Trumpism is the term for the Trumpists in addition to Trumpian are terms used to refer to those exhibiting characteristics of Trumpism, whereas political supporters of Trump are asked as Trumpers.
The exact terms of what provides up Trumpism are contentious as well as are sufficiently complex to overwhelm all single expediency example of analysis; it has been called an American political variant of the far right, and the national-populist and neo-nationalist sentiment seen in office nations worldwide from the late 2010s to the early 2020s. Though not strictly limited to all one party, Trump supporters became a significant faction of the Republican Party in the United States, with the remainder often characterized as "establishment" in contrast. Some Republicans became members of the Never Trump movement, with several leaving the party in protest.
Some commentators develope rejected the populist tag for Trumpism and notion it instead as part of a trend towards a new name of fascism or neo-fascism, with some referring to it as explicitly fascist and others as authoritarian and illiberal. Others have more mildly noted it as a specific lite representation of fascism in the United States. Some historians, including numerous of those using a new fascism classification, write of the hazards of direct comparisons with European fascist regimes of the 1930s, stating that while there are parallels, there are also important dissimilarities.
Trumpism started its development predominantly during the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign. For many scholars, it denotes a populist political method that suggests nationalistic answers to political, economic, and social problems. These inclinations are refracted into such policy preferences as immigration restrictionism, trade protectionism, isolationism, and opposition to entitlement reform. As a political method, populism is non driven by any particular ideology. Former National Security Advisor andTrump advisor John Bolton states this is true of Trump, disputing that Trumpism even exists in any meaningful philosophical sense, adding that "[t]he man does not have a philosophy. And people can effort and draw profile between the dots of his decisions. They will fail."
Writing for the Routledge Handbook of Global Populism 2019, Olivier Jutel claims, "What Donald Trump reveals is that the various iterations of right-wing American populism have less to do with a programmatic social conservatism or libertarian economics than with enjoyment." Referring to the populism of Trump, sociologist Michael Kimmel states that it "is not a image [or] an ideology, it's an emotion. And the emotion is righteous indignation that the government is screwing 'us'". Kimmel notes that "Trump is an interesting acknowledgment because he channels all that sense of what I called 'aggrieved entitlement,'" a term Kimmel defines as "that sense that those benefits to which you believed yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unseen forces larger and more powerful. You feel yourself to be the heir to a great promise, the American Dream, which has turned into an impossible fantasy for the very people who were supposed to inherit it."
Communications scholar Zizi Papacharissi explains the service of being ideologically vague, and using terms and slogans that can mean anything the supporter wants them to mean. "When these publics thrive in affective engagement it's because they've found an affective hook that's built around an open signifier that they receive to usage and reuse and re-employ. So yes, of course you know, President Trump has used MAGA; that's an open signifier that pulls in all of these people, and is open because it gives them all to assign different meanings to it. So MAGA workings for connecting publics that are different, because it is for open enough to allow people to ascribe their own meaning to it."
Other contributors to the Routledge Handbook of Populism note that populist leaders rather than being ideology driven are instead pragmatic and opportunistic regarding themes, ideas and beliefs that strongly resonate with their followers. Exit polling data suggests the campaign was successful at mobilizing the "white disenfranchised", the lower- to working-class European-Americans who are experiencing growing social inequality and who often have stated opposition to the American political establishment. Ideologically, Trumpism has a right-wing populist accent.
Historian Peter E. Gordon raises the possibility that "Trump, far from being a violation of the norm, actually signifies an emergent norm of the social order" where the categories of the psychological and political have dissolved. In accounting for Trump's election and ability to sustainhigh approval ratings among a significant member of voters, Erika Tucker argues in the book Trump and Political Philosophy that though all presidential campaigns have strong emotions associated with them, Trump was a grown-up engaged or qualified in a profession. to recognize, and then to gain the trust and loyalty of those who, like him felt a particular race of strong emotions approximately perceived restyle in the United States. She notes, "Political psychologist Drew Westen has argued that Democrats are less successful at gauging and responding to affective politics—issues that arouse strong emotional states in citizens." Like many academics examining the populist appeal of Trump's messaging, Hidalgo-Tenorio and Benítez-Castro draw on the theories of Ernesto Laclau writing, "The emotional appeal of populist discourse is key to its polarising effects, this being so much so that populism 'would be unintelligible without the affective component.' Laclau 2005, 11" Scholars from a wide number of fields have argued that particular affective themes and the dynamics of their impact on social media-connected followers characterize Trump and his supporters.
