"Trumpism" Doesn’t Exist, and Why It’s So Terrifying (Part 1)
[THIS CONTENT WAS WRITTEN LONG BEFORE THE 2024 ELECTION, AND YET IT'S MORE RELEVANT TODAY THAN WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN.]
Narrative Mistake #1: “Trumpism” is a Trump creation? No, it’s not.
“Trumpism” is a narrative boondoggle and always has been. Riffing on the terminology of The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes, the entire narrative of “Trumpism” has always been an overly simplistic kind of “Sun God” theory—it posits that Donald Trump is the unique and essential catalyst for all the conservatives’ norm-busting, guardrail-smashing, anti-democratic, autocratic antics.
And naming all that dysfunction after Trump comes with an implicit storyline: without him, presumably, the GOP would still be a welcoming big-tent, a bi-partisan partner to the Dems, tolerant of the vagaries of electoral politics, willing to abide by an accepted system of give-and-take.
Here are a few examples of the Sun God theory in action…
Max Boot chided the GOP for allowing “this autocratic buffoon to hijack their party.”
Former Republican Congressman David Jolly believes that Trump “remade the party in his image.”
USA Today columnist Susan Page said in 2021 that, “This is a different Republican Party than it was five years ago, before he came on the scene.”
After the J6 insurrection, Maeve Reston and Kevin Liptak wrote that, “Wednesday’s shocking events can be traced to the inception of Trump’s candidacy.”
Former GOP political strategist Susan Del Percio claims that, “Trumpism and what it represents is what has seeped into the Republican Party, at the state level especially.”
Republican Jennifer Horn told Jelani Cobb, as he reported in The New Yorker, that she had not anticipated “the durability of Trump’s version of Republicanism even after his [2020] defeat.”
Karen Tumulty, analyzing the machinations of Ron DeSantis, opined: “Trumpism has become much bigger than Trump.”
In the op-ed that helped get her fired from party leadership, GOP Rep. Liz Cheney implored her fellow Republicans to “steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”[i]
One hears such Sun God arguments from the left, right, and center, and everything qualifies as “Trumpism” or “Trumpian” or “Trumpist” if it evinces the right combination of bullying, power-grabbing, cruelty, arrogance, conspiracy, and totally unapologetic absurdity.
Another example: Following the expulsion of three Black Democratic lawmakers from the Tennessee House, a conservative writer penned a piece for The Atlantic titled “An Acute Attack of Trumpism in Tennessee.”[ii]
But why bring Trump into it? The case of the Tennessee Three had nothing to do with him; it was really all about gerrymandered power, voter disenfranchisement, the influence of the gun lobby, and outright racism. None of which start or end with the ex-president.
Placing Trump at the center of the conservative firmament, from where he radicalizes and energizes his followers, is to mistake correlation for causation.
Trumpism didn’t “seep into the party,” and the GOP wasn’t “hijacked”; its dysfunction was deliberately built over decades. The GOP is exactly the same small-p party it was in 2016. The heroic savior complex of the insurrectionists traces not to the inception of Trump’s candidacy, but to outsider conservative activists of the 1950s. Trump has no “version of Republicanism” to speak of, and “Trumpism” has always been bigger than Trump.
Yet, every example of right-wing malfeasance gets thrown into the rhetorical blender that is “Trumpism,” crushing it all into an into incomprehensible mush.
Trump is a Pastiche Politician, Cribbing from Generations of Strongmen
First, Trump is NOT at all unique. While he may be fit for the moment, and the movement, nothing about him is original or particularly exceptional in the historical context of authoritarian leaders, or populist nationalism. The point is so obvious, one wonders at the need of a reminder.
For example, autocrats and plutocrats have always hated and attacked the press as the enemy, including American ones: rabid anti-communist and oil magnate H. L. Hunt, who in the 1960s was the richest man in America, claimed that our mass media was in the hands of “enemies” of liberty and “the freedom system and society that has made America great.”[iii]
“America First” is more than 170 years old. “Make America Great” is vintage Reagan. Trump’s penchant for lying fits with a pattern on the right so long-standing that in 2003 Al Franken hit the number-one spot on the New York Times best-seller list with his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
The prototypical bombastic, media-savvy billionaire criminal who attained high office even after his conviction? Silvio Berlusconi.
Viktor Orbán, a pioneer of pseudo-democracy, was likely scheming about how to dismantle the administrative state before Trump had even launched a reality TV career. While Newt Gingrich literally wrote the book on acidic personal attack back in the early 1990s. And Pat Buchanan railed against immigrant criminals and the soulless Liberal state, and promised to send a Clinton to jail, all while Trump was still a playing at being a casino mogul.
Pick any facet of Trump’s political schtick and one will find ready precedents both at home and abroad. Politically speaking, he is mere pastiche, an agglomerated burlesque of the kooks, radicals, and self-proclaimed outsider populists who have come before him.
To properly frame this thing people want to call “Trumpism,” one has to invert the political Necker cube and see it from the other side:
Trump the politician is a product of the current political moment, rather than being its producer.
