Bloomberg Weekend Essay The Peculiarly American Roots of Trumpism History holds clues for the country’s political future, regardless of who wins on Nov. 5. By Timothy L. O'Brien November 1, 2024 at 2:00 PM GMT+3

 Bloomberg 

Weekend Essay

The Peculiarly American Roots of Trumpism

History holds clues for the country’s political future, regardless of who wins on Nov. 5.

By Timothy L. O'Brien

November 1, 2024 at 2:00 PM GMT+3

The Peculiarly American Roots of Trumpism (Audio)

13:02

Donald Trump feels threatened, all the time. “I think everything’s a threat,” he said at the Economic Club of Chicago recently. “There’s nothing that’s not a threat.”

He’s threatened by “woke” businesses

He’s threatened by global trade and diplomacy.

He’s threatened by an independent Federal Reserve.

He’s threatened by China (but not Russia).

He’s threatened by voting and voters.

He’s threatened by immigrants, undocumented workers and people of color.

He’s threatened by women, reproductive rights and Kamala Harris.

He’s threatened by law enforcement, schools, the media, the government, big cities, big tech, facts, civility, germs, the weather, sharks and windmills.

Unlike the rest of us, Trump has myriad tools at his disposal to help conquer his fears — particularly if he revisits the Oval Office.

He’s said he wants the Justice Department to target people and institutions he regards as opponents, and would unleash the military to round up American citizens he’s labeled as the “enemy from within.” He wants to deport more than 10 million immigrants. He plans to lock down trade channels with massive tariffs and turn his back on European and Asian allies. He’s prepared to continue stocking the courts with jurists who allow legal precedent to be voided — at the expense of women’s health and autonomy — and make presidents largely immune from the rule of law. He has called for the “termination” of the Constitution to overturn election results that don’t satisfy him (and has already fomented one insurrection).

Some of this is cultural, economic and diplomatic warfare. Much of it — as many voters, historians, analysts, Republicans, former Trump White House advisers and military leaders like John Kelly and Mark Milley have noted — is fascism. All of it, collectively, is Trumpism.

Whether or not Trump wins on Nov. 5, Trumpism is here to stay. He has shown the GOP that it’s a wickedly effective path to power. But Trumpism is also here to stay because versions of it have always been here, long before Trump rode down a Trump Tower escalator in 2015 to declare his first presidential bid.

However shocked Americans may be by Trump’s ascent, his arrival and ongoing influence shouldn’t have caught them entirely by surprise. Trumpian characters have floated across the political and social landscape for much of the country’s history. Trump and his fellow travelers have become fixations because they’re more than mere carny acts, attuned to the public’s needs and paranoia. They’ve secured their place because they’re also a reflection of the people they court.

Yes, Trump is us. (Or, more precisely, almost half of those who voted in 2020.)

That isn’t all of us, or even a majority of us, but it sure is a lot of us.

Trump sows, highlights or invents chaos, and some of his followers, on cue, turn to him because they crave order. While a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that about half the country thinks Trump is a fascist, 8% of that same group said they plan to vote for him anyway. “Mussolini made the trains run on time,” I imagine them explaining. Another explanation: Polling suggests Trump’s supporters are just as scared about America’s place in the world as Trump himself says he is — and more so than Democrats.

Some Republicans have stepped up recently to condemn Trump and throw their political support behind Harris. On the other hand, more than 230 Republican candidates are campaigning on the premise that the outcome of the 2024 election is likely to be tainted and unreliable.

A Brief History of Trumpism

Imagine a political recipe that starts with a broadly defined distaste for “the other.” Blend in a strong measure of anti-institutionalism and antipathy toward centralized power, add a healthy amount of authoritarian aggression, and mix in heaps of propaganda and disinformation. Keep the affluent at bay by promising tax cuts and smaller government, and workers at bay by identifying with their despair. Bake the entirety of it in a cult of personality and, presto, you have Trumpism.

And Trumpism’s roots run centuries-deep in the US.

The Alien and Sedition Acts, passed in 1798, gave the federal government the power to deport immigrants it deemed to be threats or to jail political dissenters and critics. Presidents invoked the law to intern immigrants and citizens with overseas ancestry during the two World Wars, and Trump has recently cited the laws as the legal framework for his mass deportation plans.

A 1900 campaign poster in support of William McKinley.

The Know Nothing movement of the mid-19th Century was built on an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and white nationalist foundation. The Populist Movement that emerged about four decades later, animated by farmers threatened or displaced by industrialization, took inspiration, in part, from anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant stances. William McKinley’s successful presidential run in 1896 was engineered as an industrial-strength response to Populism and included high tariffs on foreign goods, a tolerance for anti-Black racism and violence and an expansionist, America-first foreign policy. Frank Baum was a McKinley supporter, and his fable The Wizard of Oz has some very Trumpy elements (though how much of the book, if any, was a Populist allegory is a matter of debate). Trump doesn’t fully mirror McKinley, but he’s taken of late to citing McKinley’s tariffs as first-rate policymaking.

Political polarization has run so deep in our history, of course, that we had to fight a Civil War to keep the map knitted. Slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples are lasting horrors that undercut the mythologizing Americans can revel in about their collective experience, democracy and diversity — and it all scarred our history well before Trump landed.