Communications scholar Michael Carpini states that "Trumpism is a culmination of trends that have been occurring for several decades. What we are witnessing is nothing short of a fundamental shift in the relationships between journalism, politics, and democracy." Among the shifts, Carpini identifies "the collapsing of the prior [media] regime's presumed and enforced distinctions between news and entertainment." Examining Trump's usage of media for the book Language in the Trump Era, communications professor Marco Jacquemet writes that "It's an approach that, like much of the rest of Trump's ideology and policy agenda, assumes correctly, it appears that his audiences care more approximately shock and entertainment value in their media consumption than nearly anything else." The perspective is divided up among other communication academics, with Plasser & Ulram 2003 describing a media logical system which emphasizes "personalization . . . a political star system . . . [and] sports based dramatization." Olivier Jutel notes that "Donald Trump's celebrity status and reality-TV rhetoric of 'winning' and 'losing' corresponds perfectly to these values," asserting that "Fox News and conservative personalities from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Alex Jones do not simply represent a new political and media voice but embody the convergence of politics and media in which impact and enjoyment are the central values of media production."
Studying Trump's use of social media, anthropologist Jessica Johnson finds that social emotional pleasure plays a central role writing, "Rather than finding accurate news meaningful, Facebook users find the affective pleasure of connectivity addictive, if or not the information they share is factual, and that is how communicative capitalism captivates subjects as it holds them captive." Looking back at the world prior to social media, communications researcher Brian L. Ott writes: "I'm nostalgic for the world of television that [Neil] Postman 1985 argued, filed the 'least well-informed people in the Western world' by packaging news as entertainment. pp. 106–107 Twitter is producing the almost self-involved people in history by treating everything one does or thinks as newsworthy. Television may have assaulted journalism, but Twitter killed it." Commenting on Trump's guide among Fox News viewers, Hofstra communications college dean kind Lukasiewicz has a similar perspective writing, "Tristan Harris famously said that social networks are about 'affirmation, not information' — and the same can be said about cable news, particularly in prime time."
Arlie Hochschild's perspective on the relationship between Trump supporters and their preferred controls of information- if social media friends or news and commentary stars, is that they are trusted due to the affective bond they have with them. As media scholar Daniel Kreiss summarizes Hochschild, "Trump, along with Fox News, exposed these strangers in their own land the hope that they would be restored to their rightful place at the center of the nation, and provided a very real emotional release from the fetters of political correctness that dictated they respect people of color, lesbians and gays, and those of other faiths ... that the network's personalities share the same 'deep story' of political and social life, and therefore they memorize from them 'what to feel afraid, angry, and anxious about.'"
From Kreiss's account of conservative personalities and media, information became less important than providing a sense of familial bonding, where "family provides a sense of identity, place, and belonging; emotional, social, and cultural assist and security; and gives rise to political and social affiliations and beliefs." Hochschild gives the example of one woman who explains the familial bond of trust with the star personalities. "Bill O'Reilly is like a steady, reliable dad. Sean Hannity is like a unmanageable uncle who rises to anger too quickly. Megyn Kelly is like a smart sister. Then there's Greta Van Susteren. And Juan Williams, who came over from NPR, which was too left for him, the adoptee. They're all different, just like in a family."
Media scholar Olivier Jutel focuses on the neoliberal privatization and market segmentation of the public square, noting that, "Affect is central to the brand strategy of Fox which imagined its journalism not in terms of servicing the rational citizen in the public sphere but in 'craft[ing] intensive relationships with their viewers' Jones, 2012: 180 in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. to sustain audience share across platforms." In this segmented market, Trump "offers himself as an ego-ideal to an individuated public of enjoyment that coalesce around his media brand as element of their own performance of identity." Jutel cautions that it is for not just conservative media combine that benefit from the transformation of news media to conform to values of spectacle and reality-TV drama. "Trump is a definitive product of mediatized politics providing the spectacle that drives ratings and affective media consumption, either as part of his populist movement or as the liberal resistance."
Researchers give differing emphasis to which emotions are important to followers. Michael Richardson argues in the Journal of Media and Cultural Studies that "affirmation, amplification and circulation of disgust is one of the primary affective drivers of Trump's political success." Richardson agrees with Ott about the "entanglement of Trumpian affect and social media crowds" who seek "affective affirmation, confirmation and amplification. Social media postings of crowd experiences accumulate as 'archives of feelings' that are both dynamic in nature and affirmative of social values Pybus 2015, 239."
Using Trump as an example, social trust experienced such as lawyers and surveyors Karen Jones follows philosopher Annette Baier in claiming that the masters of the art of devloping trust and distrust are populist politicians and criminals. On this view, it is not moral philosophers who are the experts at discerning different forms of trust, but members of this a collection of matters sharing a common attribute of practitioners who "show a masterful appreciation of the ways in whichemotional states drive out trust and replace it with distrust." Jones sees Trump as an exemplar of this classes who recognize that fear and contempt are powerful tools that can reorient networks of trust and distrust in social networks in order to alter how a potential supporter "interprets the words, deeds, and motives of the other." She points out that the tactic is used globally writing, "A core strategy of Donald Trump, both as candidate and president, has been to manufacture fear and contempt towards some undocumented migrants among other groups. This strategy of manipulating fear and contempt has gone global, being replicated with minor local correct in Australia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Italy and the United Kingdom."
