Trumpism has been characterized by scholars as having authoritarian leanings[27][28] and has been associated with the belief that the president is above therule of law.[c] It has been referred to as anAmerican political variant of thefar-right[29][25][30] and thenational-populist and neo-nationalist sentiment seen in multiple nations starting in the mid–late 2010s.[31] Trump's political base has been compared to acult of personality.[d] Over the course of the late 2010s and early 2020s, Trump supporters became thelargest faction of the United StatesRepublican Party, with the remainder often characterized as "the elite", "the establishment", or "Republican in name only" (RINO) in contrast. In response to these developments, many American conservatives opposed to Trumpism formed theNever Trump movement. Trump's second-term actions include executive orders expanding tariffs and ending trade exemptions, aligning withAmerica First economic policies.[32][33][34]
Background and context
Some political scientists have attempted to explain support for Trumpism from a societal perspective and in the broader context of a wave ofright-wing populism that came to prominence in the 2010s, underpinningBrexit andTrump's 2016 election.[35][36] Theories cited by scholars include the "left behind" thesis that posits that the rise of right-wing populism inthe West finds its roots in individuals or communities that feel that they have been neglected by the development of society and political decision-makers.[37][38][39] Trends ofglobalization anddeindustrialization have been identified by scholars as having contributed toeconomic andsocial deprivation that underpins this theorized phenomenon.[40][39][e]
Some American scholars characterize the left behind thesis as a growing divergence between so-called "brain hubs" and "superstar cities" at one extreme and former manufacturing cities that have lost jobs and residents at the other.[42] Others characterize the problem as being a divergence between regions that have enjoyed the benefits of globalization andtechnological advance and those that have borne the brunt of disruptive impacts related to these phenomena.[42] A contested characterization of the left behind thesis is as a cultural backlash to long-term structural changes ingender equality,urban growth, education,immigration, economic instability, andterrorist attacks.[43][44] The left behind theory has been supported[38][45][46] and disputed[39][47] by scholars and empirical research.
Eric Kaufmann'sWhiteshift[f] describes a Western societal trend in the 21st century that he says is perceived to be erodingwhite ethnic identity.[g] He argues that Whiteshift and aprogressive trope celebrating the projected demise of white majorities have been responsible for much of thereactionary populism since 2015.[50] Kaufmann's thesis has received mixed reviews, withKenan Malik criticisingWhiteshift for omitting social context that he asserts is key to understanding politics.[51][52]
Formernational security advisor and close Trump advisorJohn Bolton disputes thatTrumpism exists in any meaningful sense, adding that "[t]he man does not have a philosophy. And people can try and draw lines between the dots of his decisions. They will fail."[59] Writing for theRoutledge Handbook of Global Populism (2019), Olivier Jutel notes, "What Donald Trump reveals is that the various iterations of right-wing American populism have less to do with a programmaticsocial conservatism orlibertarian economics than with enjoyment."[60]
SociologistMichael Kimmel states that Trump's populism is "an emotion. And the emotion is righteous indignation that the government is screwing 'us.'"[79] Kimmel posits that Trump manifests "aggrieved entitlement",[80] a "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, theAmerican Dream, which has turned into an impossible fantasy ..."[81]
Vagueness
Communications scholarZizi Papacharissi explains the utility of being ideologically vague and using terms and slogans that can mean anything the supporter wants them to mean. "When these publics thrive inaffective engagement it's because they've found an affective hook that's built around anopen signifier that they get to use and reuse and re-employ ...MAGA; that's an open signifier ... it allows them all to assign different meanings to it. So MAGA works for connecting publics that are different, because it is open enough to permit people to ascribe their own meaning to it."[82][relevant?][note 3]
Trumpism has been described as right-wing authoritarian populist,[90] and is broadly seen among scholars as posing an existential threat to American democracy.[91] His presidency sparked renewed focus and research on restraining presidential power and the threats of a criminal presidency that had died down since the Nixon administration.[92] Trump advocated for an extreme position ofunitary executive theory, arguing thatArticle II gave him the right to "do whatever I want".[93] The theory is a maximalist interpretation of presidential power formulated during theReagan administration and pushed by theFederalist Society to undo post-Nixon reforms. Future presidents ran with "unitary-adjacent ideas" and aspects of theory held bipartisan support as part of the growing powers of the presidency.[94] In February 2025, Trump wrote and pinned a comment onTruth Social andX: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law", which theWhite House later reposted on X that day. The phrase itself is a variation of one attributed toNapoleon Bonaparte, and was noted to be in line with his administration's aggressive push for expanding presidential power under the theory.[95][96]
Yale sociologistPhilip S. Gorski warned against the threat of Trumpism, writing that
"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 representative government will be slowly but effectively supplanted by a populist form of authoritarian rule in the years to come. Media intimidation, mass propaganda, voter suppression, court packing, and even armed paramilitaries—many of the necessary and sufficient conditions for an authoritarian devolution are gradually falling into place."[97]
Some academics regard such authoritarian backlash as a feature of liberal democracies.[98] Disputing the view that the surge of support for Trumpism andBrexit is a new phenomenon, political scientistKaren Stenner and social psychologistJonathan Haidt state that
the far-right populist wave ... 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 advanced liberal democracies at the heart of the Western world—and can be activated by core elements of liberal democracy itself.
Stenner and Haidt regard authoritarian waves as a feature of liberal democracies noting that the findings of their 2016 study of Trump and Brexit supporters was not unexpected, as they wrote:
... 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 previous investigations, this has seen non-authoritarians move toward positions of greater tolerance and respect for diversity under the very conditions that seem to propel authoritarians toward increasing intolerance.[98]
Author and authoritarianism criticMasha Gessen contrasted the "democratic" strategy of theRepublican establishment making policy arguments appealing to the public, with the "autocratic" strategy of appealing to an "audience of one" in Donald Trump.[99] Gessen noted the fear of Republicans that Trump would endorse aprimary election opponent or otherwise use his political power 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 contemporary leader-focused party platforms in Russia and China.[100] In January 2025, aCNN-SSRS poll found that 53% of Republicans viewed loyalty to Trump as central to their political identity and very important to what being a Republican is, beating values such as "a less powerful federal government (46%), supporting congressional Republicans (42%) or opposing Democratic policies (32%)".[101]
Trumpism has been described as borrowing from the anti-parliamentarian political theory advocated byCarl Schmitt, and has received renewed attention as a historical reference.[102][103][104][105]
Google Trends search term for "Toxic masculinity" began a substantial increase in 2016, at the time of the campaign for the U.S. presidential election.[106]
After the December 2020 introduction of COVID vaccines, a partisan gap in death rates developed, indicating the effects of vaccine skepticism.[107] As of March 2024, more than 30 percent of Republicans had not received a COVID vaccine, compared with less than 10 percent of Democrats.[107] Aversion to wearing masks has been associated with Trumpism's celebration of masculinity.[108][109]
According toPhilip Gorski, in Trumpian nostalgia "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."[97]Michael Kimmel describes male Trump supporters 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."[110]
Social psychologists Theresa Vescio and Nathaniel Schermerhorn note that "In his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump embodied HM [hegemonic masculinity] while waxing nostalgic for a racially homogenous past that maintained an unequal gender order. Trump performed HM by repeatedly referencing his status as a successful businessman ("blue-collar businessman") and alluding to how tough he would be as president. ... Trump was openly hostile to gender-atypical women, objectified gender-typical women, and mocked the masculinity of male peers and opponents." In their studies involving 2,007 people, they found that endorsement of hegemonic masculinity better predicted support for Trump than other factors, such as support for antiestablishment, antielitist, nativist, racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic perspectives.[111]
Kimmel was surprised at the sexual turn the 2016 election took and thinks that Trump is for many men a fantasy figure, an uber-male free to indulge every desire. "Many of these guys feel that the current order of things has emasculated them, by which I mean it has taken away their ability to support a family and have great life. Here's a guy who says: 'I can build anything I want. I can do anything I want. I can have the women I want.' They're going, 'This guy is awesome!'"[112]
Gender role scholar Colleen Clemens describes toxic masculinity as "a narrow and repressive description of manhood, designating manhood as defined by violence, sex, status and aggression ... where strength is everything while emotions are a weakness; where sex and brutality are yardsticks by which men are measured, while supposedly 'feminine' traits—which can range from emotional vulnerability to simply not being hypersexual—are the means by which your status as "man" can be taken away."[113] Writing in theJournal of Human Rights, Kimberly Theidon notes theCOVID-19 pandemic's irony of Trumpian toxic masculinity: "Being a tough guy means wearing the mask of masculinity: Being a tough guy means refusing to don a mask that might preserve one's life and the lives of others."[109]
Tough guy bravado appeared on the internet prior toattack on Congress on January 6, 2021, with one poster writing, "Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in ... . Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die."[114] Of the rioters arrested for the attack on the U.S. Capitol, 88% were men, and 67% were 35 years or older.[115][note 4]
Some Christian Trump supporters view him as divinely ordained and "chosen by God", and some compare him toJesus, with opposition to him seen asspiritual warfare.[122][123] Trump shared and played a video entitled "God Made Trump" at several of his rallies explicitly comparing him to amessianic figure in religious terms.[124] Trump is frequently described among some of his Christian supporters as anOld Testament hero, withCyrus the Great orDavid frequently mentioned.The New York Times describes his supporters seeing him as one of several "morally flawed figures handpicked by God to lead profound missions aimed at achieving overdue justice or resisting existential evil".[125] This framing has been described as "vessel theology" which allows for support of Trump and excuses his prior sexual misconduct and adultery.[126] Trump has strong support with members of thedominionistNew Apostolic Reformation, and many Trump administration officials are aligned with the group.[127][128]
SociologistArlie Hochschild writes that Trump's "speeches—evoking dominance, bravado, clarity, national pride, and personal uplift—inspire an emotional transformation" in followers, deeply resonating with their "emotional self-interest". Hochschild states that Trump is an "emotions candidate", appealing to the emotional self-interests of voters. To Hochschild, this explains the paradox raised byThomas Frank's bookWhat's the Matter with Kansas?, an anomaly which motivated her five-year immersive research into the emotional dynamics of theTea Party movement which she believes has mutated into Trumpism.[129][130]
Her bookStrangers in Their Own Land was named one of the "6 books to understand Trump's Win" byThe New York Times.[131] Hochschild claims that voters were not persuaded by rhetoric to vote against their self-interest through appeals to the "bad angels" of their nature:[note 5] "their greed, selfishness, racial intolerance,homophobia, and desire to get out of paying taxes that go to the unfortunate." She grants that the appeal to bad angels is made by Trump, but states that it "obscures another—to the right wing's good angels—their patience in waiting in line in scary economic times, their capacity for loyalty, sacrifice, and endurance", qualities she describes as a part of a motivating narrative she calls their "deep story", asocial contract narrative that appears to be widely shared in other countries as well.[132] She thinks Trump's approach towards his audience creates group cohesiveness by exploiting a crowd phenomenonEmile Durkheim called "collective effervescence", "a state of emotional excitation felt by those who join with others they take to be fellow members of a moral or biological tribe ... to affirm their unity and, united, they feel secure and respected."[133][note 6]
Trumpian rhetoric employs absolutistframings and threatnarratives[135] rejecting the political establishment.[136] The absolutist rhetoric emphasizes non-negotiable boundaries and moral outrage at their supposed violation.[137][note 7]
Money-Kyrle pattern
"Stopping" people you have nothing in common with
And if you don't stop people that you've never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail. ... This double-tailed monster [ofgreen energy andimmigration] destroys everything in its wake, and they cannot let that happen any longer. You're doing it because you want to be nice, you want to be politically correct, and you're destroying your heritage.
A particular pattern is common for authoritarian movements. First, elicit a sense of depression, humiliation and victimhood. Second, separate the world into two opposing groups: ademonized set ofothers versus those who have the power and will to overcome them.[141] This involves identifying the enemy supposedly causing the current state of affairs and then promotingconspiracy theories andfearmongering to inflame fear and anger. After cycling these first two patterns through the populace, the final message aims to produce acathartic release of pent-upochlocracy and mob energy, with a promise that salvation is at hand because the leader will deliver the nation back to its former glory.[142] This three-part pattern was identified in 1932 byRoger Money-Kyrle who wrotePsychology of Propaganda.[143] Reporting on Trumpist rallies has documented expressions of the Money-Kyrle pattern and associatedstagecraft.[144][145]
Critical theory scholarDouglas Kellner compares the elaborate staging ofLeni Riefenstahl'sTriumph of the Will with that used in Trump rallies using the example of the preparation ofphoto op sequences and aggressive hyping of huge attendance expected for Trump's 2015 primary event in Mobile, Alabama, when the media coverage repeatedly cuts between the Trump jet circling the stadium, the rising excitement of rapturous admirers below, the motorcade and the final triumphal entrance of the individual Kellner claims is being presented as the "political savior to help them out with their problems and address their grievances".[146]
Connolly thinks the performance draws energy from the crowd's anger as it channels it, drawing it into a collage of anxieties, frustrations and resentments about malaise themes, such asdeindustrialization,offshoring, racial tensions, political correctness, a more humble position for the United States in global security, economics and so on. Connolly observes that animated gestures, pantomiming, facial expressions, strutting and finger pointing are incorporated as part of the theater, transforming the anxiety into anger directed at particular targets, concluding that "each element in a Trump performance flows and folds into the others until an aggressive resonance machine is formed that is more intense than its parts."[147] Some compare the symbiotic dynamics of crowd pleasing to that of theprofessional wrestling style of events which Trump was involved with since the 1980s.[148][149]
Some academics point out that the narrative common in the popular press describing the psychology of such crowds is a repetition of a 19th-century theory byGustave Le Bon when organized crowds were seen by political elites as potential threats to the social order. In his bookThe Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), Le Bon described a sort of collective contagion uniting a crowd into a near religious frenzy, reducing members to barbaric, if not subhuman levels of consciousness with mindless goals.[150] Since such a description depersonalizes supporters, this type of Le Bon analysis is criticized because the would-be defenders of liberal democracy simultaneously are dodging responsibility for investigating grievances while also unwittingly accepting the sameus vs. them framing of illiberalism.[151][152] Connolly acknowledges the risks but considers it more risky to ignore that Trumpian persuasion is successful due to deliberate use of techniques evoking more mild forms ofaffective contagion.[153]
Trump relies on theatrical devices to market his messages, including animated gestures, pantomiming and facial expressions.[147] Photo is from the 2019Conservative Political Action Conference.
