“How did the United States of America, the oldest continuous democracy, arrive at January 6, 2021? Following years of rising partisan conflict, the mass media’s amplification of the Tea Party movement and their embrace of anti-Obama conspiracy theories were crucial building blocks in the rise of Donald Trump. In 2019, President Trump told an interviewer, “The Tea Party was a very important event in the history of our country…The Tea Party still exists-except now it is called Make America Great Again.” As Trump became the leader of what was, in effect, a merging of the Tea Party and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, his aggressive rhetoric and outright hate speech helped to increase the existing political divisions to hyper-polarization. This book argues that American political communication began a continuous toxic spin after the founding of the Tea Party merely a month after Barack Obama was inaugurated. It argues that the interconnectivity of political communication facilitated and even promoted the Tea Party during its formative first years along with anti-Obama conspiracy theories that were embraced by its supporters. In the early stage of Tea Party, the movement’s activists organized mass protest rallies, often with the assistance and participation of FOX News political talk show hosts, who highlighted the anti-Obama and anti-Washington outrage of rank-and-file members and supporters. “Contemporary politics is primarily media politics,” and this book argues that Tea Partiers and anti-Obama conspiracy theorists exploited the off-line and online mass media power-making space and paved the way for Donald Trump’s unorthodox candidacy and presidency. Through textual analysis of thousands of tweets, speeches, and public opinion data, the authors demonstrate how the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party and Trump era expanded the earlier partisan and demographic divisions in the United States into a hyper-polarized conflict that sometimes led to real-world violence”–
