How Trump Rode a Wave of ‘Reactionary Nihilism' to the White House

New York Times

19-02-2025

Given that 'Money, Lies, and God' was mostly written before the November 2024 election, the book reads as an eerily prescient guide to the phantasmagoria of our political moment. But it's a measure of the upheavals of the last few weeks that even the book's author, the journalist Katherine Stewart, failed to anticipate some of the early surprises of the second Trump term.
Stewart makes passing mention of Darren Beattie, a White House speechwriter who left his post in 2018 after news reports revealed that he spoke at a conference attended by white nationalists. 'Beattie was too far out even for the Trump administration,' she writes — a plausible observation that was nevertheless committed to print too soon. A couple of weeks ago, Trump tapped Beattie for a top job at the State Department, putting him in charge of the country's public diplomacy a mere four months after Beattie declared, on X, 'Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.'
Stewart's previous book, 'The Power Worshippers' (2020) traced the rise of Christian nationalism; 'Money, Lies, and God' expands the story to encompass the right-wing 'movement to destroy American democracy.' Beattie is just one figure in a bulging cast of characters that Stewart handily divides into five main categories: Funders, Thinkers, Sergeants, Infantry and Power Players. These groups don't always have one another's best interests at heart, nor do they always get along.
But as Stewart shows, this fractious movement has lined up under the banner of MAGA and Donald Trump. They speak the language of democracy while practicing the authoritarian politics of coercion and exclusion. What they all share, Stewart says, is an attitude of 'reactionary nihilism.' They denounce tolerance and pluralism as a catastrophic change to their preferred political order. Reactionary nihilists presume a world that is 'devoid of value, impervious to reason and governable only through brutal acts of will.'
Stewart should know — she has spent plenty of time with reactionary nihilists, whether in person or on the page. Her book gives us a tour through a raucous Christian nationalist event in Las Vegas and a fancy Moms for Liberty fund-raiser in Philadelphia. She offers a brisk intellectual history that includes the high-toned, illiberal musings of the Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule and the gutter misogyny of the internet personality Bronze Age Pervert — a Yale philosophy Ph.D. An adolescent boy's preoccupation with 'manliness' turns out to be a common denominator among the thinkers on the right. Rational deliberation gets derided as a tool of liberal democracy, which they somehow depict as both tyrannical and toothless. All the strategies they offer boil down to domination.
'Money, Lies, and God' covers a lot of terrain, but it's Stewart's exploration of right-wing ideas that makes her book stand out. A chapter called 'Smashing the Administrative State' explains the radical right's longstanding plans to replace the public administration of government services with a 'privately controlled, corporate-managed' regime. Another chapter on the Claremont Institute, the right-wing California think tank, examines the influence of the political philosopher Leo Strauss and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
Yet Stewart is also careful not to overstate this movement's intellectual depth. So many of the ideas espoused by the cutting-edge figures on the far right are reflexively contrarian and fundamentally empty. Its leading intellectuals are Ivy League graduates who persist in being obsessed with the campus squabbles of the Ivy League. Stewart argues that their elaborate theories are constructed from feelings of elite entitlement and petty resentment: 'When they talk about sticking it to the administrative state or fantasize about having their dictator buddy manhandle the libs, they seem to be dreaming about revenge on the people down the hall.'
This is a book with a decidedly strong point of view, even if Stewart maintains that she gathered her facts with an open mind. 'As a reporter, I like to look first and theorize later,' she writes in her introduction. 'I am interested in facts, not polemics.' After spending a lot of time with the facts, Stewart has developed her theory of the case.
The Funders and Thinkers, she says, have worked out their own symbiotic ecosystem, with the Funders supplying the money that helps the Thinkers churn out the ideas that justify the Funders' power to make ever more money. Just don't tell that to the Infantry — those millions of lower- and middle-income Americans who turned out for Trump. Stewart explains that the only real role for the Infantry is to supply the votes. They might think they're voting for cheaper eggs, when what they're more likely to get are fewer meat inspectors and an expansionist war: 'Satisfying the economic and emotional needs of this group is always the ostensible source of legitimacy of the antidemocratic movement, but it is never the actual goal.'
As an antidote to so much cynicism, Stewart ends her book with some recommendations, calling for building coalitions and pursuing a 'progressive system of taxation.' It's the kind of noble, hopeful conclusion that nevertheless highlights the discrepancy between the incessant churn of the Trumpian news cycle and the more languid pace of what might be called 'book time.'
But Stewart maintains a commitment to deliberation — not just as an activity but as an essential principle. The far right, she points out, seeks to 'demolish the very possibility of reasonable discussion' by treating politics as an extension of war by other means. Books like hers function not as weapons but as maps, navigating a way around the edges of the abyss.