Rhetoric
A constant barrage of rhetoric rivets media attention while obscuring actions such asneoliberalderegulation. One study concluded that significant environmental deregulation occurred during the first year of the Trump administration but, due to its concurrent use of racist rhetoric, escaped much media attention. According to the authors, the rhetoric served political objectives of dehumanizing its targets, eroding democratic norms, and consolidating power by emotionally connecting with and inflaming resentments among the base of followers and distracted media attention fromderegulatory policymaking by igniting media coverage of the distractions.[154]
Trump was the most prominent promoter of thebirther conspiracy theory used to delegitimize his political rival by employing a political tactic known as thebig lie[155][156]
According to civil rights lawyerBurt Neuborne and political theoristWilliam E. Connolly, Trumpist rhetoric employstropes similar to those used byfascists in Germany[157] to persuade citizens (at first a minority) to give up democracy, by using a barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, threats,xenophobia,national-security scares, religious bigotry,white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never-ending search forscapegoats.[158] Neuborne found twenty parallel practices,[159] such as creating what amounts to an "alternate reality" in adherents' minds, through direct communications, by nurturing a fawning mass media and by deriding scientists to erode the notion ofobjective truth;[160] organizing carefully orchestrated mass rallies;[161] attacking judges when legal cases are lost;[162] using lies, half-truths, insults, vituperation and innuendo to marginalize, demonize and destroy opponents;[161] makingjingoistic appeals toultranationalist fervor;[161] and promising to stop the flow of "undesirable" ethnic groups who are made scapegoats for the nation's ills.[163]
Connolly presents a similar list in his bookAspirational Fascism (2017), adding comparisons of the integration of theatrics and crowd participation with rhetoric, involving grandiose bodily gestures, grimaces, hysterical charges, dramatic repetitions of alternate reality falsehoods, and totalistic assertions incorporated into signature phrases that audiences are encouraged to join in chanting.[164] Despite the similarities, Connolly stresses that Trump is noNazi but is "an aspirational fascist who pursues crowd adulation, hyperaggressive nationalism, white triumphalism, and militarism, pursues alaw-and-order regime giving unaccountable power to the police, and is a practitioner of a rhetorical style that regularly creates fake news and smears opponents to mobilize support for theBig Lies he advances."[157]
In his 2024 bookTrump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying, cultural theoristHenk de Berg points to a number of further parallels between Trump's and Hitler's rhetoric; namely, the use of jokes and personal insults; the deliberate creation of controversy; interpretative openness, allowing different groups to recognize themselves in the argument; and oratorical meandering in cases where a coherent narrative would draw attention to the argument's inconsistencies.[165] De Berg also points out that extremist language used by Trump's followers is often perceived as authentic, because in real life we also tend to overstate things (e.g., "My new boss is worse than Stalin").[166]
Branding
Trump usedpersonal branding to market himself as an extraordinary leader by using his celebrity status and name recognition. As one of the communications directors for the MAGAsuper PAC put it in 2016, "LikeHercules, Donald Trump is a work of fiction."[167] Journalism professorMark Danner explains that "week after week for a dozen years millions of Americans saw Donald J. Trump portraying the business magus [inThe Apprentice], the grand vizier of capitalism, the wise man of the boardroom, a living confection whose every step and word bespoke gravitas and experience and power and authority and ... money. Endless amounts of money."[168]
Political science scholar Andrea Schneiker regards the branding strategy of the Trump public persona as that of a superhero who "uses his superpowers to save others, that is, his country. ... a superhero is needed to solve the problems of ordinary Americans ... Hence, the superhero per definition is an anti-politician. Due to his celebrity status and his identity as entertainer, Donald Trump can thereby be considered to be allowed to take extraordinary measures and even to break rules."[169][170]
Appeal to emotions
HistorianPeter E. Gordon observes 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.[171][note 8] In accounting for Trump's election and ability to sustain high approval ratings among voters, Erika Tucker writes in the bookTrump and Political Philosophy that though all presidential campaigns have strong emotions associated with them, Trump was able to recognize, and then to gain the trust and loyalty of those who felt strong emotions about perceived changes in the United States. She notes, "Political psychologistDrew Westen has argued thatDemocrats are less successful at gauging and responding to affective politics—issues that arouse strong emotional states."[173]
Examining the populist appeal of Trump, Hidalgo-Tenorio and Benítez-Castro draw on the theories ofErnesto 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)"[174][175]
Trump uses rhetoric that political scientists have deemed to be both dehumanizing and connected to physical violence by Trump's followers.[176]
Emotion, trust, and media
Scholar Michael Carpini states that "Trumpism is a culmination of trends that have been occurring for...decades...we are witnessing...a fundamental shift in the relationships between journalism, politics, and democracy." Carpini identifies "the collapsing of the prior [media] regime's presumed and enforced distinctions between news and entertainment."[177] Examining Trump's use of media inLanguage in the Trump Era, professor Marco Jacquemet writes that this approach "assumes (correctly, it appears) that his audiences care more about shock and entertainment value in their media consumption than almost anything else."[178]
Plasser and Ulram describe a media logic which emphasizes "personalization ... a political star system ... [and] sports based dramatization."[179] Olivier Jutel notes that "Trump's celebrity status and reality-TV rhetoric of 'winning' and 'losing' corresponds perfectly to these values", asserting that "Fox News and conservative personalities fromRush Limbaugh,Glenn Beck andAlex Jones do not simply represent a new political and media voice but embody the convergence of politics and media in which affect and enjoyment are the central values of media production."[180]
Studying paranoia in media, Jessica Johnson writes, "Rather than finding accurate news meaningful,Facebook users find the affective pleasure of connectivity addictive, whether or not the information they share is factual, and that is how communicativecapitalism captivates subjects as it holds them captive."[181] Looking back prior to social media, researcherBrian L. Ott writes: "I'm nostalgic for the world of television that[Neil] Postman (1985)argued, produced the 'least well-informed people in the Western world' by packaging news as entertainment.[182]Twitter is producing the most self-involved people in history by treating everything one does or thinks as newsworthy. Television may have assaulted journalism, but Twitter killed it."[183] Commenting on Trump's support among Fox News viewers, Mark Lukasiewicz has a similar perspective, writing, "Tristan Harris famously said that social networks are about 'affirmation, not information'—and the same can be said aboutcable news, especially in prime time."[184]
Arlie Russell Hochschild holds that Trump supporters trust their preferred sources of information due to theaffective bond they have with them. As Daniel Kreiss summarizes Hochschild, "Trump, along with Fox News, gave 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 ofpolitical correctness that dictated they respect people of color,lesbians andgays, and those of other faiths ... that the network's personalities share the same 'deep story' of political and social life, and therefore they learn from them 'what to feel afraid, angry, and anxious about.'"[185]
From Kreiss' 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 support and security; and gives rise to political and social affiliations and beliefs."[186] Hochschild gives the example of a woman who states, "Bill O'Reilly is like a steady, reliable dad.Sean Hannity is like a difficult uncle who rises to anger too quickly.Megyn Kelly[note 9] is like a smart sister. Then there'sGreta Van Susteren. AndJuan Williams, who came over fromNPR, which was too left for him, the adoptee. They're all different, just like in a family."[187]
Olivier Jutel notes that, "Affect is central to the 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' in order to sustain audience share across platforms."[note 10] In this segmented market, Trump "offers himself as an ego-ideal to an individuated public of enjoyment that coalesce around his media brand as part of their own performance of identity." Jutel states that news media companies benefit from offering spectacle and drama. "Trump is a definitive product ofmediatized politics providing the spectacle that drives ratings and affective media consumption, either as part of his populist movement or as the liberal resistance."[188]
Researchers give differing emphasis to which emotions are important to followers. Michael Richardson argues 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."[189][190]
social trust expert Karen Jones follows philosopherAnnette Baier in explaining that the masters of the art of creating trust and distrust are populist politicians and criminals, who "show a masterful appreciation of the ways in which certain emotional states drive out trust and replace it with distrust."[191] Jones sees Trump as an exemplar of this who recognize that fear and contempt are tools that can reorient networks of trust and distrust in social networks to alter how a potential supporter "interprets the words, deeds, and motives of theother."[note 11] She holds that "A core strategy of Donald Trump...has been to manufacture fear and contempt towards some undocumented migrants (among other groups)", a strategy which "has gone global ... in Australia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Italy and the United Kingdom."[191]
To sow election doubt, Trump escalated use of "rigged election" and "election interference" statements in advance of the 2024 election compared to the previous two elections—the statements described as part of a "heads I win; tails you cheated" rhetorical strategy.[197]
Google Trends topic searches for "gaslighting" began a substantial increase in about 2016,[198] around the time of the campaign for the U.S. presidential election. Numerous journalists used the term to describe Trump's statements.[199][200][201]
Though the termfake news was known before the 2016 election, since Trump started using it soon after the election, it has been used continuously by Trump, other leaders, political operatives, journalists and ordinary people.[202] Trump weaponized the term as a rhetorical tool to dismiss and discredit unfavorable reporting, undercutting journalism's truth-telling function and delegitimizing journalism for a large part of the electorate.[203]
Though Trump repeatedly promoted his 2024 victory as amandate—to inflate the actual degree of voter support—he failed to receive 50% of the popular vote.[204] His 1.5 percentage pointmargin of victory in 2024 (shown in chart) place it in only the 20th percentile of presidential elections since 1828.[205]
Trump's opposition towind power involves repeated deceptive claims that "windmills" "kill the birds".[206] However,wind turbines in the U.S. are responsible for less than one one-hundredth of one percent of human-related bird deaths.[207]
There aremany falsehoods which Trump presents as facts.[208] Drawing onHarry G. Frankfurt's bookOn Bullshit, political science professor Matthew McManus argues that Trump is a bullshitter whose sole interest is to persuade, and not a liar (e.g.Richard Nixon) who takes the power of truth seriously and so deceitfully attempts to conceal it. Trump by contrast is indifferent to the truth or unaware of it.[209] Unlike conventional lies of politicians exaggerating their accomplishments, Trump's lies are egregious, making lies about easily verifiable facts. At one rally Trump stated his father "came from Germany", even thoughFred Trump was born in New York City.[210]
Leaders at the 2018United Nations General Assembly burst into laughter at his boast that he had accomplished more in his first two years than any other United States president. Visibly startled, Trump responded to the audience: "I didn't expect that reaction."[210] Trump lies about the trivial, such as claiming that there was no rain on the day ofhis inauguration when in fact it did rain, as well as making grandiose "Big Lies", such as claiming that Obama foundedISIS, or promoting thebirther movement, a conspiracy theory which claims that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii.[211] Connolly points to the similarities of such reality-bendinggaslighting with fascist and post Soviet techniques of propaganda includingKompromat (scandalous material), stating that "Trumpian persuasion draws significantly upon the repetition of Big Lies."[212]
Robert Jay Lifton, a scholar ofpsychohistory and authority on the nature ofcults, emphasizes the importance of understanding Trumpism "as an assault on reality". A leader has more power if he is in any part successful at making truth irrelevant to his followers.[213] Trump biographerTimothy L. O'Brien agrees, stating: "It is a core operating principle of Trumpism. If you constantly attack objective reality, you are left as the only trustworthy source of information, which is one of his goals for his relationship with his supporters—that they should believe no one else but him."[214] Lifton believes Trump is a purveyor of asolipsistic reality[215] which is hostile to facts and is made collective by amplifying frustrations and fears held by his community of zealous believers.
