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Adele M. Stan

Adele M. Stan is a columnist for The American Prospect. She is the winner of the 2017 Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism.

Recent Articles

Donald Trump’s Calibrated Race and Sex War

Adele M. StanNov 23, 2016
(Photo: AP/Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
(Photo: AP/Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call) People for the American Way hold a protest on November 18 in Upper Senate Park against the nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions as Donald Trump's Attorney General. I n the presidential appointments made so far by Donald Trump, the president-elect has signaled his willingness to feed his base of angry white people the race war they crave, if only thus far by means of posturing. But early next year, a race war of words will break out on the Senate floor, and there is little escaping the conclusion that this is what the next occupant of the Oval Office wants. For his chief of staff, Trump selected a talented propagandist whose specialty is fanning the flames of outrage through the use of incendiary themes. As chief executive of Breitbart News, Stephen K. Bannon oversaw a web empire which, he boasted, provided “a platform for the alt-right,” the Trump-loving white supremacist movement that the president-elect was finally shamed into disavowing on Tuesday...

A Government Of, By, and For the Deplorables

Adele M. StanNov 18, 2016
(Adele M. Stan)
(Photo: Adele M. Stan) A protester in Manhattan on Saturday, November 12 holds a sign protesting Trump's election. The joke had long been that if Donald Trump won the presidency, the White House would be reappointed with the gold-plated kitsch so prevalent in his real-estate holdings. A better choice, it seems, would be wicker, for if there ever was a basket of deplorables, it’s taking shape in the West Wing. Most notable among them is Stephen K. Bannon, the former Breitbart News chief executive who will serve as Trump’s chief strategist. As Breitbart’s head honcho, Bannon told journalist Sarah Posner that he fashioned the website as “ the platform for the alt-right ,” the once-fringy movement that encompasses white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and hate-mongering conspiracy theorists. Bannon’s appointment won applause , according to The Washington Post ’s David Weigel, from white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, who is convening a conference in Washington, D.C., this weekend at the...

Trump Victory Exposes Weakness in Liberal Political Infrastructure

Adele M. StanNov 10, 2016
AP Photo/Tamir Kalifa
AP Photo/Tamir Kalifa Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton campaign volunteers make phone calls to prospective supporters reminding them to vote from Clinton's campaign headquarters in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, March 1, 2016. A s the dust settles with the terrible news of the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency, there will be no shortage of analysis of just how the reality show king pulled it off, what with his lean campaign staff and ostensible lack of ground game. Most will likely be wrong. It was not Trump’s mastery of the media alone that won him the big prize, nor did he lack ground game. Trump’s triumph is as much the product of a political infrastructure built by right-wing operatives over the course of the last 40 years as it is the candidate’s prowess at manipulating the press. Liberals and the left have no comparable political infrastructure, and left-wing donors have shown little interest in building one. And so we have President-elect Trump, the...

How the Anti-choice Movement Paved the Way for Trump

Adele M. StanNov 02, 2016
(Photo: AP/Tamir Kalifa)
(Photo: AP/Tamir Kalifa) Anti-abortion rights supporter Katherine Aguilar prays at the State Capitol rotunda in Austin, Texas, on July 12, 2013. I n a stunning stunning piece titled “From Roe to Trump” in Wednesday’s New York Times , columnist Ross Douthat serves up a revisionist history of the anti-choice movement, holding up its alleged pacifism as the rationale for conservative opposition to the presidential candidacy of Donald J. Trump. There are plenty of reasons for anyone of any political stripe to oppose Trump, but to accept Douthat’s premise of the anti-choice movement as some Peaceable Kingdom of Fetus Protectors is to live in Upside-Down Land. For, if any cultural movement paved the way for Trump, it is the one that seeks to deprive women of agency over their own bodies. Douthat does a neat trick of trying to separate what he calls the “mainstream pro-life movement” and the anti-choice extremists who incite with violent rhetoric those who do physical violence. I’ve sat at...

Trump Surrogate Gingrich Slut-Shames Megyn Kelly

Adele M. StanOct 26, 2016
AP Photo/ Evan Vucci
AP Photo/ Evan Vucci Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich introduces Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a campaign rally, Monday, September 19, 2016, in Ft. Myers, Florida. W hen, as a campaign surrogate and once-powerful white man, you answer allegations that your candidate may be a sexual predator with a sex-laced attack on your female interviewer, you’re probably a misogynist. A desperate misogynist. That’s what former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is looking like this morning. During a Tuesday discussion of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s sinking poll numbers, Gingrich accused Fox News Channel host Megyn Kelly of being “fascinated with sex” when she dared to mention that Trump’s fortunes began falling after the now infamous Access Hollywood video, featuring Trump boasting about his self-proclaimed prerogative to sexually assault women, became public on October 7, and nearly a dozen women came forward to allege that Trump had either assaulted...

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