By Telos Press · Monday, November 22, 2021 Now available for pre-order: The Travails of Trumpification, by Timothy W. Luke. Pre-order today in our online store and save 30% off the list price. Release date: December 1, 2021. While supplies last, also save 30% on our other books by Timothy W. Luke, including Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, Anthropocene Alerts: Critical Theory of the Contemporary as Ecocritique, and A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory. Sale ends November 30, 2021.
The Travails of Trumpification
by Timothy W. Luke
Release date: December 1, 2021
 In this series of critical essays written over the course of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, from its chaotic early days to its calamitous end, Timothy W. Luke explores how the recent twists and turns in the civic life of the United States have precipitated a dangerous transformation of American political culture. Since 2016, Trump’s will to attain, and then retain, his office by whatever means necessary crossed red lines never before violated by any previous presidential administration. Even before his loss in the 2020 election, Trump sought to discredit America’s electoral process by challenging legal voting practices in key swing states on social media, in the courts, through executive agencies, and finally with violent riots, culminating in the disastrous attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Yet while Trump himself no longer remains president, the “Trumpification” of the American political system persists today, with the majority of Republican politicians as well as Trump’s millions of devoted followers still firmly in the grip of his influence. The goal of the critical probes collected in this volume is to evaluate the “travails,” or excessive tribulation, pain, hardship, anguish, and agony, that his dangerous demagoguery has inflicted—and continues to inflict—on the nation’s democratic institutions and processes.
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By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, August 28, 2021 The following essay originally appeared at The Hill. It is republished here by permission of the author.
The Biden administration promised to return American foreign policy to reliability and international leadership after the disruptions of the Trump years. Yet its egregious mismanagement of the exit from Afghanistan has damaged America’s global standing and undercut the credibility of three of the administration’s foreign policy planks.
President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were supposed to repair transatlantic relations by reassuring our European allies, give priority to human rights in all decisions, and counter Chinese ambitions. The deeply flawed execution of the Afghanistan withdrawal undermines all those aspirations and leaves the Biden foreign policy vision in shambles. The diplomatic team that was supposed to bring professionalism has left America rudderless.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, August 12, 2021 Renaud Girard is an American-born French journalist, the author of several books on world affairs, especially the Middle East. In this trenchant commentary on the Afghan debacle, he recognizes the defeat for what it is, bluntly invoking the collapse of the imperial German army at the end of the First World War. Is that an overstatement or an unflinching naming of the collapse of an order? Girard brings a realist eye to the factors that have contributed to the current situation, asking us to understand them and their consequences, as the Taliban proceed from city to city, heading toward Kabul.
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By Telos Press · Thursday, July 29, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Jay Gupta, Mark Kelly, and Tim Luke about the changing character of the public sphere. Their wide-ranging conversation covers a number of topics, including the ways that social media has fragmented the public sphere into separate echo chambers; how the internet has contributed to an insurgent populism around the world and the efforts by traditional stakeholders to shut it down; the atrophy of the value of truth and the dominance of “bullshit” in the Trump era; the extent to which moral earnestness preserves an aspiration to truthfulness; Trumpism and the critique of society as controlled by unaccountable New Class elites; the ongoing Trumpification of the Republican Party; and the conflation versus the interpenetration of elitism and expertise. Telos 195 (Summer 2021) features a forum on the public sphere with articles by Gupta, Kelly, and Luke, excerpts of which appear here. Read the full articles at the Telos Online website (subscription required). To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 195 are available for purchase in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Telos Press · Thursday, May 13, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Jay Gupta, Mark G.E. Kelly, and Timothy W. Luke about the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Their discussion covers a range of topics, including the main causes of the riot, the cultic character of Trump’s supporters, whether the breach of the Capitol was more about symbolism or substance, the declining legitimacy of U.S. political institutions and the loss of faith in the Constitution, the rhetoric of democracy, populism as a rebellion against the administrative deep state and managerial capitalism, the changing politics of race and racial divides, and the realignment of Democratic and Republican coalitions in the wake of Trump. Telos 194 (Spring 2021) features a group of essays on the U.S. Capitol riot, excerpts of which appear here. Click through to read the full articles at the Telos Online website (subscription required). To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 194 are available for purchase in our store.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, February 8, 2021 Matthias Küntzel is a German political scientist with a focus on the Middle East. He provides astute analyses of the German and more broadly the European role in responding to the challenges posed by the Iranian regime; two of his books are available in English from Telos Press. His current piece, published here, sheds important light on the challenge of the moment: the Biden administration’s vocal commitment to returning to the JCPOA—a long-standing position during the presidential campaign—but facing continued intransigence from Tehran, willing to accelerate its nuclear program, indeed all the more so in the wake of the Biden election. Once it became clear that Trump and Pompeo were on their way out and that the incoming administration, which had been advertising its support for the Obama-era deal, would take over, Tehran became more, not less, aggressive on the nuclear front. It is presumably calculating that increased pressure will lead Washington to buckle by lifting sanctions first, in a way that would certainly not have succeeded with the previous administration. That makes the moment all the more fragile and fraught. Küntzel leads us through this maze.
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