Research published in theAmerican Sociological Review found that Trump's lying helped boost his "authentic appeal". It argued that in systems viewed as flawed or with low political legitimacy, a "flagrant violator of established norms" is seen "as an authentic champion" by being perceived as "bravely speaking a deep and otherwise suppressed truth" against a political establishment that does not appear to be working on behalf of the people. While a perceived establishment candidate "may be more likable or perceived to be more competent", voters question the candidates opposition to "the injustice that is said to have permeated the established political system".[216] Andrew Gumbel, writing forThe Guardian after the 2024 presidential election, wrote that many Trump voters inYoungstown, Ohio saw both parties as filled with crooks and liars, but that Trump "comes across as someone who doesn't pretend to be anything other than what he is, and that perceived authenticity counts for more with many Youngstown voters than his character flaws or even his policy positions". Gumbel argued that voters preferred "gut instincts" to "carefully scripted messaging of a Democrat likeKamala Harris or even a mainstream Republican".[217]
Social psychology
Dominance orientation
Trump supporters employed a variety of dominance imagery in flags, clothing and a mock gallows on January 6, 2021, when violent Trumpist rioters attempted to overturn the 2020 election, temporarily succeeding in preventing Congress from certifying Trump's loss.TheAmerican way of upward mobility for the deserving is, according to Kimmel and Hochschild, a promise that many Americans feel has been denied them due to forces described within a shared "deep story" commonly held among Trump supporters.
In the non-academic book,Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers, Altemeyer andJohn Dean describe research which reaches the same conclusions. Despite disparate and inconsistent beliefs and ideologies, a coalition of such followers can become cohesive and broad in part because each individual "compartmentalizes" their thoughts[222] and they are free to define their sense of the threatened tribal in-group[223] in their own terms, whether it is predominantly related to theircultural or religious views[224] (e.g. the mystery of evangelical support for Trump), nationalism[225] (e.g. theMake America Great Again slogan), or their race (maintaining a white majority).[226]
Mock gallows and Trump supporters attacking Congress on January 6, 2021
Altemeyer, MacWilliams, Feldman, Choma, Hancock, Van Assche and Pettigrew claim that instead of directly attempting to measure such ideological, racial or policy views, supporters of such movements can be reliably predicted by using two social psychology scales (singly or in combination), namelyright-wing authoritarian (RWA) measures which were developed in the 1980s by Altemeyer and otherauthoritarian personality researchers,[note 12] and thesocial dominance orientation (SDO) scale developed in the 1990s bysocial dominance theorists.
In May 2019,Monmouth University Polling Institute conducted a study in collaboration with Altemeyer in order to empirically test the hypothesis using the SDO and RWA measures. The finding was that social dominance orientation and affinity for authoritarian leadership are highly correlated with followers of Trumpism.[227] This study further confirmed of the studies discussed in MacWilliams (2016), Feldman (2020), Choma and Hancock (2017), and Van Assche & Pettigrew (2016).[228]
The research does not imply that the followers always behave in an authoritarian manner but that expression is contingent, which means there is reduced influence if it is not triggered by fear and what the subject perceives as threats.[219][229][230] Similar social psychological techniques for analyzing Trumpism have been effective in identifying adherents of similar movements in Europe, including in Belgium and France (Lubbers & Scheepers, 2002; Swyngedouw & Giles, 2007; Van Hiel & Mervielde, 2002; Van Hiel, 2012), the Netherlands (Cornelis & Van Hiel, 2014) and Italy (Leone, Desimoni & Chirumbolo, 2014).[231] Quoting comments from participants in focus groups made up of people who had voted for Democrat Obama in 2012 but flipped to Trump in 2016, pollster Diane Feldman noted the anti-government, anti-coastal-elite anger: "'They think they're better than us, they'reP.C., they'revirtue-signallers.' '[Trump] doesn't come across as one of those people who think they're better than us and are screwing us.' 'They lecture us.' 'They don't even go to church.' 'They're in charge, and they're ripping us off.'"[232]
Comparisons to animal social behavior
Formerspeaker of the HouseNewt Gingrich explained the central role of dominance in his speech "Principles of Trumpism", comparing the needed leadership style to that of a violent bear. Psychology researcherDan P. McAdams thinks a better comparison is to the dominance behavior ofalpha male chimpanzees such as Yeroen, the subject of an extensive study of chimp social behavior conducted by renownedprimatologistFrans de Waal.[233]Christopher Boehm, a professor of biology and anthropology agrees, writing, "his model of political posturing has echoes of what I saw in the wild in six years in Tanzania studying the Gombe chimpanzees," and "seems like a classic alpha display."[234]
Using the example of Yeroen, McAdams describes the similarities: "On Twitter, Trump's incendiary tweets are like Yeroen's charging displays. In chimp colonies, the alpha male occasionally goes berserk and starts screaming, hooting, and gesticulating wildly as he charges toward other males nearby. Pandemonium ensues as rival males cower in fear ... Once the chaos ends, there is a period of peace and order, wherein rival males pay homage to the alpha, visiting him, grooming him, and expressing various forms of submission. In Trump's case, his tweets are designed to intimidate his foes and rally his submissive base ... These verbal outbursts reinforce the president's dominance by reminding everybody of his wrath and his force."[235]
Primatologist DameJane Goodall explains that like the dominance performances of Trump, "In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: Stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position." The comparison has been echoed by political observers sympathetic to Trump.Nigel Farage, an enthusiastic backer of Trump, stated that in the2016 United States presidential debates where Trump loomed up on Clinton, he "looked like a bigsilverback gorilla", and added that "he is that big alpha male. The leader of the pack!"[236]
McAdams points out the audience gets to vicariously share in the sense of dominance due to theparasocial bonding that his performance produces for his fans, as shown by Shira Gabriel's research studying the phenomenon in Trump's role inThe Apprentice.[237] McAdams writes that the "television audience vicariously experienced the world according to Donald Trump", a world where Trump says "Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat."[238]
Cultural anthropologistPaul Stoller thinks Trump employed celebrity culture-glitz, illusion and fantasy to construct a shared alternate reality where lies become truth and reality's resistance to one's own dreams is overcome by the right attitude and bold self-confidence.[239] Trump's father indoctrinated his children from an early age into thepositive thinking approach to reality advocated by the family's pastorNorman Vincent Peale.[240] Trump said that Peale considered him the greatest student of his philosophy that regards facts as not important, because positive attitudes will instead cause what you "image" to materialize.[241] Trump biographerGwenda Blair thinks Trump "weaponized" Peale'sself-help philosophy.[242]
Collective narcissism measures have been shown to be a powerful predictor of membership in authoritarian movements including Trump's.[243]
In his bookBelieve Me which details Trump's exploitation of white evangelical politics of fear,Messiah College history professor John Fea points out thenarcissistic nature of the fanciful appeals to nostalgia, noting that "In the end, the practice of nostalgia is inherently selfish because it focuses entirely on our own experience of the past and not on the experience of others. For example, people nostalgic for the world ofLeave It to Beaver may fail to recognize that other people, perhaps even some of the people living in the Cleaver's suburban "paradise" of the 1950s, were not experiencing the world in a way that they would describe as 'great.' Nostalgia can give us tunnel vision. Its selective use of the past fails to recognize the complexity and breadth of the human experience ... ."[244]
According to historian John Fea, many Trump followers seek refuge from change by urging return to a utopianLeave it to Beaver version of America.[245]
According to Fea, the hopelessness of achieving an idealized past "causes us to imagine a future filled with horror" leading to conspiratorial narratives that easily mobilize white evangelicals.[246] As a result, they are easily captivated by a strongman such as Trump who repeats and amplifies their fears while posing as the deliverer from them. In his review of Fea's analysis of the impact of conspiracy theories on white evangelical Trump supporters, scholar of religious politics David Gutterman writes: "The greater the threat, the more powerful the deliverance." Gutterman's view is that "Donald J. Trump did not invent this formula; evangelicals have, in their lack of spiritual courage, demanded and gloried in this message for generations. Despite the literal biblical reassurance to 'fear not,' white evangelicals are primed for fear, their identity is stoked by fear, and the sources of fear are around every unfamiliar turn.[247]
Social theory scholar John Cash notes that disaster narratives of impending horrors have a broad audience, pointing to a 2010 Pew study which found that 41 percent of those in the US think that the world will probably be destroyed by the middle of the century. Cash points out that certainties may be found in other narratives which also have the effect of uniting like minded individuals into shared "us versus them" narratives.[248]
Cash thinks that psychoanalytic theoristJoel Whitebook is correct that "Trumpism as a social experience can be understood as apsychotic like phenomenon, that "[Trumpism is] an intentional [...] attack on our relation to reality." Whitebook thinks Trump's playbook is like that of Putin's strategistVladislav Surkov who employs "ceaselessshapeshifting, appealing to nationalist skinheads one moment and human rights groups the next."[248]
Cash comparesAlice in Wonderland to Trump's ability to seemingly embrace disparate fantasies in a series of contradictory tweets and pronouncements, for example appearing to encourage the "neo-Nazi protestors" afterCharlottesville or for audiences with felt grievances about America's first black president, the claim thatObama wiretapped him. Cash writes: "Unlike the resilient Alice, who ... insists on truth and accuracy when confronted by a world of reversals, contradictions, nonsense and irrationality, Trump reverses this process. ... Trump has dragged the uninhibited and distorted world of the other side of the looking-glass into our shared world."[249]
Lifton sees important differences between Trumpism and typical cults, such as not advancing atotalist ideology and lack of isolation from the outside world. Lifton identifies similarities with cults that disparage the "fake world" created by the cult's titanic enemies.
Cultlike persuasion techniques are used, such as echoing of catch phrases. Examples include the use ofcall and response ("Clinton" triggers "lock her up"; "immigrants" triggers "build that wall"; "who will pay for it?" triggers "Mexico"), deepening the sense of unity between the leader and the community.[250] Participants and observers at rallies have remarked on a liberating feeling which Lifton calls a "high state" that "can even be called experiences of transcendence".[251]
Conspiracy theories such asQAnon are widely accepted among Trump supporters according to polling data from 2020.[252][253] Pictured are Vice PresidentMike Pence and members of theBroward County, Florida SWAT team assigned to a high-profile security detail, one of whom is wearing a QAnon patch.
