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Trumpism is the ideology behind U.S. president Donald Trump and his political base. It is often used in close conjunction with the Make America Great Again (MAGA) and America First political movements. It comprises ideologies such as right-wing populism, right-wing antiglobalism, national conservatism and neo-nationalism, and features significant illiberal, authoritarian and at times Autocracy beliefs. and are terms that refer to individuals exhibiting its characteristics. There is significant academic debate over the prevalence of neo-fascist elements of Trumpism.
Trumpism has been characterized by scholars as having authoritarian leanings and has been associated with the belief that the president is above the rule of law (with the consistent exceptions of presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, whom Trump has long sought to have prosecuted). It has been referred to as an American political variant of the far-right and the national-populist and neo-nationalist sentiment seen in multiple nations starting in the mid–late 2010s. Trump's political base has been compared to a cult of personality. Over the course of the late 2010s and early 2020s, Trump supporters became the largest faction of the United States Republican 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 the Never Trump movement.
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. Others characterize the problem as being a divergence between regions that have enjoyed the benefits of globalization and technological advance and those that have borne the brunt of disruptive impacts related to these phenomena. A contested characterization of the left behind thesis is as a cultural backlash to long-term structural changes in gender equality, urbanisation, education, immigration, economic instability, and terrorist attacks. The left behind theory has been supported and disputed by scholars and empirical research.
Eric Kaufmann's Whiteshift describes a Western societal trend in the 21st century that he says is perceived to be eroding White identity. He argues that Whiteshift and a progressivism trope celebrating the projected demise of white majorities have been responsible for much of the reactionary populism since 2015. Kaufmann's thesis has received mixed reviews, with Kenan Malik criticising Whiteshift for omitting social context that he asserts is key to understanding politics.
Former national security advisor and close Trump advisor John Bolton disputes that Trumpism exists in any meaningful sense, adding that "the man does not have a philosophy. And people can try and draw lines between the dots of his decisions. They will fail." Writing for the Routledge 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 programmatic social conservatism or libertarian economics than with enjoyment."
Trump has been described as a demagogue, and there exists significant scholarly study on the use of demagogy and related themes within Trumpism. Trump explicitly and routinely disparages racial, religious, and ethnic minorities, and scholars consistently find that racial animus regarding blacks, immigrants, and Muslims are the best predictors of support for Trump. Trumpist rhetoric heavily features anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and nativist attacks against minority groups. Other identified aspects include conspiracist, isolationist, Christian nationalist, evangelical Christian, protectionist, anti-feminist, and anti-LGBT beliefs.
Exit polling data suggests the campaign was successful at mobilizing the "White backlash", the lower- to working-class European-Americans who are experiencing growing social inequality and who often have stated opposition to the American political establishment.
Some prominent conservatives formed a Never Trump movement, seen as a rebellion of conservative elites against the base. (2025). 9780190880446, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190880446
Yale sociologist Philip S. Gorski warned against the threat of Trumpism, writing that
Some academics regard such authoritarian backlash as a feature of liberal democracies. Disputing the view that the surge of support for Trumpism and Brexit is a new phenomenon, political scientist Karen Stenner and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt state that
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:
Author and authoritarianism critic Masha Gessen contrasted the "democratic" strategy of the Republican establishment making policy arguments appealing to the public, with the "autocratic" strategy of appealing to an "audience of one" in Donald Trump. Gessen noted the fear of Republicans that Trump would endorse a Partisan primary 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. In January 2025, a CNN-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%)".
Trumpism has been described as borrowing from the anti-parliamentarian political theory advocated by Carl Schmitt, and has received renewed attention as a historical reference.
Soon after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, U.S. President Trump claimed that "the radicals on the left are the problem" with political violence. Opinion editors, as well as both far-right commentators and Trump critics, have compared Charlie Kirk's killing to the Reichstag fire—the 1933 arson of the German parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and prosecute political opposition—some calling Kirk's killing Trump's "Reichstag fire moment". How Democracies Die author, professor Steven Levitsky, said that exploiting Charlie Kirk's killing to justify unleashing attacks on critics is "page one of the authoritarianism playbook".
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.
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!
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." Writing in the Journal of Human Rights, Kimberly Theidon notes the COVID-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."
Tough guy bravado appeared on the internet prior to attack 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." Of the rioters arrested for the attack on the U.S. Capitol, 88% were men, and 67% were 35 years or older.
Opposition to aspects of transgender rights is a theme of Trumpism.
