Shannon Bow O'Brien – författare

This book examines Donald Trump''s longstanding connections to professional wrestling in relation to how he uses and exploits language, and the ways in which he has weaponized going public never before seen in previous administrations. Trump utilizes the language of wrestling to make rhetorical appeals and draws upon its theatrical tactics to redefine expectations of spaces to fundamentally change the nature of political expectations and expression. Wrestling is almost always about stories within a confined space, and Donald Trump inculcated many of its techniques to command an audience with rhetoric. The emotional performance supersedes truth or accuracy; factual exactness matters less than your presentation of the material. As Donald Trump blends performance and public service, social confusion over boundaries has occurred. Theatrical norms, when applied to daily life, generate vastly different reactions than within the artificial confines of an arena. It is notsimply a muddling of public and private, but rather a jumbling of theatrical and generalized social standards. This book examines these aspects and explores how Donald Trump has also utilized well-established presidential tools in completely new ways in an attempt to build the strongest executive branch in American history.

The book explores the development of the American eugenics movement and how it still plays a role in American life. Building on a brief overview of the concept of eugenics, Shannon Bow O’Brien charts the foundations of the ideas, significant influences, and influencers of the movement in the last 19th and early 20th centuries. She discusses how these ideals and social life shaped American culture and encouraged attitudes toward racial and ethnic biases, including immigration policies in that period.

O’Brien examines how the founding of the United States of America was built on unwanted individuals from the United Kingdom; transported felons and indentured servants were many of the original colonists. As the population forged its new nation, many of these individuals were the focus of restrictive immigration policies that sought to amend the identity of the American citizen and sought to define acceptable roles for Black persons within American society. Faithful slave monuments provided physical models to help engrain these roles within American life.  O’Brien traces the development of the Mammy statue movement and its intersectionality with the restrictive immigration laws.

Finally, she turns to the rhetoric of Donald Trump and contextualizes his speech in the ideology of the superiority of White Nordic nativism within American life.