Conservative culture commentatorDavid Brooks observes that under Trump, thispost-truth mindset, heavily reliant on conspiracy themes, came to dominate Republican identity, providing its believers a sense of superiority since such insiders possess important information most people do not have.[254] This results in an empowering sense of agency[255] with the liberation, entitlement and group duty to reject "experts" and the influence of hidden cabals seeking to dominate them.[254]
Prior to 2015, Trump already had established a bond with followers due to television and media appearances.[237] For those sharing his political views, Trump's use of Twitter to share his views caused those bonds to intensify, causing his supporters to feel a deepened empathetic bond as with a friend—sharing his anger and outrage, taking pride in his successes, sharing in his denial of failures and his oftentimes conspiratorial views.[256]
Dominance imagery using theStop the Steal conspiracy theme erected on the day of the Capitol assault. 76 percent of Republicans believe the conspiracy theory[257] with nearly half approving of the Capitol assault.[258][note 13]
Brooks thinks sharing of conspiracy theories has become the most powerful community bonding mechanism of the 21st century.[254]
Hofstadter'sThe Paranoid Style in American Politics describes the political efficacy of conspiracy theories. Some attribute Trump's political success to making such narratives a rhetorical staple.[261] The conspiracy theoryQAnon asserts that top Democrats run a child sex-trafficking ring and Trump is trying to dismantle it. An October 2020Yahoo-YouGov poll showed that elements of the QAnon claims are said to be true by half of Trump supporters polled.[252][253]
Some social psychologists see the predisposition of Trumpists towards interpreting social interactions in terms of dominance frameworks as extending to their relationship towards facts. A study by Felix Sussenbach and Adam B. Moore found that the dominance motive strongly correlated with hostility towards disconfirming facts and affinity for conspiracies among 2016 Trump voters but not among Clinton voters.[262] Many critics note Trump's skill in exploiting narrative, emotion, and a whole host of rhetorical ploys to draw supporters into the group's common adventure[263] as characters in a story much bigger than themselves.[264]
It is a story that involves not just a community-building call to arms to defeat titanic threats,[135] or of the leader's heroic deeds restoring American greatness, but of a restoration of each supporter's individual sense of liberty and control.[265] Trump channels and amplifies these aspirations, explaining in one of his books that his bending of the truth is effective because it plays to people's greatest fantasies.[266] By contrast, Clinton was dismissive of such emotion-filled storytelling and ignored the emotional dynamics of the Trumpist narrative.[267]
Cult of personality
Trump's support has been compared to acult of personality.[h] Trump's message and self-representation involved the creation of an identity as a non-politician,businessman, andgreat leader, distancing himself from traditional politicians and from the traditionalRepublican Party. His strategy involved the creation of an ethos of"saving America" through populist intentions and fighting imagined enemies with "I versus them" rhetoric that constituted the formation of a cult of personality.[268][page needed] Trump's contingent of hard-core supporters allowed him to maintain a grip on his political party even after several actions and controversies that would have discredited other politicians.[269]
News media and commentators have widely characterized Trump as the object of a personality cult.[270][271][272] His support was found to satisfy all parameters needed to determine a personality cult based onMax Weber's concept ofcharismatic authority.[273] Research found examples of asymmetric bias by his supporters in favor of Trump that did not exist among left-leaning individuals among alleged cases of "Trump derangement syndrome".[274] Other research has argued that Trump's personality cult revolves around an "all-powerful, charismatic figure, contributing to a social milieu at risk for the erosion of democratic principles and the rise offascism" based on the analysis of psychoanalysts and sociopolitical historians.[275] Research using theBig Five model of personality has found that his most loyal followers tend to score highly in conscientiousness / self-discipline, traits likely to be attracted to "personalistic, loyalty-demanding leaders" like Trump.[269] Several aspects of cult-like loyalty to Trump have been found to have religious parallels among certain supporters, and certain evangelicals have referred to him in religious terms, casting him as a divinely ordainedsavior and "chosen one".[269][276]
Peter E. Gordon,Alex Ross, sociologist David L. Andrews and Harvard political theorist David Lebow look onTheodor Adorno andMax Horkheimer's concept of the "culture industry" as useful for comprehending Trumpism.[note 14] As Ross explains the concept, the culture industry replicates "fascist methods of mass hypnosis ... blurring the line between reality and fiction", explaining, "Trump is as much a pop-culture phenomenon as he is a political one."[278] Gordon observes that these purveyors ofpopular culture are not just leveraging outrage,[279] but are turning politics into a more commercially lucrative product, a "polarized, standardized reflection of opinion into forms of humor and theatricalized outrage within narrow niche markets ... within which one swoons to one's preferred slogan and already knows what one knows. Name just about any political position and what sociologists call 'pillarization'—or what theFrankfurt School called 'ticket' thinking—will predict, almost without fail, a full suite of opinions."[280][note 15]
Trumpism is from Lebow's perspective, more of a result of this process than a cause.[282] In the intervening years since Adorno's work, Lebow believes the culture industry has evolved into a politicizing culture market "based increasingly on the internet, constituting a self-referentialhyperreality shorn from any reality of referants ...sensationalism and insulation intensify intolerance ofdissonance and magnify hostility against alternative hyperrealities. In a self-reinforcing logic of escalation, intolerance and hostility further encourage sensationalism and the retreat into insularity."[282][note 16] From Gordon's view, "Trumpism itself, one could argue, is just another name for the culture industry, where the performance of undoing repression serves as a means for carrying on precisely as before."[284]
From this viewpoint, the susceptibility to psychological manipulation of individuals with social dominance inclinations is not at the center of Trumpism, but is instead the "culture industry" which exploits these and other susceptibilities by using mechanisms that condition people to think in standardized ways.[171] The burgeoning culture industry respects no political boundaries as it develops these markets with Gordon emphasizing "This is true on the left as well as the right, and it is especially noteworthy once we countenance what passes for political discourse today. Instead of a public sphere, we have whatJürgen Habermas long ago called therefeudalization of society."[285]
What Kreiss calls an "identity-based account of media" is important for understanding Trump's success because "citizens understand politics and accept information through the lens of partisan identity. ... The failure to come to grips with a socially embedded public and an identity group–based democracy has placed significant limits on our ability to imagine a way forward for journalism and media in the Trump era. As Fox News andBreitbart have discovered, there is power in the claim of representing and working for particular publics, quite apart from any abstract claims to present the truth."[286]
Examining Trumpism as an entertainment product, some media research focuses onoutrage discourse, relating the entertainment value of Trump's rhetoric to the commercial interests of media companies.[287] Outrage narratives on political blogs, talk radio and cable news shows were, in the decades prior, a new genre which grew due to its profitability.[288][289]
Media critic David Denby writes, "Like a good standup comic, Trump invites the audience to join him in the adventure of delivering his act—in this case, the barbarously entertaining adventure of running a Presidential campaign that insults everybody." Denby claims that Trump is good at delivering entertainment that consumers demand. He observes that "Themovement's standard of allowable behavior has been formed by popular culture—by standup comedy and, recently, by reality TV and by the snarking, trolling habits of the Internet. ... it's exactly vulgar sensationalism and buffoonery that his audience is buying. Donald Trump has been produced by America."[263]
Trump made false assertions, mean spirited attacks anddog whistle appeals to racial and religious intolerance. CBS's CEOLes Moonves remarked that "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS,"[290] demonstrating how Trump's messaging is compatible with the financial goals of media companies.[291]Peter Wehner, senior fellow at theEthics and Public Policy Center considers Trump a political "shock jock" who "thrives on creating disorder, in violating rules, in provoking outrage."[292]
The political profitability of incivility was demonstrated by the amount of airtime devoted to Trump's 2016 primary campaign—estimated at two billion[293] to almost five billion dollars.[294] The advantage of incivility was as true in social media, where "a BuzzFeed analysis found that the top 20 fake election news stories emanating from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated more engagement on Facebook (as measured by shares, reactions, and comments) than the top 20 election stories produced by 19 major news outlets combined, includingThe New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, and NBC News."[295]
Surveying research of how Trumpist communication is well suited to social media, Brian Ott writes that, "commentators who have studied Trump's public discourse have observed speech patterns that correspond closely to what I identified as Twitter's three defining features [Simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility]."[297] Media criticNeal Gabler has a similar viewpoint writing that "What FDR was to radio and JFK to television, Trump is to Twitter."[298] Outrage discourse expert Patrick O'Callaghan argues that social media is most effective when it utilizes the particular type of communication which Trump relies on. O'Callaghan notes that sociologist Sarah Sobieraj and political scientist Jeffrey M. Berry almost perfectly described in 2011 the social media communication style used by Trump long before his presidential campaign.[299]
They explained that such discourse "[involves] efforts to provoke visceral responses (e.g., anger, righteousness, fear, moral indignation) from the audience through the use of overgeneralizations, sensationalism, misleading or patently inaccurate information,ad hominem attacks, and partial truths about opponents, who may be individuals, organizations, or entire communities of interest (e.g., progressives or conservatives) or circumstance (e.g., immigrants). Outrage sidesteps the messy nuances of complex political issues in favor of melodrama, misrepresentative exaggeration, mockery, and improbable forecasts of impending doom. Outrage talk is not so much discussion as it is verbal competition, political theater with a scorecard."[300]
Trump's hourly tweet activity from his first tweet in May 2009 until his suspension from the website in 2021. His tweet activity pattern changed markedly in 2013.
Due to Facebook's and Twitter'snarrowcasting environment in which outrage discourse thrives,[note 17] Trump's employment of such messaging at almost every opportunity was from O'Callaghan's account extremely effective because tweets and posts were repeated in viral fashion among like minded supporters, thereby rapidly building a substantial information echo chamber,[302] a phenomenonCass Sunstein identifies asgroup polarization,[303] and other researchers refer to as a kind of self re-enforcinghomophily.[304][note 18] Within these information cocoons, it matters little to social media companies whether much of the information spread in such pillarized information silos is false, because as digital culture critic Olivia Solon points out, "the truth of a piece of content is less important than whether it is shared, liked, and monetized."[307]
Citing Pew Research's survey that found 62% of US adults get their news from social media,[308] Ott expresses alarm, "since the 'news' content on social media regularly features fake and misleading stories from sources devoid of editorial standards."[309] Media criticAlex Ross is similarly alarmed, observing, "Silicon Valley monopolies have taken a hands-off, ideologically vacant attitude toward the upswelling of ugliness on the Internet," and that "the failure of Facebook to halt the proliferation of fake news during the [Trump vs. Clinton] campaign season should have surprised no one. ... Traffic trumps ethics."[278]
O'Callaghan's analysis of Trump's use of social media is that "outrage hits an emotional nerve and is therefore grist to the populist's or the social antagonist's mill. Secondly, the greater and the more widespread the outrage discourse, the more it has a detrimental effect onsocial capital. This is because it leads to mistrust and misunderstanding amongst individuals and groups, to entrenched positions, to a feeling of 'us versus them'. So understood, outrage discourse not only produces extreme and polarising views but also ensures that a cycle of such views continues. (Consider also in this context Wade Robison (2020) on the 'contagion of passion'[310] and Cass Sunstein (2001, pp. 98–136)[note 19] on 'cybercascades'.)"[302] Ott agrees, stating that contagion is the best word to describe the viral nature of outrage discourse on social media, and writing that "Trump's simple, impulsive, and uncivil Tweets do more than merely reflect sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia; they spread those ideologies like a social cancer."[68]
Robison warns thatemotional contagion should not be confused with the contagion of passions thatJames Madison andDavid Hume were concerned with.[note 20] Robison states they underestimated the contagion of passions mechanism at work in movements, whose modern expressions include the surprising phenomena of rapidly mobilized social media supporters behind both theArab Spring and the Trump presidential campaign writing, "It is not that we experience something and then, assessing it, become passionate about it, or not", and implying that "we have the possibility of a check on our passions." Robison's view is that the contagion affects the way reality itself is experienced by supporters because it leverages how subjective certainty is triggered, so that those experiencing the contagiously shared alternate reality are unaware they have taken on a belief they should assess.[312]
Andrew Jackson's followers felt he was one of them, enthusiastically supporting his defiance ofpolitically correct norms of the nineteenth century and even constitutional law when they stood in the way of public policy popular among his followers. Jackson ignored theU.S. Supreme Court ruling inWorcester v. Georgia and initiated the forcedCherokee removal from their treaty protected lands to benefit white locals at the cost of between 2,000 and 6,000 dead Cherokee men, women, and children. Notwithstanding such cases of Jacksonian inhumanity,[clarification needed] Mead's view is that Jacksonianism provides the historical precedent explaining the movement of followers of Trump, marrying grass-roots disdain for elites, deep suspicion of overseas entanglements, and obsession with American power and sovereignty, acknowledging that it has often been axenophobic, "whites only" political movement. Mead thinks this "hunger in America for a Jacksonian figure" drives followers towards Trump but cautions that historically "he is not the second coming of Andrew Jackson," stating that Trump's "proposals tended to be pretty vague and often contradictory," exhibiting the common weakness of newly elected populist leaders, commenting early in his presidency that "now he has the difficulty of, you know, 'How do you govern?'"[313] Contradictorily, it has also been argued that Trump's historical precedent is in the Whig Party of Andrew Jackson's enemies. The Whigs and their successors the Know-Nothings were usually pro-tariff and anti-immigrant, and the party collapsed in the 1850s due to not taking a clear position on slavery.[317][318][319]
Morris agrees with Mead, locating Trumpism's roots in the Jacksonian era from 1828 to 1848 under the presidencies of Jackson,Martin Van Buren andJames K. Polk. On Morris's view, Trumpism also shares similarities with the post-World War I faction of theprogressive movement which catered to a conservative populist recoil from the looser morality of the cosmopolitan cities and America's changing racial complexion.[315] In his bookThe Age of Reform (1955), historianRichard Hofstadter identified this faction's emergence when "a large part of the Progressive-Populist tradition had turned sour, became illiberal and ill-tempered."[320]
An article byNational Public Radio's Ron Elving likens the populism of late-19th and early-20th centuryPopulist politicianWilliam Jennings Bryan to the later right-wing populism of Trump.[321] Bryan, while economically liberal, was socially and theologically conservative, supporting creationism, Prohibition and other aspects of Christian fundamentalism.[321][322] However, Trump also draws inspiration from Bryan's 1896 and 1900 Republican opponent,William McKinley, both in regard to protectionist tariffs and imperialism.[323]
