Ep. 37: Deconstructing Trumpism with CNN’s Kirsten Powers

Show Notes

Episode Summary

According to CNN’s Kirsten Powers, the United States is headed toward a constitutional crisis. Led primarily by white evangelicals and their cult-like worship of former President Donald Trump, American democracy is on the verge of collapse. How do we move forward? How do we have healthy conversations with our friends and family who continue to believe conspiracy theories and parrot the lies they hear everyday on FoxNews? In this candid “Election Day” episode, Kirsten draws on her deconstruction journey to carve out a way forward both personally and politically. Leaving behind a politics of cruelty for a politics of compassion, Kirsten offers a path to navigating the toxic division in our culture without compromising our deeply held beliefs and emotional well-being. Her new book Saving Grace: Speak Your Truth, Stay Centered, and Learn to Coexist With People Who Drive You Nuts is a much-needed antidote to our culture of rage.

Bio

Kirsten Powers is a New York Times bestselling author, USA Today columnist, and senior political analyst for CNN, where she appears regularly on Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, and The Lead with Jake Tapper. Her writing has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News, The New York Observer, Salon, The Daily Beast, the New York Post, Elle, and The American Prospect online. A native of Fairbanks, Alaska, Powers lives in Washington, D.C, with her fiancé, Robert Draper, and their two fur children, Lucy and Bill.

Follow Kirsten on Instagram (@Kirstenpowers), on Twitter (@KirstenPowers), and the web at her CNN Profile page.

Quotables

• “I was in the evangelical world for close to a decade, which was really actually…alarming and I thought I had gone insane.”

• “I’m reading the Bible and I’m not necessarily seeing the same things you are seeing.”

• “Because of trauma I had already experienced, I was already in a very black and white state and then I went into the evangelical church that was very binary, here are all the rules, you have to think this way, and it just actually made things worse.”

• “We have a toxic culture, and to be honest, I’m contributing to it.”

• “Grace is not for the person you like and agree with on…Grace is actually exactly for the people you despise.”

• “Sometimes, I really don’t like people.”

• “What outrages me is injustice and inequality and people being harmed.”

• “I’m not going to have unity with a white supremacist. I’m not going to have unity with people who think the election was stolen. I’m not going to have unity with these people, and they are right, and they shouldn’t be asked to have unity with people like that.”

• “We are divided over values…these are fundamental differences that cannot be bridged.”

Timestamps and References

• [02:40]—Introducing our new guest co-host Kelly Rose Lamb.

• [04:45]—Kirsten discusses her own journey of faith deconstruction.

• [10:35]—Kirsten shares how her own personal trauma intersected with evangelicalism to create her own version of hell.

• [15:38]—From FoxNews to CNN, the journey out of toxicity toward grace.

• [20:05]—Modeling grace, even to folks like Tucker Carlson or Bill O’Reilly.

• [26.22]—Why offering grace to our political enemies actually functions as an antidote to the personal anxiety, anger, and frustrations we feel toward our friends and family who continue to support lies and conspiracy theories.

• [31:20]—Setting boundaries with your family when it comes to politics.

• [38:43]—Is unity even possible with white supremacists, Christian Nationalists, and Trump evangelicals at this point?

• [46:50]—The future of American democracy, the death of truth, and Donald Trump’s relentless attack on freedom.

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Credits

This episode was produced by The Sophia Society. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.