Understanding Trumpism

I’m reading the historian Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. It includes about a seven-page discussion of Trump and Trumpism that is among the most incisive and comprehensive distillations of his worldview and appeal that I’ve seen.

Gerstle begins by noting that in spite of Trump’s famous shapeshifting political stances over his long years in public life (on abortion, for example), he has long held three core beliefs:

1) “he had never embraced the neoliberal promise of a world without borders….He did not believe in the virtues of free trade. Even the best rules of fair competition…would fail to restrain power hungry countries, corporations, or individuals (like himself) from pursuing advantage by whatever means necessary.” Only “smart dealmakers acting in their own self-interest” could achieve good results. He always rejected NAFTA, and the WTO, maintaining suspicion of any dealings with Mexico or China.

2) “Trump had always been an ethnonationalist who believed America’s destiny was to be a white man’s country. Like his father, he held that the best of people America were those of European descent.” Dating to his loud calls to reinstate the death penalty after the “Central Park Five” were accused of raping a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989, Trump saw it as his “mission to guard white America against ‘dangerous’ and ‘upstart’ minority populations.” His hatred of Obama, including his pursuit of the absurd “birther” theory, stemmed in significant part from these beliefs. So, of course, did his rabid hostility to nonwhite immigrants, the issue with which he launched his campaign for the presidency in 2015.

3) “Trump’s third longstanding belief was, in some respects, the most surprising one to find in a New York City billionaire: that America’s good, white people had to take back the country from a cosmopolitan elite intent on selling it out.”

Before I continue, it’s worth noting here that the second and third elements of Trump’s worldview have been longstanding bedrocks of the modern GOP. The cultivation of resentment toward non-white Americans, toward people who are “different,” has been an enduring staple of GOP politics. From Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” in the late 1960s, to Reagan’s barely coded invocation of “states rights” to Romney’s ideas about “self-deportation,” hostility toward nonwhite others has been a critical element of Republican politics.

But Trump’s integration of aggressive hostility to those others with his suspicion of the outside world more broadly added new depth and intensity to the politics of ethnic and racial antipathy that have been go-to Republican “principles.” Previous Republican presidents, in policy and practice, sometimes broke significantly from that hostility. For example, Reagan signed a bill providing amnesty to some three million previously unauthorized immigrants in the mid-1980s. George W. Bush was sincerely intent on and thought he had a deal to implement significant immigration reform in his second term, a deal that was killed in large measure by more nativist backbenchers in the GOP. Trump, however, doubled and tripled down on his professed hostilities once he became president. In other words, per Gerstle, he fully intended, in deed, and not just in word, to follow through on his hatreds. For Trump, those were not just winning campaign lines. They were among his only core beliefs.

As Gerstle describes (drawing on the work of others), Trump’s style, as a TV personality, a campaigner and as president, has owed as much as anything to the “bombastic performance art” characteristic of pro wrestling. Trump cultivated his image to mirror the “aggressive world of staged male combat, a world always teetering - tantalizingly, in the view of many supporters - on the edge of violence.” While “effeminate,” “cosmopolitan” “multicultural” coastal elites became “obsessed with micro-aggressions,” Trump’s supporters “delighted in the performance of extravagant macro-aggressions.” The pro wrestling ethos that Trump brought to national politics valorized an “unapologetic will to power” and the notion that sheer dominance of opponents by any means, fair or foul, was to be celebrated.

Trump’s clownish bombast, his incessant name-calling, his delight in playing to the worst instincts of worked up and bloodthirsty crowds, the way he has reveled in playing the “heel,” - all of this mimics the world that Vince McMahon, wrestling’s master promoter, turned into marketing gold.

In doing so, Trump rejected a core element of the old GOP. To return to Gerstle’s first point above, Trump had no use for the pro-trade tenets that Republican elites - however selectively - had long hewed to. In conjunction with his repudiation of those ideas, Trump had little patience for traditional conservative moralizing. By the lights of that older conservatism, one critical rationale for reducing the role of government was to reduce “dependency.” Freed from such shackles, individuals would have to cultivate for themselves a sense of initiative, industry and purpose that would be the building blocks of a virtuous society. Trump, by contrast, according to Gerstle, “regarded this GOP moralizing as both boring and out of touch with the real world….[Trump] was more interested in thrills and power than in integrity and discipline.” Trump supported deregulation, but not because he thought that free markets were virtuous institutions capable of instilling [in participants] ethical behavior." Instead, for Trump, markets were “built for manipulation, contracts were made to be broken,” and deregulation made that easier.

All of the above provides a roadmap for understanding Trumpism generally, and for making sense specifically of Trump’s motives and behavior as he insisted that a coup be carried out on his behalf. Some have wondered whether Trump “knew” what he insisted on was wrong, or whether he was deluded into really believing that the election had been stolen out from under him. But such questions presume that Trump possesses a normal mind as well as a set of life experiences that ordinary people could even conceivably relate to.

In fact, however, Trump has lived in a cocoon of astonishing privilege and insularity and has never experienced accountability for any of his endless ethical and criminal transgressions. That life experience has reinforced the lack of conscience that is surely a family inheritance. For Trump, there’s no reason to differentiate fact from fiction. All that matters is what serves his purposes at any given moment. Neither circumstantially nor characterologically has Trump ever been compelled to think otherwise. That includes having any moral compunction about inciting mobs to kill people. The only sensations he would likely have felt about his actions on January 6 were the titillation he surely derives from having such power and the fury he experiences whenever he doesn’t get his way.

Of course, we’re not just talking about any old ruthless monster. We’re talking about a once and perhaps future president who, the next time around, may be subject to less constraint than he was the last go-round. And even if there is no second act, he’s already tilled the ground for the sprouting of other pitiless would-be tyrants, like the current governor of Florida. Trump became Trumpism because of the deepening degeneracy of the already-existing GOP, and took advantage of an increasingly fractured society that political and economic elites across the board - whether well-intentioned or not - have failed to heal. But regardless of his personal political future, Trump’s distinctive talents and pathologies have exacerbated all of our extant weaknesses and vulnerabilities and brought us to the cusp of existential political peril.

And with that - have a great weekend!!