“Trumpism” Doesn’t Exist, and Why It’s So Terrifying (Addendum)
We spent four years trying to get notice for our exhaustive piece on the fallacy of "Trumpism." Nobody headed it. But it all came true. Told y'so.
YES. We told you so. And We Won’t Be Shy About Saying It.
LiteralMayhem’s project on “Trumpism” was four years in the making, with most of it written in 2021 and 2022. It started as a single article, then expanded to a 60,000-word book manuscript, and then got squeezed back down to a six-part online series.
All of it was completed well before the election. We’ve got a copyright filing to prove it, as well as more than a dozen magazine and influencer submissions. We did our best to follow the rules, and sought out the imprimatur of reputable magazines and commentators, but the gatekeepers kept the portcullis firmly locked in place.
Now, a few timely additions were made to the text in the summer of 2024—like the part on Chris Christie’s withdrawal from the GOP primary—but the vast majority of the writing was pre-2024-electoral-earthquake, which we predicted.
Today, as we begin a new Trump term, and we’re watching an autocratic GOP’s wrecking-ball politics in real time, we here at LiteralMayhem can’t help but say, “Told you so.”
Much of what this article series warned about has come true…
The central contention of this series is that we need to dump the term “Trumpism” and all its derivatives—it’s an argument even more apt today than it ever was. So, we’ll repeat it again for emphasis:
The true cause of America’s political dysfunction came long before Trump and will long outlast him. In fact, while it made him possible, the true cause has nothing to do with him, and naming it after him just distracts from the Herculean narrative work facing us: to restore the narrative of pluralism in American life.
The right’s identity thrives on a kind of narrative anti-reality, a corrupted heroic myth that’s been built over 70+ years: i.e., that the country is under assault by domestic enemies who are bent on the destruction of the “real America.” As a result, conservative heroes must destroy those enemies to save the nation and restore it to what was intended by the Founding Fathers. (At least an original intent as modern conservatives see it.)
It’s a romantic hero story, but it’s also dangerously anti-pluralist, dominionist, and hegemonic. It sees bi-partisanship as a compromise with anti-American traitors. A compromise of truth itself. They win, or their enemies win. After seven decades of living that fight, they can see the world no other way.
They have plunged us all into narrative warfare. And at the moment, their storyline is winning.
The most maddening thing to watch is the political and media class get rope-a-doped into focusing all their manic resistance on Trump and “Trumpism,” when our current autocratic drift started while Trump was barely out of training pants. The narrative tides that raised up a politician like Trump owe him nothing and will continue to rise lone after he’s gone.
And yet, the idea of “Trumpism” is so ingrained in our political rhetoric that it’s inescapable—even more inescapable now that he’s president again. To wit, at the end of January, the University of Southern California was hosting something called the Warschaw Conference on Practical Politics, which was titled “The Trumping of America: Why and What’s Next?”
SMH. Really? Just shoot me now.
A much more appropriate title would be: “America’s Autocratic Drift: Why and What’s Next?” Naming it after the man only serve to buoy the cult of personality around him, add a gloriole to his public image, and probably gratify his ego.
The idea that we’re enduring the “Trumping” of America misses the forest for the trees, and the longer we stay focused on all things “Trumpism” and “Trumpian” and “Trumpist” (and every such derivation of a Trump-focused taxonomy), the longer and harder it will be to reverse the 70-years of autocratic drift that made him possible.
PRESCEIENCE IS A VIRTUE
More than a year before the election I wrote…
“We now face a zero-sum confrontation based on the specious claim [i.e., the "BIG “Big Lie”] that the real America is a unipolar conservative Christian nation, rather than a multipolar pluralistic one, and that heroic conservatives must, at all costs, restore America to its original conservative identity.
“We all live in that binary now—heroes saving America versus enemies trying to destroy it—because conservatives have spent seven decades making it so. In their framing, either born-again conservative heroes will claim victory over us, or we will assert a multi-polar, pluralistic, consensus tyranny over them.”