Her book Strangers in Their Own Land was named one of the "6 books to understand Trump's Win" by The New York Times. Hochschild claims that voters were not persuaded by rhetoric to vote against their self-interest through appeals to the "bad angels" of their nature: "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", a social contract narrative that appears to be widely shared in other countries as well. She thinks Trump's approach towards his audience creates group cohesiveness by exploiting a crowd phenomenon Emile 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."
Trumpian rhetoric employs absolutist framings and threat narratives rejecting the political establishment. The absolutist rhetoric emphasizes non-negotiable boundaries and moral outrage at their supposed violation.
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 as deindustrialization, 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." Some compare the symbiotic dynamics of crowd pleasing to that of the professional wrestling style of events which Trump was involved with since the 1980s.
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 by Gustave Le Bon when organized crowds were seen by political elites as potential threats to the social order. In his book (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. 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 same us vs. them framing of illiberalism. 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 of affective contagion.
According to civil rights lawyer Burt Neuborne and political theorist William E. Connolly, Trumpist rhetoric employs tropes similar to those used by fascists in Germany 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 for scapegoats. Neuborne found twenty parallel practices, 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 of objective truth; organizing carefully orchestrated mass rallies; attacking judges when legal cases are lost; using lies, half-truths, insults, vituperation and innuendo to marginalize, demonize and destroy opponents; making jingoistic appeals to ultranationalist fervor; and promising to stop the flow of "undesirable" ethnic groups who are made scapegoats for the nation's ills.
Connolly presents a similar list in his book Aspirational 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. Despite the similarities, Connolly stresses that Trump is no Nazi but is "an aspirational fascist who pursues crowd adulation, hyperaggressive nationalism, white triumphalism, and militarism, pursues a law-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 the he advances."
In his 2024 book Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying, cultural theorist Henk 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. 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").
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."
Examining the populist appeal of Trump, Hidalgo-Tenorio and Benítez-Castro draw on the theories of Ernesto Laclau, writing, "The emotional appeal of populist discourse is key to its polarising effects, this being so much so that populism 'would be unintelligible without the affective component.' (Laclau 2005, 11)"
Trump uses rhetoric that political scientists have deemed to be both dehumanizing and connected to physical violence by Trump's followers.
Plasser and Ulram describe a media logic which emphasizes "personalization ... a political star system ... and sports based dramatization." 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 from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Alex Jones do not simply represent a new political and media voice but embody the convergence of politics and media in which affect and enjoyment are the central values of media production."
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 communicative capitalism captivates subjects as it holds them captive." Looking back prior to social media, researcher Brian 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. 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." 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 'Self-affirmation, not information'—and the same can be said about cable news, especially in prime time."
Arlie Russell Hochschild holds that Trump supporters trust their preferred sources of information due to the affective 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 of political correctness that dictated they respect people of color, and , 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.'"
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." 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 is like a smart sister. Then there's Greta Van Susteren. And Juan Williams, who came over from NPR, which was too left for him, the adoptee. They're all different, just like in a family."
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 'crafting intensive relationships with their viewers' in order to sustain audience share across platforms." In this segmented market, Trump "offers himself as an ego-ideal to an individuated public of enjoyment that coalesce around his media brand as part of their own performance of identity." Jutel states that news media companies benefit from offering spectacle and drama. "Trump is a definitive product of mediatized politics providing the spectacle that drives ratings and affective media consumption, either as part of his populist movement or as the liberal resistance."
Researchers give differing emphasis to which emotions are important to followers. Michael Richardson argues 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."
social trust expert Karen Jones follows philosopher Annette 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." 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 the other." 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."
Leaders at the 2018 United 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." Trump lies about the trivial, such as claiming that there was no rain on the day of his inauguration when in fact it did rain, as well as making grandiose "Big Lies", such as claiming that Obama founded ISIS, or promoting the birther movement, a conspiracy theory which claims that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. Connolly points to the similarities of such reality-bending gaslighting with fascist and post Soviet techniques of propaganda including Kompromat (scandalous material), stating that "Trumpian persuasion draws significantly upon the repetition of Big Lies."
Robert Jay Lifton, a scholar of psychohistory and authority on the nature of cults, 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. Trump biographer Timothy 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." Lifton believes Trump is a purveyor of a solipsistic reality which is hostile to facts and is made collective by amplifying frustrations and fears held by his community of zealous believers.
Research published in the American 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". Andrew Gumbel, writing for The Guardian after the 2024 presidential election, wrote that many Trump voters in Youngstown, 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 like Kamala Harris or even a mainstream Republican".