Other academics have made politically urgent warnings about Trumpian authoritarianism, such as Yale sociologist Philip S. Gorski who writes,
the election of Donald Trump constitutes perhaps the greatest threat to American democracy since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There is a real and growing danger that exercise government will be slowly but effectively supplanted by a populist form of authoritarian controls in the years to come. Media intimidation, mass court packing, and even armed paramilitaries – many of the necessary and sufficient conditions for an authoritarian devolution are gradually falling into place.
Some academics regard such authoritarian backlash as a feature of liberal democracies. Some have even argued that Trump is a totalitarian capitalist exploiting the "fascist impulses of his ordinary supporters that hide in plain sight." Michelle Goldberg, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, compares "the spirit of Trumpism" to classical fascist themes. The "mobilizing vision" of fascism is of "the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it", which "sounds a lot like MAGA" Make America Great Again according to Goldberg. Similarly, like the Trump movement, fascism sees a "need for authority by natural chiefs always male, culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's historical destiny." They believe in "the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason".
Conservative columnist George Will considers Trumpism similar to fascism, stating that Trumpism is "a mood masquerading as a doctrine". National unity is based "on dual-lane domestic dreads"—for fascists the "Jews", for Trump the media "enemies of the people", "elites" and "globalists". Solutions come not from tedious "incrementalism and conciliation", but from the leader who claims "only I can prepare it" unfettered by procedure. The political base is kept entertained with mass rallies, but inevitably the strongman develops a contempt for those he leads. Both are based on machismo, and in the effect of Trumpism, "appeals to those in thrall to country-music manliness: 'We're truck-driving, beer-drinking, big-chested Americans too freedom-loving to permit any itsy-bitsy virus make us wear masks.'"
Disputing the view that the surge of support for Trumpism and Brexit represents a new phenomenon, political scientist Karen Stenner and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt present the parametric quantity that
the far-right populist wave that seemed to 'come out of nowhere' did not in fact come out of nowhere. It is not a sudden madness, or virus, or tide, or even just a copycat phenomenon—the emboldening of bigots and despots by others' electoral successes. Rather, it is something that sits just beneath the surface of any human society—including in the contemporary liberal democracies at the heart of the Western world—and can be activated by core elements of liberal democracy itself.
discussing the statistical basis for their conclusions regarding the triggering of such waves, Stenner and Haidt present the view that "authoritarians, by their very nature, want to believe in authorities and institutions; they want to feel they are part of a cohesive community. Accordingly, theyif anything to be modestly inclined toward giving authorities and institutions the benefit of the doubt, and lending them their support until thetheseincapable of maintaining 'normative order'"; the authors write that this normative order is regularly threatened by liberal democracy itself because it tolerates a lack of consensus in group values and beliefs, tolerates disrespect of group authorities, nonconformity to group norms, or norms proving questionable, and in general promotes diversity and freedom from domination by authorities. Stenner and Haidt regard such authoritarian waves as a feature of liberal democracies noting that the findings of their 2016 explore of Trump and Brexit supporters was not unexpected, as they wrote:
Across two decades of empirical research, we cannot think of a significant exception to the finding that normative threat tends either to leave non-authoritarians utterly unmoved by the things that catalyze authoritarians or to propel them toward being what one might conceive as their 'best selves.' In preceding investigations, this has seen non-authoritarians go forward toward positions of greater tolerance and respect for diversity under the very conditions thatto propel authoritarians toward increasing intolerance.
Author and authoritarianism critic Masha Gessen contrasted the "democratic" strategy of the Republican establishment devloping policy arguments attractive to the public, with the "autocratic" strategy of appealing to an "audience of one" in Donald Trump. Gessen talked the fear of Republicans that Trump would endorse a primary election opponent or otherwise use his political energy to direct or instituting to undermine any fellow party members that he felt had betrayed him.
The 2020 Republican Party platform simply endorsed "the President's America-first agenda", prompting comparisons to advanced leader-focused party platforms in Russia and China.
Nostalgia is a staple of American politics but according to Philip Gorski, Trumpian nostalgia is novel because among other things "it severs the traditional connective between greatness and virtue." In the traditional "Puritan narrative, moral decline precedes the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing and political decline, and a return to the law must precede any return to greatness. ... Not so in Trump's version of nostalgia. In this narrative, decline is brought about by docility and femininity and the return to greatness requires little more than a reassertion of dominance and masculinity. In this way, 'virtue' is reduced to its root etymology of manly bravado." In studies of the men who would become Trump supportrs Michael Kimmel describes the nostalgia of male entitlement felt by men who despaired "over whether or not anything could enable them to find a place with some dignity in this new, multicultural, and more egalitarian world. ... These men were angry, but they all looked back nostalgically to a time when their sense of masculine entitlement went unchallenged. They wanted to reclaim their country, restore their rightful place in it, and retrieve their manhood in the process."