Then, lo and behold, the day after Trump’s inauguration, The Bulwark validated my thesis with a home page headline: Donald Trump Is at War with America. (I had submitted my “Trumpism” piece to The Bulwark, before the election. Still hearing crickets on that one.)
Their columnist Jonathan Last wrote: “I don’t think there’s any way to read yesterday except as President Trump deciding that with the Republican party fully subservient to him, he can subjugate the other remaining power centers in American life… He can finally be a wartime president. It’s just that he’s going to war against America.”
Why does the author sound so surprised, like he’s discovering some great hidden secret? If the media had spent more time thinking about the root cause of Trump’s identitarian appeal on the right, they would have seen long ago that such a “war” was not only looming, but it was unavoidable.
More than a year before the election I wrote…
“Under a cold-hearted analysis, the pro-pluralism electoral coalition reveals not just weak alliances, but the likelihood of sizeable defections around the center at some point very soon.
“Those would include a return of White women to their home in the GOP; religious and anti-communist Latinos leaving the Democratic Party because they believe the GOP’s “socialist liberal tyranny” attacks; exasperated and fickle young people not showing up; cynical centrists giving up on voting in a fit of antipolitics, or syphoning off votes to anti-Establishment candidates; libertarians making any number of self-interested excuses as to why their lives would be better under an autocratic GOP compared to the sanctimonious Dems.”
And what happened?
White women, like always, voted their power and privilege. Many split their vote: passing abortion rights referendums, which they felt gave them permission to vote for the autocratic, Christian nationalist candidate. It wouldn’t affect them, or so they thought, so they permissioned themselves to give Trump another go.
Latin men went for Trump’s “strongman” anti-socialism schtick, as well as his “prosperity gospel.” Ironic given that such appeals are partly cultural, among a group of men that Republicans have demonized as unrepresentative of the culture of the “real America.” Youth turnout overall was down from 2020, with young White men strongly swinging to Trump, and men overall (with and without college degrees) going with Trump.
Independents went for Harris overall, but in key battleground states they went for Trump and helped swing the Electoral College in his direction. Independents made up a significantly larger share of the voting electorate in 2024 than Democrats, which is critical given that Independent voters skew conservative. As for Libertarians, that’s a mixed bag, but Trump was so enthusiastic in claiming their support after the election that he pardoned the convicted operator of the dark-web marketplace Silk Road, who is one of the biggest drug dealers of all time.
More than a year before the election I wrote…
“The moneyed elite will continue backing any candidate who backs their financial interests, no matter how hostile that candidate is to democracy.[12] Moreover, technology and media companies, which control more and more of the world’s information production and delivery, have shown little willingness to prioritize truth and democracy over the profits generated by information pollution and addiction.”
And what happened?…
There isn’t room here to catalogue all the ways that the rich have “obeyed in advance” by paying off the incoming autocrat. But it’s worth noting Jeff Bezos’s sudden killing of a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris as well as his $1MM donation to Trump’s Inaugural; Mark Zuckerberg’s $25MM gift-settlement of Trump’s defamation lawsuit, as well as a $1MM donation to the Inaugural, and his travels to Mara Largo to kiss the ring; and Disney’s $15MM gift-settlement of another Trump lawsuit; as well as dozens of billion-dollar corporations cozying up to the budding tyrant.
And tech-media platforms are rushing to remake themselves in the image of a woke-killing pugilist by abandoning content moderation and fact checking, because Freedom—as rich corporate douchebros celebrate being able to be bigots again.
More than a year before the election I wrote…
The religious right will continue their march to the center of conservative politics; as Katherine Stewart observes in The Power Worshippers, “Theirs is not a culture war, it is a political war over the future of democracy.”[11]
And what happened?...
Trump has wasted no time in “spearheading the American Christian Nationalist Movement.” The Department of Transportation now favors putting money behind projects in communities with higher-than-average marriage and birth rates, because nuclear families are just more deserving. (Sec. 5; f(iii)) School choice reform paves the way toward unrestricted public funding of religious schools. Trump issued an Executive Order defining gender according to biological sex as determined by zygote.