A 1927 "America First" political advertisement advocating isolationism and establishing emotional ties of1927 Chicago mayoral candidateWilliam Hale Thompson with his German and Irish supporters by vilifying the United Kingdom
Prior to World War II, conservative themes of Trumpism were expressed in theAmerica First Committee movement in the early 20th century, and after World War II were attributed to aRepublican Party faction known as theOld Right. By the 1990s, it became referred to as thepaleoconservative movement, which according to Morris has now been rebranded as Trumpism.[324]Leo Löwenthal's bookProphets of Deceit (1949) summarized common narratives expressed in the post-World War II period of this populist fringe, specifically examining Americandemagogues of the period when modern mass media was married with the same destructive style of politics that historian Charles Clavey thinks Trumpism represents. According to Clavey, Löwenthal's book best explains the enduring appeal of Trumpism and offers the most striking historical insights into the movement.[325]
Writing inThe New Yorker, journalistNicholas Lemann states the post-war Republican Party ideology offusionism, a fusion of pro-business party establishment withnativist,isolationist elements who gravitated towards the Republican and not theDemocratic Party, later joined by Christian evangelicals "alarmed by the rise of secularism", was made possible by theCold War and the "mutual fear and hatred of the spread of Communism". An article in Politico has referred to Trumpism as "McCarthyism on steroids".[326][232]
Ignoring the findings of the report and the party establishment in his campaign, Trump was "opposed by more officials in his own Party ... than any Presidential nominee in recent American history," but at the same time he won "more votes" in the Republican primaries than any previous presidential candidate. By 2016, "people wanted somebody to throw a brick through a plate-glass window", in the words of political analystKarl Rove.[232] His success in the party was such that an October 2020 poll found 58% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents surveyed considered themselves supporters of Trump rather than the Republican Party.[327]
Parallels with fascism and trend towards illiberal democracy
Though Trump said in September 2025 that "the radicals on the left are the problem" with political violence,[328] cumulatively over decades, most extremist killings in the US have been caused by right-wing perpetrators.[329] From 2022 through 2024, all 61 political killings were committed by right-wing extremists.[330]
Over decades, right wing ideologically motivated homicides have substantially outnumbered those perpetrated by left wing perpetrators in the US.[331] Also, far-right motivated homicides have occurred much more frequently thanjihadi violence inspired byIslamic extremism (not shown in chart).[331]
Some commentators have rejected the populist designation for Trumpism and view it instead as part of a trend towards a new form of fascism or neo-fascism, with some referring to it as explicitly fascist and others as authoritarian andilliberal.[337][338][note 21] Others have more identified it as a form of mildfascism specific to the US.[342][343] Some historians, including many employingnew fascism to describe Trumpism,[note 22] write of the hazards of direct comparisons withEuropean fascist regimes of the 1930s, stating that while there are parallels, there are important dissimilarities.[346][347][note 23]
Activist groupSumOfUs's Projection of "Resist Trumpism Everywhere" on London'sMarble Arch as part of protests during Trump's July 2018 visit
Federico Finchelstein believes intersections exist betweenPeronism and Trumpism in terms of their disregard for the political system.[353]Christopher Browning considers the long-term consequences of Trump's policies and support which he receives from theRepublican Party to be dangerous for democracy.[354] In the German-speaking debate, the term "fascism" initially appeared sporadically, in connection with the crisis of confidence in politics and the media, and described the strategy of right-wing politicians who wish to stir up this crisis to profit from it.[355] German literature has a more diverse range of analysis of Trumpism.[note 24]
Others have argued that Trump is atotalitarian capitalist exploiting the "fascist impulses of hisordinary supporters that hide in plain sight."[356][357][341]Michelle Goldberg compares Trumpism to classicalfascist themes.[note 25] 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 Trumpism, 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".[360]
Image posted on February 19, 2025, by the official White House account likening Trump to a monarch with the phraseLONG LIVE THE KING. The post was made shortly after Trump had taken several actions that were apparent violations of federal law and the Constitution, and quoted Napoleon, saying "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law".[361]
Conservative columnistGeorge Will considers Trumpism similar to fascism, stating that Trumpism is "a mood masquerading as a doctrine". Will argues that national unity is based "on shared 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 fix it") unfettered by procedure. The political base is kept entertained with mass rallies, but inevitably thestrongman develops a contempt for those he leads.[note 26] Will argues both are based onmachismo, and in the case of Trumpism, "appeals to those in thrall to country-music manliness: 'We're truck-driving, beer-drinking, big-chested Americans too freedom-loving to let any itsy-bitsy [COVID-19] virus make us wear masks.'"[108][note 27]
Mark Blyth andJonathan Hopkin believe similarities exist between Trumpism and similar movements towardsilliberal democracies worldwide, but that Trumpism is not merely being driven by revulsion, loss, and racism. They argue that on the right and left, the global economy is driving the growth ofneo-nationalist coalitions which find followers who want to be free of the constraints which are being placed on them by establishment elites whose members advocateneoliberal economics andglobalism.[366]
Others emphasize the lack of interest in finding real solutions to the social malaise which has been identified, and they believe those individuals and groups who are executing policy are actually following a pattern which has been identified by researchers likeLeo Löwenthal andNorbert Guterman as originating in the post-World War II work of the Frankfurt School of social theory. Based on this perspective, books such as Löwenthal and Guterman'sProphets of Deceit offer insights into how movements like Trumpism dupe their followers by perpetuating their misery and preparing them to move further towards an illiberal form of government.[325]
Soon after theassassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump claimed that "the radicals on the left are the problem" with political violence.[328] Opinion editors,[367] as well as both far-right commentators[368] and Trump critics,[369] have compared Charlie Kirk's killing to theReichstag fire—the 1933 arson of theGerman parliament building that Hitler used as apretext to suspend civil liberties and prosecute political opposition[369]—some calling Kirk's killing Trump's "Reichstag fire moment".[367]How Democracies Die author, professorSteven Levitsky, said that exploiting Charlie Kirk's killing to justify unleashing attacks on critics is "page one of theauthoritarian playbook".[370]
Trumps "enemy from within" remarks and threats to use the National Guard and military against "radical left lunatics" during the 2024 campaign and the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination (especially the remarks ofStephen Miller) prompted historians Wendy Goldman and Timothy Snyder to compare these events to theGreat Purge in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.[371] At that time, an assassination promptedJoseph Stalin to proclaim vast non-existent conspiracies; to redefine dissent as terrorism and treason; to encourage people to inform on dissenters; and to engage in a campaign of prosecution, imprisonment, and execution of hundreds of thousands of political opponents.
Rush Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh speaking in West Palm Beach in 2019
Trump is considered by some analysts to be following a blueprint of leveraging outrage, which was developed on partisan cable TV and talk radio shows[302] such as theRush Limbaugh radio show—a style that transformedtalk radio and American conservative politics decades before Trump.[372] Both shared "media fame" and "over-the-top showmanship", and built an enormous fan base with politics-as-entertainment,[372] attacking political and cultural targets in ways that would have been considered indefensible and beyond the pale in the years before them.[373] Both featured "the insults, the nicknames", and conspiracy theories. Both maintained thatglobal warming was a hoax, thatBarack Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen, and that the danger ofCOVID-19 was vastly exaggerated.[372] Both mocked people with disabilities.[373]
Limbaugh, to whom Trump awarded thePresidential Medal of Freedom in 2020, preceded Trump in moving the Republican Party away from "serious and substantive opinion leaders and politicians", towards political provocation, entertainment, and anti-intellectualism, and popularizing and normalizing for "many Republican politicians and voters" what before his rise "they might have thought" but would have "felt uncomfortable saying".[note 28] His millions of fans were intensely loyal and "developed a capacity to excuse ... and deflect" his statements no matter how offensive and outrageous, "saying liberals were merely being hysterical or hateful. And many loved him even more for it."[373]
Future impact
Writing inThe Atlantic, Yaseem Serhan states Trump's post-impeachment claim that "our historic, patriotic, and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun," should be taken seriously as Trumpism is a "personality-driven" populist movement, and other such movements—such asBerlusconism in Italy,Peronism in Argentina andFujimorism in Peru, "rarely fade once their leaders have left office".[374] Joseph Lowndes, a professor of political science at the University of Oregon, argued that while current far-right Republicans support Trump, the faction rose before and will likely exist after Trump.[375]Bobby Jindal andAlex Castellanos wrote inNewsweek that separating Trumpism from Donald Trump himself was key to the Republican Party's future following his loss in the2020 United States presidential election.[376] However, Trump went on to win the2024 United States presidential election with victories in all seven crucialswing states.
In 2024, PresidentKevin Roberts ofThe Heritage Foundation stated that he sees the role of Heritage as "institutionalizing Trumpism."[377] Stating in June 2025 that "'The Age of Trump' Enters Its Second Decade",Peter Baker ofThe New York Times wrote "In those 10 years, Mr. Trump has come to define his age in a way rarely seen in America, more so than any president of the past century other thanFranklin D. Roosevelt andRonald Reagan".[378]
Trumpism "promises new jobs and more domestic investment".[379] Trump's hard line against export surpluses of American trading partners andprotectionist trade policies led to a tense situation in 2018 with mutually imposed tariffs by the United States and the European Union versus China.[380] Trump secures the support of his political base emphasizingneo-nationalism andcriticism of globalization.[381] One book suggested that Trump "radicalized economics" for white working- to middle-class voters by implying that "undeserving [minority] groups are getting ahead while their group is being left behind."[382]
In terms of foreign policy in the sense ofTrump's "America First",unilateralism andisolationism is preferred to amultilateral policy.[383] National interests are particularly emphasized, especially in the context of economic treaties and alliance obligations.[384][385] Trump has shown a disdain for traditional American allies such as Canada as well as transatlantic partnersNATO and theEuropean Union.[386][387] Conversely, Trump has shown sympathy forautocratic rulers, such as Russian PresidentVladimir Putin, whom Trump often praised even before taking office,[388] and during the2018 Russia–United States Summit.[389] The "America First" foreign policy includes promises by Trump to end American involvement in foreign wars, notably in theMiddle East, while also issuing tighter foreign policy throughsanctions against Iran, among other countries.[390][391] Trump's proposals during his second presidency to expand the United States by acquiringCanada,Greenland, and thePanama Canal were described by CNN as part of his nationalist "America First" agenda and having "modern echoes of the 19th century doctrine ofManifest Destiny".[392]
Trump woveChristian religious imagery into his2024 presidential campaign, characterizing it as a "righteous crusade" against "atheists, globalists and the Marxists". He stated that his aims included restoring the United States "as one nation under God with liberty and justice for all".[398]
Trump has been critical of what he sees as apersecution of Christians.[399] On February 6, following theNational Prayer Breakfast, he signed an executive order to create a task force to "immediately halt all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government, including at the DOJ, which was absolutely terrible, the IRS, the FBI — terrible — and other agencies".[400][401] Donald Trump appointed Attorney GeneralPam Bondi to lead the task force and appointedPaula White to direct the White House Faith Office.[399]
Trumpism is represented in Australia by the political partyTrumpet of Patriots, founded in 2021. The party has pledged to "put Australians first and make Australia great again".[404] It focuses on "gender, changing the immigration policy, bringing down the cost of living and free speech."[405]
President Trump poses with President Bolsonaro (June 2019)
In Brazil,Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes referred to as the "Brazilian Donald Trump",[406] who is often described as a right-wing extremist,[407][408] sees Trump as a role model[409] and according to Jason Stanley uses the same fascist tactics.[410] Like Trump, Bolsonaro finds support among evangelicals for his views onculture war issues.[411] Along with allies he publicly questioned Joe Biden's vote tally after the2020 United States presidential election.[412]
Trumpism exists as a political current in Canada.[k] Law professorAllan Rock, Canada's former attorney general and ambassador to the U.N., said Trump had "given expression to an underlying frustration and anger, that arises from economic inequality, from the implications from globalisation." Rock stated that the "overtly racist behaviour" associated with Trumpism emboldened racists and white supremacists, resulting in a rise in the number of these organizations and hate crimes in Canada.[413]
According to an October 2020 poll of Canadian voters, the number of "pro-Trump conservatives" was growing in Canada. Maclean's said this was influencing Canadian political campaigns.[414]Erin O'Toole, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, featured the slogan—"Take Back Canada"—in a video, stating "[j]oin our fight, let's take back Canada."[415] When asked if his "Canada First" policy was different from Trump's "America First" policy, O'Toole said, "No, it was not."[416] O'Toole criticized what he considered to be Trumpism following one ofLiberalDeputy Prime MinisterChrystia Freeland's tweets being flagged as "manipulated media" and compared her toTrump's flagged tweets,[417][418] prior to Twitter's acquisition byElon Musk.[419] Writing forThe Hill in 2021, Markik Von Rennenkampff stated that there are "striking differences" between the Conservative Party under Erin O'Toole and the Republican Party under Trump, notably O'Toole supportingaccess to abortion and his support for Canada'ssingle-payer health care system.[420] Rennenkampff also described Canadian Conservatives as "far more closely aligned with Democrats than Republicans".[421]
Following the2022 Conservative Party leadership election, some journalists have compared Conservative Party leaderPierre Poilievre to American Republicans such as Donald Trump andTed Cruz;[422][423] however many journalists have dismissed these comparisons due to Poilievre's pro-abortion access, pro-immigration, and pro-same-sex marriage positions.[l] In 2024, Zack Beauchamp ofVox stated that while Poilievre's rhetoric draws Trump comparisons, in terms of policy "he's actually considerably more moderate than Trump or European radicals".[424]
During the2025 Canadian federal election,Liberal Party of Canada staffers createdTrump-style "Stop The Steal" buttons and were caught planting them at aCanada Strong and Free Network conference which was supporting theConservative Party of Canada.[425] In response, the Liberal Party spokesman Kevin Lemkay stated that such actions did not fit the prime minister's "commitment to serious and positive discourse" while Conservative Party spokesman Sam Lilly stated "it's clear that it's the Liberals who are attempting to bring American-style politics to our country".[426]
At the February 2025 meeting betweenNarendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, and Donald Trump, the former stated:[433][434]
Borrowing an expression from America, our vision for a developed India is to make India great again, or MIGA ... When America and India work together, that is, when it's MAGA plus MIGA, it becomes a mega partnership for prosperity. ... And it is this mega spirit that gives new scale and scope to our objectives.[433][434]