Two landmark books by the historian Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics, were written in the 1960s and explored many of the conflicts that would later ripple through Trumpism — including populist intolerance and the demonization of expertise.

And Don from Queens, the guy who feigns a working-class resentment of the government even though his family’s fortune was derived from federally subsidized housing projects? The guy who has targeted immigrants even though he married two emigres and has employed many more for decades? Norman Lear knew exactly what kind of guy he was. He memorialized him as Archie Bunker from Queens, the star of the 1970s sitcom All in the Family.

My colleagues at Bloomberg Opinion recently produced an instructive series on the erosion of trust in US institutions, and a leading force in much of that rot has been social media. And sure, Trump has weaponized social media in the service of his own demagoguery to grotesque and damaging effect. But his forbearers include Father Charles Coughlin, who used radio to foment anti-Semitism in the 1930s, and Senator Joseph McCarthy, who used television to whip up the Red Scare in the 1950s. The technology has changed, and it’s more potent and ubiquitous, but the tactics are essentially the same.

McCarthy is shown as he testified on Communist Party organization with the aid of a huge map of the US.Photographer: Bettmann/Getty Images

It’s also pretty easy to draw a line from political figures like Huey Long, Barry Goldwater and George Wallace through Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin and wind up at Trump. They all told similar stories and sowed similar seeds.

We’ve always been awash in this.

Trumpism, The Sequel

Trump snared the White House in 2016 by filling a vacuum. Working-class Americans, pummeled by the manufacturing decline amid the arrival of the service economy and the technology revolution, have had just as much to fear as the farmers of the 1890s.

The 2008 financial crisis slammed them again, with the government doing little in subsequent years to meet their needs or help them sort their futures. Trump, comfortably wealthy, positioned himself as their avatar and defender. He had been quick to bring simmering racism to a boil by joining efforts to smear Barack Obama, the first Black president. Trump’s appeal, venom and candidacy were infused with the idea that he was a hero of the White working class even though he had little interest in helping average Americans beyond locking down their votes.

The word salad and pathology Trump brought to the national stage was sui generis. Few politicians have been as unhinged and craven, or willing to push the boundaries of civil society and the law with as much gusto. His charisma is authentic, and not easily replicated (as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis learned when he tried positioning himself as Trump Lite in a slightly better-fitting suit).

When Trump entered the Oval Office the first time, he knew nothing and cared little about policy and governance. He let advisers handle the day-to-day while he spent time in his favorite habitats — the golf course and the spotlight. Trumpism 1.0 offered copious amounts of performance art from its author, while his apparatchiks did the hard work of stacking the courts, overturning Roe v. Wade and pushing through tax cuts. But Trump was watching and learning, and after he was voted out of office and survived two impeachments he continued cultivating his base.

Trump’s marquee supporters are still rural, white and distinctly male. The Republican primaries earlier this year showed that his base has become older and more conservative since 2016, with continued allegiance from Republican women and evangelical Christians. Demographics are at work here too. The US is on track to become a minority-majority country by 2044 or so, if not sooner. Americans who identify as racial or ethnic minorities are powering population growth in the US — not the White voters Trump has routinely courted.

Get the Morning & Evening Briefing Europe newsletters.

Start every morning with what you need to know followed by context and analysis on news of the day each evening. Plus, the Weekend Edition.

Bloomberg may send me offers and promotions.

By submitting my information, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

The myths and promises Trumpism 1.0 spun for voters still embroider Trumpism 2.0. But a second Trump presidency won’t feature him as a mere storyteller, watching others handle the levers of power. He resents the idea that others stage-managed him during his presidency and is overtly angry about losing in 2020. Trumpism 2.0 will offer a cast of true believers who will help him institutionalize strongman politics and authoritarian control in a way he didn’t during his last White House stay. The more institutionalized Trumpism 2.0 becomes, the greater its longevity — and the less reliant it will be on a successor to carry Trump’s banner.

Trump has also been on a revenge tour this election year, unable to embrace visions of national unity even when advisers press him to do so. The consummate snake oil salesman, he understands that bravado and division sell, and he’s not going to change the script.

Because Trump is as much an outcome of paranoia and intolerance as a cause, it’s unclear what might break the wave he’s riding. History, as the saying goes, doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.

“We have to go back to 1798,” he said in a speech in October, because, as he said in another, the US is “like a garbage can for the world.”

Trumpism, like its antecedents and whatever offshoots that follow it, are thoroughly American. So are the responses to it — those that embrace democracy, the rule of law, tolerance and aspirations for prosperous, equitable and constructive communities at home and abroad. Expect to see those visions to continue colliding.

That’s not a risk-free scenario. What separates Trumpism from its predecessors in American history is Trump’s ability to capture and weaponize US institutions like the military and the Justice Department to push through his agenda. The glimmer of hope is, again, demographics. The changing character and complexion of America creates friction — as it always has — but it is also the source of great energy and promise. Voters and the country may change faster than Trump can corral them, and there will always be a home for his supporters.

Change has always been central to the American experiment. In the Trump era, it’s both a burden and a source of optimism.

This story was featured in the Weekend Edition. Read More Here

Timothy L. O'Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”