His administration has aggressively attacked abortion rights in a “big surprise to ‘pro-choice’ Trump voters,” and tacitly condoned anti-abortion violence by pardoning those convicted of barricading clinics and attacking patients and staff. According to NPR he has ordered HHS to scrub its website of all abortion references. No wonder the new chair of the FCC who helped write communications policy sections of Project 2025 has opened investigations into PBS and NPR for wokeness.
More than a year before the election I wrote…
“The alt-right trolls are hard at work right now, at places like the Claremont Institute, building their own educational institutions, think tanks, media enterprises, social networks, youth outreach programs, and other infrastructure (within and outside the GOP); they’re doing it just the way original right-wing media activists did it in the 1950s.”
And what happened?...
Shadowy right-wing groups are steering the GOP on major policy issues. The Heritage Foundation is writing policy at Federal agencies. Russell Vought, an avowed Christian Nationalist and a Project 2025 author, has been building a “shadow government in waiting” and is now up for director of the Office of Management and Budget: where he’s said he wants to “traumatize” the federal workforce to get them to quit.
Maybe so he can hire Trump loyalists and ideologically aligned Christian Nationalists? There’s not enough space here to catalogue all the other radical, ultra-conservative “think tank” types who are finding a new home in the Trump Administration—but it’s not that hard to find them if you want to.
Finally… and most important… more than a year before the election I wrote…
“Given its untrue premise, today’s born-again conservative identity cannot survive and thrive except in a world of untruth.
“[It requires] the manufacture of a fictional counterworld in which the false mythology of victimized conservative heroes can be asserted as true. Creating what Masha Gessen calls a “power lie,” not merely to lie, but to “assert power” and assert “control over reality itself.” [xxiv]
Around the time I was writing this, the NY Review of Books ran the following headline:
“The Republican Party—now committed to minoritarian rule, not democracy—needs fictions to sustain its power. And that means a collision with honest journalism.”
Why the GOP “needs fiction” is the entire point of my “Trumpism” piece.
They desperately need their batshit crazy whinging about “fake news” and the “deep state” and “weaponization of government” and “election theft” and everything else (including fresh batshit crazy claims about “DEI” being to blame for the LA wildfires and DC airline crash) because their whole worldview crumbles if they have to admit the fact that none of it is true.
The right has spent 70+ years manufacturing a victim-based anti-reality, in which conservative heroes of the “real America” are called to free themselves from “government tyranny” and save the nation from domestic enemies.
To keep that mythology alive, the “deep state” must be true, and “weaponization of government” must be true, and “election theft” must be true, and “racism against white people” must be true, and on and on. If they admit none of it is true, they have to admit their identity is false.
So they just keep adding to the anti-reality with the intent of replacing actual reality in a concerted effort to validate their long-standing victim fantasy.
Why Are We Living in a Time of Autocratic “Mandate”? The BIG “Big Lie” Explains Why
OK, one more… over a year before the election, I wrote this too…
“Even if they don’t win the White House in 2024, sometime the in next decade or two, a born-again conservative GOP will roll into Washington DC atop a wave election that they will surely claim as a mandate.
“Then what we have is an autocratic party in charge, whose base voters and policy priorities have been growing increasingly anti-democratic over the last several presidential election cycles, at both the local and national levels.”
It happened much faster than my grudging optimism allowed for. I just didn’t want to believe that American voters were so cynically aligned with antipolitics that they’d throw in with such an obvious goon.
But now a thoroughly autocratic GOP won a “wave” election, believes it has a glorious mandate from God, and is smashing every “norm” in sight.
If the pro-democracy coalition in American politics doesn’t figure out WHY this happened, WHY the GOP’s transgressiveness is so attractive to their base, and WHY it gets them more traction with voters rather than less… then small-d democracy is pretty much done for.
The concept of the BIG “Big Lie” is the only viable explanation I’ve seen—i.e., a unified field theory of conservative dysfunction—that works not only as an explainer, but also a predictor, of the right’s madness.
The driver and source of our current political insanity is a narrative.
It’s the lie, stupid… the BIG “Big Lie.”