Restart has been compared toQAnon byAriane Tabatabai, in terms of "conspiracist thinking going global".[435] Among conspiracy theories advocated by the group is that Iran's Supreme LeaderAli Khamenei has died (or went into coma) in 2017 and adouble plays his role in public.[436]
Shinzo Abe and US President Trump in 2017 with "MAGA"-style hats reading "Donald & Shinzo, Make Alliance Even Greater"
In Japan, in a speech toLiberal Democratic Party lawmakers in Tokyo on March 8, 2019,Steve Bannon said that Prime MinisterShinzo Abe was "Trump before Trump" and "a great hero to the grassroots, the populist, and the nationalist movement throughout the world."[437] Shinzo Abe was described as a "right-wing nationalist" or "ultra-nationalist",[438][439] but whether he was a "populist" is controversial.[440]
Netto-uyoku is the term used to refer tonetizens who espouse ultranationalist far-right views on Japanese social media, as well as in English to those who are proficient.Netto-uyoku are typically very friendly not only to Japanese nationalists but also to Donald Trump, and oppose liberal politics. They began spreading Trump's conspiracy theories in anattempt to overturn the 2020 American presidential election.[441]
Nigeria
According toThe Guardian andThe Washington Post, there is a significant affinity towards Trump in Nigeria.[442][443] Donald Trump's comments on theethno-religious conflicts between Christians and the predominantly Muslim Fulani tribe has contributed to his popularity among Christians in Nigeria, in which he stated: "We have had very serious problems with Christians who are being murdered in Nigeria. We are going to be working on that problem very, very hard because we cannot allow that to happen".[442] Donald Trump is praised by theIndigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a secessionist group that supports the independence ofBiafra fromNigeria and is designated as a terrorist group by the Nigerian government. IPOB has claimed that he "believes in the inalienable right of an indigenous people to self-determination" and it also praised him for "the direct and serious manner he addressed and demanded immediate end to the serial slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, especially Biafran Christians".[444][445]
After Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election, IPOB leaderNnamdi Kanu wrote a letter to Trump stating he had a "historic and moral burden ... to liberate the enslaved nations in Africa".[444] As Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, IPOB organized a rally in support of Trump that resulted in violent clashes with Nigerian security forces and resulted in multiple deaths and arrests.[446] On January 30, 2020, IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu attended a Trump rally in Iowa as a special VIP guest, at the invitation of theRepublican Party of Iowa.[447] According to a 2020 poll fromPew Research, 58% of Nigerians had favorable views of Donald Trump, the fourth highest percentage globally.[448]
According to John Campbell ofCouncil on Foreign Relations, Trump's popularity in Nigeria can be explained by a "manifestation of the widespread disillusionment in a country characterized by growing poverty, multiple security threats, an expanding crime wave, and a government seen as unresponsive and corrupt", and his popularity is likely stronger among wealthier urban Nigerians rather than the majority of Nigerians who live in rural areas or urban slums and are unlikely to have strong opinions on Trump.[449]
Philippines
President Trump shakes hands with President Duterte (November 2017)
Sheila S. Coronel has argued that the political strategies ofFerdinand Marcos, who waspresident of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, andRodrigo Duterte, who held the same position from 2016 to 2022, share certain features with Trumpism, including disregard for facts, encouragement of fear, and a "loud, bombastic, hypermasculine" aesthetic; and that each has benefited from uncertain political environments.[450]
President Trump standing together with President Putin (August 2025)
Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian far-right political philosopher has described the political style of the incumbent Russian PresidentVladimir Putin as similar to Donald Trump due to their anti-globalist and anti-elite rhetoric in emphasizing nationalism and traditional values with Putin framing Russia as a defender against Western liberal elites, while Trump criticizes global institutions and claims they undermine American interests.[451]
Trump's presidential approval ratings, with more disapproval ratings than approval ratings two months after his election, and disapproval ratings rising to over 50% after three months.[453]
^Believing theStop the Steal conspiracy theory ofelectoral fraud, Trumpists acted after being told minutes prior by Trump to "fight like hell" to "take back our country",[1][2] with his personal lawyerRudy Giuliani calling for "trial by combat",[3] and sonDonald Trump Jr. in the prior week warning "we are coming for you" and calling for "total war" over election results.[4][5]
^TheAlbert Lea Tribune's description of the scene at the September 13, 2020, "United We Stand & Patriots March for America" was that "[p]eople rallied outside the Minnesota Capitol in St. Paul on Saturday in support of President Trump, and against statewide pandemic policies they say are infringing on personal freedoms and damaging the economy. ... Some in the crowd carried long guns and wore body armor." There were physical confrontations resulting in the arrest of two counter-protesters.[6]
^Papacharissi notes that examples can also be found on the left for the use of open signifiers whenaffectively engaging their bases ("publics").[82]
^The 88% figure is based on the CBS news report that as of April 16, 2021, 45 out of the 370 arrested were arrested were women.[116]
^For a detailed description of this evocation of intense collective emotions in order to engineer group identity, seeCui 2018. Cui writes: "The collective emotions that audiences feel during media events is the modern day equivalent of the collective effervescence intotemic worship (Dayan & Katz, 1992). In primitive societies, intense feelings about the collectivity are generated through the participants physically enacting rituals together. Possessed by these intense feelings, they experience themselves as sharing thecollective identity represented by the symbolism in the rituals. In sophisticated industrial societies, people often participate in rituals through the media. Through the live broadcast of ceremonial events, a geographically dispersed population can be temporally synchronized through the symbolic representation of a higher reality. The intense collective emotions these events generate reinforce social identity (Jiménez-Martínez, 2014; Uimonen, 2015; Widholm, 2016)."[134]
^Trump's scenic construction (introduction of characters and setting stage depicting an issue) use black and white terms to describe malevolent forces, or the coming victory.John Kerry is a "total disaster" andObamacare would "destroy American health care forever"; Kenneth Burke referred to this "all or none" staging as characteristic of "burlesque" rhetoric.[138] Instead of a world involving a variety of complex situations requiring nuanced solutions acceptable to a multiplicity of interested groups, for the agitator the world is a simple stage populated by two irreconcilable groups and dramatic action involves decisions with simple either-or choices. Because all players and issues are painted using black and white terms, there is no possibility of working out a common solution.[139]
^Ann Stoler writes, "These are divisive cuts through our social, political, and affective landscapes that are not eruptions, as they are so often described. Rather, these figures [Trump,Le Pen, andWilders] register deep tectonic shifts not readily visible with the conceptual tools at hand, nor by the metrics we have used to measure durable sensibilities or to capture sonics to which we are so adverse, askew to our shared radars. Prevailing political categories and concepts may now seem inadequate or inoperative."[172]
^Jones elaborates on her view that trust is central toepistemology in a chapter entitled "Trusting Interpretations" which appeared in the book "Trust – Analytic and Applied Perspectives".[192]
^The skull with Trump hair refers to thePunisher comic book vigilante serial killer who murders those he considers evil. More stylized Punisher images appeared on patches worn by some rioters in combat attire, multiple police atBlack lives matter protests[259] and frequently as a Sean Hannity's lapel pin.[260]
^For instance in the introduction to his bookMaking Sport Great Again, Andrews writes, "The prescience of much Frankfurt School theorizing informs this analysis of the relationship between ubersport as a popular culture industry, the politics of neoliberal America, and Trump's cacophonous political-cultural-economic project."[277]
^ The idea is that while markets attempt to turn the population into unthinking mass consumers, political actors (from parties to politicians to interest groups) use the same mechanisms to turn us into unthinking mass citizens—a Frankfurt school concept which Marcuse explored further in his bookOne Dimensional Man. Horkheimer and Adorno's "ticket" metaphor refers to the political party sense of a slate of candidates and policies that followers expect to vote for in its entirety because they have come to believe that the ideas from the opposing political blocs are so irreconcilable their political power is simplified to a binary choice which despite the intense rhetoric reduces them to passive observers of the spectacle.[281]
^Political scientist Matthew McManus makes a similar observation writing that Trump is the culmination of this trend towards pillarized tribalistic market niches where the hyperpartisan discourses characteristic ofFox News in the US orHír TV in Hungary have displaced nuanced analysis.[283]
^One of Sobieraj and Berry's key findings was that, "Outrage thrives in a narrowcasting environment."[301]
^Homophily is the sociological term corresponding to the saying "Birds of a feather flock together." Pointing to a 2015Pew Research Center study revealing that the average Facebook user has five politically like-minded friends for every one from the opposing end of the spectrum,[305] like Massachset al. (2020),Samantha Power takes note of the combination of social media and homophily's self-reinforcing impact on our perceived world writing, "The information that comes to us has increasingly been tailored to appeal to our prior prejudices, and it is unlikely to be challenged by the like-minded with whom we interact day-to-day."[306]
^The 2001 reference is to an earlier edition of Sunstein's Republic.com. An updated chapter on cybercascades may be found in his Republic.com 2.0 (2007).[311]
^Hume argued that democracy incity-states of ancient Greece failed because in small cities, sentiments could rapidly spread in the population, meaning agitators were "more likely to succeed in sweeping aside the old order". Madison responded to this threat of tyrannical majority factions unified by a shared sentiment inFederalist paper number 10 with the argument (Robison's paraphrase): "In an extensive country, distance immunizes citizens from the contagion of passions and hinders their coordination even when passions are shared."[310] Robison thinks this portion of Madison's argument is obsolete due to the near instantaneous social media sharing of sentiments wherever we are due to the commonplace use of wirelessly connected handheld devices.
^abCornel West uses the termneofascist. Badiou describes Trump signaling the birth of a "new fascism" or "democratic fascism",[339] while Traverso prefers the termpost-fascist to describe "new faces of fascism" such as Trump who advance a model of democracy "that destroys any process of collective deliberation in favour of a relationship that merges people and leader, the nation and its chief."[340] By contrast, Tarizzo describes Trump as part of whatPier Paolo Pasolini callednew fascism[341] employing a "political grammar" analysis which shares similar perspectives on ties between new fascism and dystopian economics argued in the analyses of Giroux, West, Hedges and Badiou. Chomsky instead uses the term authoritarianism.
^Giroux notes that "Trump is not Hitler in that he has not created concentration camps, shut down the critical media or rounded up dissidents; moreover, the United States at the current historical moment is not theWeimar Republic."[344] Tarizzo writes that both paleofascism and new fascism undermine the fundamentals of modern democracy, but the new mode of fascism "does not do this by absolutizing popular sovereignty at the expense of individual rights. New fascism celebrates our freedoms and absolutizes human rights to the detriment of our sense of belonging to a social-political community."[345]
^For a wide ranging review and critique of the use of the termfascist to describe Trump as of late 2017, seeCarl Boggs' postscript chapter in his bookFascism Old and New.[348]
^Yale'sJason Stanley observed that while Trump is not a fascist, "I think you could legitimately call Trumpism a fascist social and political movement" and that "he's using fascist political tactics. I think there's no question about that. He is calling for national restoration in the face of humiliations brought on by immigrants, liberals, liberal minorities, and leftists. He's certainly playing the fascist playbook."[358] PhilosopherCornel West agrees that Trump has fascist proclivities and claims his popularity signals thatneo-fascism is displacingneoliberalism in the United States.[359] Harvard historian Charles Clavey thinks the authors of theFrankfurt School (Max Horkheimer,Theodor Adorno andHerbert Marcuse) who studied the sudden victory of fascism in Germany offer the best insights into Trumpism. These similarities include the rhetoric of self-aggrandizement, victimhood, accusation, and his solicitation of unconditional support to return the country from moral and political decay.[325]
^David Livingstone Smith, a scholar of history, psychology and anthropology, compares Trump and the fascist pattern of persuasion described byRoger Money-Kyrle, who witnessed fascist rallies in 1930s Germany. The psychological linkage between the leader and supporters in mass protests, the melancholia-paranoia-megalomania pattern, recitation of shared domestic dreads, promotion of fear-mongering conspiracy theories painting out-groups as the cause of the problems, simplified solutions presented in absolute terms and the promotion of singular leader capable of returning the country to its former greatness.[362]
^Described as "the sociologist who studied Trump's base before Trump",[363]Michael Kimmel examined the relationship betweenmasculinity and radicalization of pre-Trump supporters. In his 2018 bookHealing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—and Out of—Violent Extremism Kimmel describes a theme he "came to call 'aggrieved entitlement', a sense of righteous indignation, of undeserved victimhood in a world suddenly dominated by political correctness. The rewards these white men felt had been promised for a lifetime of, as they saw it, playing by the rules that someone else had established had suddenly dried up—or, as they saw it, the water had been diverted to far less deserving 'others'" who "were not worthy of the rewards they were now reaping, because 'they' were not 'real men.'"[364]
^Quotes are from Brian Rosenwald, described as "a Harvard scholar who tracks disinformation in talk radio."[373]
Cox & O'Connor 2025, p. 1: "This debate has unfolded in stark binary terms of presence or absence. Alarmists argue that Trumpism bears all of the hallmarks of fascism and should therefore be labelled as such. Sceptics suggest that this conclusion is premised on shallow historical analogizing that mistakes form for substance... although Trumpism does not conform to inter-war European iterations of fascism, and while the conditions under which they emerged are strikingly different, Trumpism nonetheless exhibits fascistic tendencies that have intensified in recent years. We refer to this as 'proto-fascism', and suggest that neoliberal capitalism has been centrally implicated in its emergence."
McGaughey 2018: "Trump is closely linked to neo-conservative politics. It is too hostile to insider welfare to be called 'fascist'. Its political ideology is weaker. If we had to give it a name, the social ideal of Donald Trump is 'fascism-lite'."
Homans 2024: "No major American presidential candidate has talked like he now does at his rallies—not Richard Nixon, not George Wallace, not even Donald Trump himself."
Ward 2024: "It's a stark escalation over the last month of what some experts in political rhetoric, fascism, and immigration say is a strong echo of authoritarians and Nazi ideology."
Applebaum 2024: "In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. ... The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the 'bloodbath' that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn't win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics. But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics."
Brooks 2024: "Trump, however, has also used the term fascist to describe Harris as he has doubled down on his insults against Harris and ratcheted up the intensity of his own rhetoric against political opponents. 'She's a marxist, communist, fascist, socialist', Trump said at a rally in Arizona in September. Johnson and McConnell made no mention of Trump's rhetoric in their statement, keeping the focus on their political rival."
Strauss 2019, p. 440: "what has been for me the disturbing trend toward essentially unchecked presidential exercise of authority: Reagan presidency (Strauss, 1986) Clinton presidency (Strauss, 1997), Bush II presidency (Strauss, 2007), Obama Presidency (Strauss, 2015). With President Trump, this trend has, if anything, accelerated."
