THE THROUGHLINE:

Donald Trump picked Waco, of all places, for the first mass rally of his third bid for the presidency. There, with characteristic unsubtlety, he stood at attention, hand over heart, for an homage to the violence of January 6th, including a song performed by a choir of incarcerated insurrectionists. He assured his audience that "the thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system"--by holding Trump to account for his violations of law--"will be defeated, discredited, and totally disgraced." He intoned, with Koresh-like prognostication, that "2024 is the final battle, it's going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again."

Talty, whose previous nonfiction books include A Captain's Duty, co-written with its subject and later made into the Oscar-winning film Captain Phillips starring Tom Hanks, does a fine job of shining light on the mechanisms of cult control, as practiced by a sadistic bully. In this respect, Koresh is deeply similar to another book, out this week and timed loosely to the centennial of the emergence of the nation's premiere hate group as a major political force.

A Fever in the Heartland, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Timothy Egan, also focuses on an incomprehensibly charismatic figure: the Klan leader David C. Stephenson, who went by D.C. Stephenson, or "Steve."

Born into wealth with an ingrained sense of privilege, Stephenson rose through the ranks in the early to mid-1920s to become Grand Dragon in Indiana, then the nation's leading hotbed of Klan activity, both in numbers of adherents and the depth of its influence in the political sphere. In 1924, the Klan boasted 400,000 Hoosier members, which was probably only a slight exaggeration. The state had a Klan-affiliated governor, Ed Jackson; its capital city of Indianapolis had a Klan-backed mayor, John L. Duvall; and one of its U.S. senators--James Watson--was, as Egan puts it, Stephenson's "loyal supplicant." All three were Republicans, as were countless local officials, judges, district attorneys, sheriffs, and police officers in Indiana who supported the KKK.

Observed the New York Times in November 1923, "In no State in the Union, not even in Texas, is the domination of the Ku Klux Klan so absolute as it is in Indiana." But the Klan's political influence extended nationwide, as Egan relates: "About seventy members of Congress were faithful to the hooded order, by the Klan's tally. It had sympathetic governors in Georgia, Alabama, and California."

The Klan found its sense of common identity in hatred of others, including black people, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. Georgia Gov. Clifford Walker, speaking at a Klan rally in 1924, said the United States should "build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven" to keep out immigrants.

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