Yes, his unoriginal schtick enflamed conservatives to the point of insurrection, but that fire had been raging for decades, and as Steve Bannon recently said:
“Our phrase is, ‘Next man up.’ You can’t depend on Trump to always be there… the MAGA movement is shifting day by day farther right… President Trump is a moderate in our movement.”[iv]
Trump and GOP bureaucrats know that any departure from the MAGA script endangers their relevance. They saw it back in November 2020 when FOX News suddenly started bleeding viewers to OAN and Newsmax, because FOX criticized Trumpworld’s flimsy lies about election theft. The Dominion Voting case unearthed truck-loads of emails showing that FOX was terrified of its own viewers.[v] Trump, FOX, and the GOP are all held quite firmly in MAGA’s populist grip, not the reverse.
For his part, Trump is a born huckster, and by nature a pugilist. By playing that up for the consumption of his audience, his persona is just another product, built to exploit a ready, eager, pre-existing market—it’s a product he faithfully delivers so that masses of disgruntled voters can feel transmogrified. Only because he’s so good at commanding his audience, commentators assert that the movement belongs to Trump alone.
For example, political consultant Chai Komanduri boldly claimed after Ron DeSantis ended his 2024 presidential bid, “There’s no Trumpism without Trump.”[vi]
This is exactly the wrong lesson.
Fundamentalist movements recognize a credible avatar when they see one, just as they can surely spot a fraud. Ron DeSantis [whose “Trumpian” credentials were always questioned] was about as fit for leading the MAGA movement as Mitt Romney was for co-opting the Tea Party movement.
To wit, back in 2012, the chairman of the New Hampshire Liberty Caucus, Andrew Hemingway, told an anti-Romney rally that, “Mitt Romney is a poser. He’s a fraud trying to stand on a Tea Party stage.”[vii]
All the current Trump wannabes fail the avatar test in some important dimension, but it is flawed logic to assert that because Trump best fits the bill today, that he’s the only possible MAGA leader forever—i.e., that no one else can fit the bill, perhaps even better than Trump, at some point in the future.
Likewise, implicit in the very term “Trumpism” is the assumption, ex post facto, that the “Trumpism” movement is singular and discreet, contained by a single leader, something materially different from any American political movement that came before it.
This is the first big mistake the political and media class makes in its assessment of the Trump/MAGA phenomenon: that “Trumpism” is a Trump creation.
Trump is the consequent, not the antecedent.
In reality, Trumps is part of one continuous tectonic movement that has had many leaders over many decades.
The needs and imperatives of the movement brought forth politician Trump, not the other way around. The movement does not depend on him for its survival; it will continue to thrive and grow even without him. The man himself is not nearly as important as the accelerating right-wing movement that endows him with relevance.
So, the next question is: If it isn’t Trump, then what’s driving this movement and its political/social dysfunction—and where is it headed?
FOLLOW THE STORYLINE…
Part 2… Conservatives Believe They Are Heroes of the “Real America”
[i] These are just a few examples of the common representation made about Trumpism in mainstream political commentary: Boot, M. (2021, January 7) Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have led Republicans to disaster. They must go., The Washington Post; David Jolly (2022, November 13) commentary on Politics Nation on MSNBC; Suasn Page (2021, Jauary 8) commentary on The 11th Hour on MSNBC; Reston-Liptak (2021, January 9) The day America realized how dangerous Donald Trump is, CNN.com; Susan Del Percio (2021, May 27) interview on The Reid Out, MSNBC; Cobb, J. (2021, March 8) What is happening to the Republicans?, The New Yorker; Karen Tumulty (2023, April 30) interview on Velshi on MSNBC; Cheney, L. (2021, May 5) The GOP is at a turning point. History is watching us. The Washington Post
[ii] Wehner, P. (2023, April 14) An Acute Attack of Trumpism in Tennessee, The Atlantic(https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/trump-induced-idiocy-tennessee/673726/)
[iii] KUHT / University of Houston Libraries Special Collection (1965) H.L. Hunt: The richest and the rightest (https://av.lib.uh.edu/media_objects/w9505049b)
[iv] Bannon, S. (2024, June 29) NBC Interview with Vaughn Hillyard on War Room, (1:06 and 40:02)
[v] Stetler, B. (2020, December 8) Newsmax TV scores a ratings win over Fox News for the first time ever, CNN.com (https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/08/media/newsmax-fox-news-ratings/index.html); Barr, J. (2020, December 27) Why these Fox News loyalists have changed the channel to Newsmax, The Washington Post; Darcy, O. (2023, February 17) Fox News has been exposed as a dishonest organization terrified of its own audience, CNN.com
[vi] The Beat with Ari Melber (2024, January 22) (https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240122_230000_The_Beat_With_Ari_Melber)
[vii] Michigan Live/Associated Press (2011, September 4) Tea party bulling its way into 2012 GOP race (https://www.mlive.com/news/us-world/2011/09/tea_party_bulling_its_way_into.html); WBUR radio (2011, September 4) Tea party forcefully shaping 2012 GOP race (https://www.wbur.org/news/2011/09/05/tea-party-2012-gop-race)