Diamond 2023:[page needed] "The cult of Trumpism fosters and exploits paranoia and allegiance to an all-powerful, charismatic figure, contributing to a social milieu at risk for the erosion of democratic principles and the rise of fascism."
^Kaufmann definesWhiteshift as "a process by which white majorities absorb an admixture of different peoples through intermarriage, but remain oriented around existing myths of descent, symbols and traditions".[48]
^Kaufmann characterized this as "a set of myths and symbols to which people are attached" similar to otherethnic identities. According to Kaufmann, thisdemographic process is inevitable even without immigration due to the rates ofintermarriage occurring in many Western countries.[49]
Diamond 2023:[page needed] "The cult of Trumpism fosters and exploits paranoia and allegiance to an all-powerful, charismatic figure, contributing to a social milieu at risk for the erosion of democratic principles and the rise of fascism."
Goldberg 2016: "To listen to both his defenders and critics, Donald Trump represents the U.S. version of a new nationalism popping up around the world."
"NP View: The unstoppable Pierre Poilievre".National Post. August 5, 2022.Trying to demonize Poilievre as a "populist" or as Canada's Trump, or implying that he is a white supremacist or opposed to women's rights is unlikely to succeed. He is pro-choice, pro-immigration and has forcefully denounced white replacement theory and all of "that kind of thinking."
Forrest 2022: "He has been compared to former President Donald Trump for his populist overtures, but in terms of substance, he has largely confined himself to pocketbook issues. He is pro-immigration — his wife is a Venezuelan immigrant — and now calls himself pro-choice."
McConkey 2022: "In several ways, Poilievre does not fit the mould of a new populist. For one, Poilievre is not new. He was a cabinet minister in the Stephen Harper government and he has been a member of Parliament for almost 20 years. For another, he is not your stereotypical reactionary. He is at ease with the non-traditional family, he is pro-choice, he is pro-immigration."
Campbell 2022: "But he is no Donald Trump in tenets or temperament. He doesn't echo the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and abhors Mr. Trump's gargantuan deficits. He is so calculated that he could never be the erratic bundle of impulses that rambles at a Trump rally."
Moore, Samuel (November 4, 2022)."Pierre Poilievre: Canada's next Prime Minister?".Cherwell.Moreover, in a way that distinguishes him from Trump and other right-wing populists, Poilievre's social policies are progressive. He is pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights and has actually criticised the Trudeau ministry for not being pro-immigration enough, belittling the inefficiencies of the current immigration system as yet another example of big government "gatekeeping".
Oliver 2022: "The "Trump North" label has failed to stick because he has been consistently pro-choice, supports gay marriage and favours immigration."
^Baltz 2021, p. 2: "But what do scholars, media outlets and the man himself mean when they talk about Trump as an 'economic nationalist'? To whom or what does the economic nationalism of Trump and his administration mount a 'challenge' against? Definitive answers have not been forthcoming."
^Ganesh, Janan (July 16, 2025)."Trump and Maga are no longer the same thing".Financial Times.It was always an odd fit: the libertine and the scolds of ultraconservatism. Trump doesn't share the movement's interest in the fate of "western civilisation" and other grandiose abstractions. He is not much of a China hawk: his concern is the bilateral trade data, not the grand strategy, much less the contest of values.
^Stephens-Dougan 2021, p. 302, "Trump, however, managed to achieve electoral success in 2016 despite routinely using racial appeals that openly and categorically disparaged racial, religious, and ethnic minorities, or what the racial priming literature refers to as explicit racial appeals. ... Throughout his campaign and subsequent presidency, Trump continued to traffic in similar explicit racial appeals".
^Berman 2021, p. 76, "In the United, States scholars consistently find that "racial animus," or attitudes regarding "blacks, immigrants, Muslims" are the best predictors of support for President Trump".
^Stewart, Charles; Bobo, Lawrence D.; Hochschild, Jennifer L. (2017). "Populism and the Future of American Politics".Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.70 (2):53–61.ISSN0002-712X.JSTOR26407109.
^Murty, Komanduri S.; Simonez, Tenora J. (2018). "State of the Union under Donald Trump Presidency: Problems, Policies and Prospects".Race, Gender & Class.25 (3/4):162–178.ISSN1082-8354.JSTOR26802891.
^Adams, Roberta A. (2024).Trumpism, Carl Schmitt, and the Threat of Anti-Liberalism in the United States: The Political Thought of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Roberta Adams. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.ISBN978-1-6669-5225-4.OCLC1478244845.
^Mohamed, Feisal G. (2018), Torres, Angel Jaramillo; Sable, Marc Benjamin (eds.), "'I Alone Can Solve': Carl Schmitt on Sovereignty and Nationhood Under Trump",Trump and Political Philosophy: Leadership, Statesmanship, and Tyranny, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 293–309,doi:10.1007/978-3-319-74445-2_17,ISBN978-3-319-74445-2,OCLC1110613443,S2CID158793211
^Nacos, Brigitte L.; Shapiro, Robert Y.; Bloch-Elkon, Yaeli (2020). "Donald Trump: Aggressive Rhetoric and Political Violence".Perspectives on Terrorism.14 (5):2–25.ISSN2334-3745.JSTOR26940036.
^"Gaslighting / topic".Google Trends. November 16, 2024. Archived fromthe original on December 13, 2024. RetrievedNovember 18, 2024.Worldwide / 2004 - present / All categories / Web Search
^Woolley, John T. and Peters, Gerhard, Eds."Presidential Election Margin of Victory". The American Presidency Project (University of California). November 6, 2024.Archived from the original on March 29, 2025.
^Diamond 2023:[page needed] "The cult of Trumpism fosters and exploits paranoia and allegiance to an all-powerful, charismatic figure, contributing to a social milieu at risk for the erosion of democratic principles and the rise of fascism."
Adleret al. 2022: "The decoupling of the man from the movement suggests that authoritarianism can continue well beyond the authoritarian's rule. The most enduring vestige—apart from the democratic institutions attacked—is Trumpism. It has metastasized from Trump's delusional framing on his inauguration day in 2017—with the biggest crowds ever—to a widespread and ambient movement, amplified by disinformation and distortion, broadcast in social and right-wing media, aggressively militant, and framed with falsehoods."
^Von Rennenkampff 2021: "A comparison between Canada's Conservative Party and the Republican Party illustrates these striking differences. In stark contrast to Republicans, the leader of Canada's Conservatives is pro-choice. [...] In another striking example, Canada's single-payer health care system is sacrosanct among voters (just as the UK's system is to Britons). Most Canadian Conservatives would never dream of shifting their popular, government-run health system towards the wasteful, bankruptcy-inducing, for-profit American insurance state."
^Von Rennenkampff 2021: "Ultimately, Canadian Conservatives – like mainstream conservative political parties in virtually all advanced, industrialized democracies – are far more closely aligned with Democrats than Republicans on many issues."
^Beauchamp, Zack (April 26, 2024)."Canada's polite Trumpism".Vox.Vox Media.But on policy substance, he's actually considerably more moderate than Trump or European radicals.
^Yamaguchi, Mari; Tanaka, Chisato; Klug, Foster (July 9, 2022)."Japan's ex-leader Shinzo Abe assassinated during a speech".Associated Press News.Archived from the original on March 21, 2023.Even though he was out of office, Abe was still highly influential in the governing Liberal Democratic Party and headed its largest faction, Seiwakai, but his ultra-nationalist views made him a divisive figure to many.
^"Yoon visits Japan, seeking to restore ties amid N Korea threat".Al Jazeera. March 16, 2023.Archived from the original on March 21, 2023.But many in South Korea did not consider Japan's remorse as sufficiently sincere, especially as the ultranationalist former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated last year, and his allies sought to whitewash Japan's colonial abuses, even suggesting there was no evidence to indicate Japanese authorities coerced Korean women into sexual slavery.
Badiou, Alain (2019).Trump (e-book ed.). Cambridge, UK:Polity Press.ISBN978-1-5095-3609-2....we could speak of these new figures in terms of a kind of "democratic fascism", a paradoxical but effective designation. After all, the Berlusconis, the Sarkozys, the Le Pens, the Trumps, are operating inside the democratic apparatus, with its elections, its oppositions, its scandals, etc. But, within this apparatus, they are playing a different score, another music. This is certainly the case with Trump, who is racist, a male chauvinist, violent—all of which are fascist tendencies—but who, in addition, displays a contempt for logic and rationality and a muffled hatred of intellectuals. The music proper to this type of democratic fascism is a discourse that does not worry in the least bit about coherence, a discourse of impulse, comfortable with a few nighttime tweets, and that imposes a sort of dislocation of language, positively flaunting its ability to say everything and its opposite. For these new political figures, the aim of language is no longer to explain anything or to defend a point of view in an articulate manner. Its aim is to produce affects, which are used to create a fleetingly powerful unity, largely artificial but capable of being exploited in the moment.
Boggs, Carl (2018).Fascism Old and New (e-book ed.). New York:Routledge. p. xii.ISBN978-1-351-04969-6.At this juncture [November 2017] it is worth noting that the 2016 ascendancy of Donald Trump to the White House does not occur to the author as a specifically fascist moment in U.S. history, contrary to what is commonly heard in liberal and progressive circles. To be sure, Trump does possess strong elements of a leadership cult, replete with narcissism and grandiose visions ('making American great again') ... I have chosen to view Trump as representing an interregnum between existing power arrangements—that is, a militarized state-capitalism—and potential American fascism.
Boler, Megan; Davis, Elizabeth (2021). "Affect, Media, Movement – Interview with Susanna Paasonen and Zizi Papacharissi". In Boler, Megan; Davis, Elizabeth (eds.).Affective Politics of Digital Media (e-book ed.). New York:Routledge.ISBN978-1-003-05227-2.
de la Torre, Carlos; Barr, Robert R.; Arato, Andrew; Cohen, Jean L.; Ruzza, Carlo (2019).Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. Routledge International Handbooks. London & New York:Routledge.ISBN978-1-315-22644-6.
Jaeger, C. Stephen (1985).The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:University of Pennsylvania Press.ASINB008UYP8H8.
Jeffress, Robert (2011).Twilight's Last Gleaming: How America's Last Days Can Be Your Best Days. Brentwood, Tennessee: Worthy Publishing.ISBN978-1-936034-58-1.
Jones, Karen (2013). "Trusting Interpretations". In Mäkelä, Pekka; Townley, Cynthia (eds.).Trust: Analytic and Applied Perspectives. Value Inquiry Book Series. Vol. 263. Rodopi.ISBN978-94-012-0941-0.
Jutel, Olivier (2019). "Donald Trump, American Populism and Affective Media". In de la Torre, Carlos; Barr, Robert R.; Arato, Andrew; Cohen, Jean L.; Ruzza, Carlo (eds.).Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. Routledge International Handbooks. London & New York:Routledge.ISBN978-1-315-22644-6.
Kessler, Glenn; Rizzo, Salvador; Kelly, Meg (2020).Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The Presidents Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lie. The Washington Post Books. New York:Simon and Schuster.ISBN978-1-9821-5108-9.
Lifton, Robert Jay (2019).Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry (ePub) ed.). New York:New Press.ISBN978-1-62097-512-1. (Page numbers correspond to theePub edition.)
Lowndes, Joseph (2019). "Populism and race in the United States from George Wallace to Donald Trump". In de la Torre, Carlos (ed.).Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. London & New York:Routledge. "Trumpism" section, pp. 197–200.ISBN978-1-315-22644-6.Trump unabashedly employed the language of white supremacy and misogyny, rage and even violence at Trump rallies was like nothing seen in decades.
Massachs, Joan; Monti, Corrado; Morales, Gianmarco De Francisci; Bonchi, Francesco (2020). "Roots of Trumpism: Homophily and Social Feedback in Donald Trump Support on Reddit".12th ACM Conference on Web Science. 12th ACM Conference on Web Science. pp. 49–58.arXiv:2005.01790.doi:10.1145/3394231.3397894.ISBN978-1-4503-7989-2.S2CID218502169.
Money-Kyrle, Roger (2015) [1941]. "The Psychology of Propaganda". In Meltzer, Donald; O'Shaughnessy, Edna (eds.).The Collected Papers of Roger Money-Kyrle. Clunie Press.Money – Kyle describes not a rhetorical pattern of problem–conflict–resolution, but a progression of psychoanalytic states of mind in the three steps: 1)melancholia, 2)paranoia and 3)megalomania.
O'Callaghan, Patrick (2020). "Reflections on the Root Causes of Outrage Discourse on Social Media". In Navin, Mark Christopher; Nunan, Richard (eds.).Democracy, Populism, and Truth. AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice. Vol. 9. Springer. pp. 115–126.doi:10.1007/978-3-030-43424-3_9.ISBN978-3-030-43424-3.S2CID226512444.
Plasser, Fritz; Ulram, Peter A. (2003). "Striking a Responsive Chord: Mass Media and. Right-Wing Populism in Austria". In Mazzoleni, Gianpietro; Stewart, Julianne; Horsfield, Bruce (eds.).The Media and Neo-Populism. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.ISBN978-0-275-97492-3.
Power, Samantha (2018). "Beyond Elections: Foreign Interference with American Democracy". InSunstein, Cass R. (ed.).Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America (ePub ed.). New York: Dey Street Books. pp. 69–80.ISBN978-0-06-269621-2.
