for the "decadent," fearful, feminine voices of public health drove the movement. Picture Donald Trump, the bone spur, draft dodger of the Vietnam War era, preening without a mask and boasting about it. Trump, the bone spur coward had achieved death cult redemption via Covid-19.
In the 1932 German film “The Blue Light” by Leni Riefenstahl—who would later gain fame as Hitler’s propaganda videographer— played a strange young girl with almost mystical mountain climbing skills (scaling sheer rock faces wearing cloth slippers). High on a rocky cliff, she discovers a grotto filled with magnificent crystals that glow with an ethereal brilliance. The movie juxtaposes Riefenstahl’s pristine, innocent and courageous character with the greedy townspeople who view the sacred crystals as a mere commodity. At the film’s end, the young mountain climber falls to her death after discovering that the crystals have been appropriated by ambitious town’s people. The fascist world view pivots around the eternal battle between heroism and decadence. The hero, according to the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, seeks death fearlessly and avidly, as a means of fascist consecration. Susan Sontag noted that Riefenstahl, at every juncture of her long career, channeled a fascist aesthetic.
One might argue that the doddering figure of a maskless Trump hardly equals the youthful Riefenstahl scaling mountains. But a death cult is still a death cult, even if it teeters precariously close to self-parody.
A death cult is still a death cult, even if it teeters precariously close to self-parody.
It may not be easy to accurately imagine all the details of the Trump death cult in its enhanced 2025 version. To be sure, some of the horrors seem almost certain—the continued Gazan genocide with the Democratic Party blessing for instance. Then there is the anticipated, murderous orgy of roundups, mass transfers to concentration camps and deportations of those without legal status. This will, in and of itself, meet the criterion for genocide. But the most critical consequence will be the obliteration of public mental well being. We should all anticipate the racing heart rates, the suicides, the spiking blood pressures, the strokes and heart attacks as the soul of the American people is mobilized for mere survival.
The public is the last barrier between the U.S. military machine and a dead Gaza. We are the last stand to turn back a planned extermination of our “undocumented” people. That may sound rather dramatic, as we don’t yet know if we can even save ourselves. We would be in slightly better shape if Sharon Jones’ voice still provided refuge. It doesn’t, and she was only the first to fall.