Pybus, Jennifer (2015). "Accumulating affect: social networks and their archives of feeling". In Hillis, Ken;Paasonen, Susanna; Petit, Michael (eds.).Networked affect. Cambridge, Massachusetts:MIT Press.ISBN978-0-262-02864-6.
Resano, Dolores (2017).American Literature in the Era of Trumpism: Alternative Realities. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.ISBN978-3-030-73857-0.
Rudolf, Peter (2017). "The US under Trump: Potential consequences for transatlantic relations". In Heinemann-Grüder, Andreas (ed.).Peace Report 2017(PDF). Vol. 29. Berlin/Münster/Zürich: LIT-Verlag, International Politics.ISBN978-3-643-90932-9.Archived(PDF) from the original on February 15, 2021. RetrievedOctober 15, 2020.
Tarizzo, Davide (2021).Political grammars: the unconscious foundations of modern democracy. Square One: First Order Questions in the Humanities. Stanford, California:Stanford University Press.ISBN978-1-5036-1532-8.
Traverso, Enzo (2017).The New Faces of Fascism. Brooklyn, New York:Verso Books.ISBN978-1-78873-046-4.'Populism' is a category used as a self-defence mechanism by political elites who stand ever further from the people. According toJacques Rancière: "Populism is the convenient name under which isdissimulated the exacerbated contradiction between popular legitimacy and expert legitimacy, that is, the difficulty the government of science has in adapting itself to manifestations of democracy and even to the mixed form of representative system. This name at once masks and reveals the intense wish of theoligarch: to govern without people, in other words, without any dividing of the people; to govern without politics.
van Prooijen, Jan-Willem (2018).The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories. The Psychology of Everything. New York:Routledge.ISBN978-1-315-52541-9.
Waisbord, Silvio; Tucker, Tina; Lichtenheld, Zoey (2018). "Trump and the Great Disruption in Public Communication". In Boczkowski, Pablo; Papacharissi, Zizi (eds.).Trump and the Media (e-book ed.). Cambridge:MIT Press.ISBN978-0-262-03796-9.
Adler, Paul S.; Adly, Amr; Armanios, Daniel Erian; Battilana, Julie; Bodrožić, Zlatko; Clegg, Stewart; Davis, Gerald F.; Gartenberg, Claudine; Glynn, Mary Ann; Gümüsay, Ali Aslan; Haveman, Heather A.; Leonardi, Paul; Lounsbury, Michael; McGahan, Anita M.; Meyer, Renate; Phillips, Nelson; Sheppard-Jones, Kara (2022)."Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Global Retreat of Democracy: A Curated Discussion"(PDF).Journal of Management Inquiry.32 (1):3–20.doi:10.1177/10564926221119395.S2CID251870215.Archived(PDF) from the original on January 14, 2024. RetrievedJanuary 14, 2024.The decoupling of the man from the movement suggests that authoritarianism can continue well beyond the authoritarian's rule. The most enduring vestige—apart from the democratic institutions attacked—is Trumpism. It has metastasized from Trump's delusional framing on his inauguration day in 2017—with the biggest crowds ever—to a widespread and ambient movement, amplified by disinformation and distortion, broadcast in social and right-wing media, aggressively militant, and framed with falsehoods.
Baker, Joseph O.; Perry, Samuel L.; Whitehead, Andrew L. (May 14, 2020). "Keep America Christian (and White): Christian Nationalism, Fear of Ethnoracial Outsiders, and Intention to Vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election".Sociology of Religion.81 (3):272–293.doi:10.1093/socrel/sraa015.hdl:1805/26339.In the penultimate year before Trump's reelection campaign, the strongest predictors of supporting Trump, in order of magnitude, were political party, xenophobia, identifying as African American (negative), political ideology, Christian nationalism, and Islamophobia.
Cui, Xi (2018). "Emotional Contagion or Symbolic Cognition? A Social Identity Perspective on Media Events".Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media.62 (1):91–108.doi:10.1080/08838151.2017.1402906.S2CID149162170.
Franks, Andrew S.; Hesami, Farhang (September 18, 2021)."Seeking Evidence of The MAGA Cult and Trump Derangement Syndrome: An Examination of (A)symmetric Political Bias".Societies.11 (3): 113.doi:10.3390/soc11030113.Trump supporters consistently showed bias in favor of the interests and ostensible positions of Trump, whereas Trump's detractors did not show an opposing bias ... Results of the current study do not support the broad existence of so-called 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' on the left, but they may lend credence to accusations that some Trump supporters have a cult-like loyalty to the 45th president.
Giroux, Henry A. (2021)."Trumpism and the challenge of critical education".Educational Philosophy and Theory.55 (6): 5.doi:10.1080/00131857.2021.1884066.S2CID234851204.As the social state came under severe attack, the punishing state grew with its ongoing militarization of civil society and its increasing criminalization of social problems. War, dehumanization, divisiveness, hate, and the language of racial cleansing and sorting became central governing principles and set the stage for the rebirth of an updated fascist politics. Trumpism reached into every niche and crack of civil and political society and in doing so cross-pollinated politics, culture, and everyday life with a range of right-wing policies, authoritarian impulses, and the emerging presence of right-wing movements.
Goldsmith, Benajmin E.; Moen, Lars J. K. (May 14, 2024)."The personality of a personality cult? Personality characteristics of Donald Trump's most loyal supporters".Political Psychology.46 (Special Issue):225–243.doi:10.1111/pops.12991. RetrievedNovember 6, 2024.We contend that, for his most committed followers, the attraction is personality-based — both in terms of Trump's self-presentation to citizens and in terms of the personality characteristics making some citizens attracted to such leadership. Trump's appeal appears to fit Sundahl's (2023) three characteristics of a personality cult. The phenomenon of a political personality cult may have arrived in full force in U.S. democracy — and could potentially be its undoing.
Gutterman, David (2020). "Book Review: Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump".eJournal of Public Affairs.9 (2).doi:10.1111/1467-9809.12592.S2CID199267291.
Hidalgo-Tenorio, Encarnación; Benítez-Castro, Miguel-Ángel (2021). "Trump's populist discourse and affective politics, or on how to move 'the People' through emotion".Globalisation, Societies and Education.20 (2):86–109.doi:10.1080/14767724.2020.1861540.hdl:10481/86686.S2CID234260705.
Hoad, Neville (November 20, 2020). "Big man sovereignty and sexual politics in pandemic time".Safundi the Journal of SouthAfrican and American Studies.21 (4):433–455.doi:10.1080/17533171.2020.1832801.S2CID228896339.
Hogg, Michael; van Knippenberg, Daan; Rast, David E. (2012). "The social identity theory of leadership: Theoretical origins, research findings, and conceptual developments".European Review of Social Psychology.23:258–304.doi:10.1080/10463283.2012.741134.S2CID143555737.
Kimmel, Michael; Wade, Lisa (2018). "Ask a Feminist: Michael Kimmel and Lisa Wade Discuss Toxic Masculinity".Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.44 (1):233–254.doi:10.1086/698284.S2CID149487672.
Leone, Luigi; Desimoni, Marta; Chirumbolo, Antonio (September 26, 2012). "Interest and expertise moderate the relationship between right-wing attitudes, ideological self-placement and voting".European Journal of Personality.28 (1):2–13.doi:10.1002/per.1880.S2CID143037865.
Mason, Liliana; Wronski, Julie; Kane, John V. (2021). "Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support".American Political Science Review.115 (4).Cambridge University Press:1508–1516.doi:10.1017/S0003055421000563.S2CID237860170.Trump's support is thus uniquely tied to animus toward minority groups. Our findings provide insights into the social divisions underlying American politics and the role of elite rhetoric in translating animus into political support.
Morris, Edwin Kent (2019). "Inversion, Paradox, and Liberal Disintegration: Towards a Conceptual Framework of Trumpism".New Political Science.41 (1):17–35.doi:10.1080/07393148.2018.1558037.S2CID149978398.Trumpian fascism is a different kind of fascism. It is better understood as an inverted, American kind of fascism, distinct from European fascism, but not entirely dissimilar from it. Inverted American-style fascism differs from European fascist in one crucial way: the role of corporate power in the politics of the state.
Paravati, Elaine; Naidu, Esha; Gabriel, Shira; Wiedemann, Carl (December 23, 2019). "More than just a tweet: The unconscious impact of forming parasocial relationships through social media".Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice.7 (4):388–403.doi:10.1037/cns0000214.S2CID212834936.
Schneiker, Andrea (2018). "Telling the Story of the Superhero and the Anti-Politician as President: Donald Trump's Branding on Twitter".Political Studies Association.1 (14):210–223.doi:10.1177/1478929918807712.S2CID150145298.
Sobieraj, Sarah; Berry, Jeffrey M. (2011). "From Incivility to Outrage: Political Discourse in Blogs, Talk Radio, and Cable News".Political Communication.28 (1):19–41.doi:10.1080/10584609.2010.542360.S2CID143739086.
Sundahl, Anne-Mette Holmgård (May 4, 2022)."Personality Cult or a Mere Matter of Popularity?".International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society.36 (4):431–458.doi:10.1007/s10767-022-09423-0.PMC9066393.PMID35528318.Trump, Putin and Ardern are used as examples of the model's ability to distinguish between cult and non-cult phenomena. The comparison shows that only Trump and Putin have a cult on both dimensions ... This paper introduced a model for distinguishing between popularity and personality cults based on three parameters covering a representational and social practice dimension. Putin, Trump and Ardern were used to illustrate the model's ability to categorise phenomena with different degrees of charisma. The analysis shows that while Trump and Putin belong in the domain of personality cults, Ardern's alleged cult does not have a social practice dimension, as the few cultlike tendencies are strictly representational.
Swyngedouw, Marc; Ivaldi, Giles (December 2007). "The extreme right utopia in Belgium and France: The ideology of the Flemish Vlaams Blok and the French front national".West European Politics.24 (3):1–22.doi:10.1080/01402380108425450.S2CID144383766.
Whitehead, Andrew L.; Perry, Samuel L.; Baker, Joseph O. (January 25, 2018)."Make America Christian Again: Christian Nationalism and Voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election"(PDF).Sociology of Religion.79 (2):147–171.doi:10.1093/socrel/srx070.Why did Americans vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election? Social scientists have proposed a variety of explanations, including economic dissatisfaction, sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. The current study establishes that, independent of these influences, voting for Trump was, at least for many Americans, a symbolic defense of the United States' perceived Christian heritage. Data from a national probability sample of Americans surveyed soon after the 2016 election shows that greater adherence to Christian nationalist ideology was a robust predictor of voting for Trump, even after controlling for economic dissatisfaction, sexism, anti-black prejudice, anti-Muslim refugee attitudes, and anti-immigrant sentiment, as well as measures of religion, sociodemographics, and political identity more generally.
Yang, Mimi (September 25, 2018)."Trumpism: a disfigured Americanism".Palgrave Communications.4 117:1–13.doi:10.1057/s41599-018-0170-0.Trump's "America First" is not exactly original but from a culturally genetic and historic make-up that builds the vertical America. The xenophobic and anti-immigration rhetoric has its origin in nativism that harbors white nationalism, populism, protectionism and isolationism ... Trumpism is not Americanism, but a masqueraded white supremacism and nativism; it is a disfigured Americanism in its vertical form.
Browning, Christopher R. (October 25, 2018)."The Suffocation of Democracy".The New York Review. Vol. 65, no. 16.Archived from the original on June 9, 2020. RetrievedJune 9, 2020.Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
Browning, Christopher R. (July 25, 2023)."A New Kind of Fascism".The Atlantic. Washington, D.C.: Laurene Powell Jobs.Archived from the original on September 26, 2024. RetrievedDecember 8, 2023.
The Verso published English translation is of the article:Butler, Judith; Salmon, Christian (December 18, 2016)."Judith Butler: pourquoi "Trump est un phénomène fasciste"" [Judith Butler: Why "Trump is a fascist phenomenon"].Mediapart (in French).Archived from the original on May 18, 2021. RetrievedMay 14, 2021.
Erin O'Toole (newly-elected leader of the CPC) (September 8, 2020).O'Toole on his 'Canada First' policy. Power & Politics.Archived from the original on January 16, 2021. RetrievedJanuary 12, 2021.
Foster, John Bellamy (June 1, 2017)."This Is Not Populism".Monthly Review (Editorial).Archived from the original on July 1, 2017. RetrievedMay 14, 2015.Commenting on the hegemonic framing of the radical right as populist, and the analytical problems that it presents, Andrea Mammone observes in hisTransnational Neofascism in France and Italy that "the terms populism and national populism" were deliberately introduced in recent decades by liberal European commentators in order to "replace fascism/neofascism as the used terminology." This move was designed to "provide a sort of political and democratic legitimization of right-wing extremism."
Jacobs, Thomas (October 21, 2016)."Masculinity in the Time of Trump".Pacific Standard. Grist Magazine, Inc.Archived from the original on February 14, 2022. RetrievedApril 17, 2021.
Katzenstein, Peter J. (March 20, 2019)."Trumpism is Us".WZB Mitteilungen. Berlin: Social Science Research Center.Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. RetrievedOctober 15, 2020.
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Presentation by John Fea onBelieve Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, July 7, 2018,C-SPAN
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