In the non-academic book, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers, Altemeyer and John 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 and they are free to define their sense of the threatened tribal in-group in their own terms, whether it is predominantly related to their culture war or religious views (e.g. the mystery of evangelical support for Trump), nationalism (e.g. the Make America Great Again slogan), or their race (maintaining a white majority).
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), namely right-wing authoritarian (RWA) measures which were developed in the 1980s by Altemeyer and other authoritarian personality researchers, and the social dominance orientation (SDO) scale developed in the 1990s by social 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. This study further confirmed of the studies discussed in MacWilliams (2016), Feldman (2020), Choma and Hancock (2017), and Van Assche & Pettigrew (2016).
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. 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). 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're P.C., they're Virtue signaling.' '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.'"
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."
Primatologist Dame Jane 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 the 2016 United States presidential debates where Trump loomed up on Clinton, he "looked like a big silverback gorilla", and added that "he is that big alpha male. The leader of the pack!"
McAdams points out the audience gets to vicariously share in the sense of dominance due to the parasocial bonding that his performance produces for his fans, as shown by Shira Gabriel's research studying the phenomenon in Trump's role in The Apprentice. 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."
Collective narcissism measures have been shown to be a powerful predictor of membership in authoritarian movements including Trump's.
In his book Believe Me which details Trump's exploitation of white evangelical politics of fear, Messiah College history professor John Fea points out the narcissistic 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 of Leave 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 ... ."
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. 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.
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.
Cash thinks that psychoanalytic theorist Joel Whitebook is correct that "Trumpism as a social experience can be understood as a psychotic like phenomenon, that "Trumpism an intentional ... attack on our relation to reality." Whitebook thinks Trump's playbook is like that of Putin's strategist Vladislav Surkov who employs "ceaseless shapeshifting, appealing to nationalist skinheads one moment and human rights groups the next."
Cash compares Alice 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" after Charlottesville or for audiences with felt grievances about America's first black president, the claim that Obama 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."
Lifton sees important differences between Trumpism and typical cults, such as not advancing a 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 of call 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. 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".
Prior to 2015, Trump already had established a bond with followers due to television and media appearances. 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.
Brooks thinks sharing of conspiracy theories has become the most powerful community bonding mechanism of the 21st century.
Hofstadter's The 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. The conspiracy theory QAnon asserts that top Democrats run a child sex-trafficking ring and Trump is trying to dismantle it. An October 2020 Yahoo-YouGov poll showed that elements of the QAnon claims are said to be true by half of Trump supporters polled.
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. 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 as characters in a story much bigger than themselves.
It is a story that involves not just a community-building call to arms to defeat titanic threats, or of the leader's heroic deeds restoring American greatness, but of a restoration of each supporter's individual sense of liberty and control. 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. By contrast, Clinton was dismissive of such emotion-filled storytelling and ignored the emotional dynamics of the Trumpist narrative.
News media and commentators have widely characterized Trump as the object of a personality cult. His support was found to satisfy all parameters needed to determine a personality cult based on Max Weber's concept of charismatic authority. 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". 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 of fascism" based on the analysis of psychoanalysts and sociopolitical historians.: "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." Research using the Big 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. 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 ordained messiah and "chosen one".
Trumpism is from Lebow's perspective, more of a result of this process than a cause. 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-referential hyperreality shorn from any reality of referants ... sensationalism and insulation intensify intolerance of dissonance and magnify hostility against alternative hyperrealities. In a self-reinforcing logic of escalation, intolerance and hostility further encourage sensationalism and the retreat into insularity." 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."
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. 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 what Jürgen Habermas long ago called the refeudalization of society."
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 and Breitbart 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."
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 "The movement'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."
Trump made false assertions, mean spirited attacks and dog whistle appeals to racial and religious intolerance. CBS's CEO Les Moonves remarked that "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," demonstrating how Trump's messaging is compatible with the financial goals of media companies. Peter Wehner, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center considers Trump a political "shock jock" who "thrives on creating disorder, in violating rules, in provoking outrage."
The political profitability of incivility was demonstrated by the amount of airtime devoted to Trump's 2016 primary campaign—estimated at two billion to almost five billion dollars. 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, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, and NBC News."
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."
Due to Facebook's and Twitter's narrowcasting environment in which outrage discourse thrives, 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, a phenomenon Cass Sunstein identifies as group polarization, and other researchers refer to as a kind of self re-enforcing homophily. 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."
Citing Pew Research's survey that found 62% of US adults get their news from social media, Ott expresses alarm, "since the 'news' content on social media regularly features fake and misleading stories from sources devoid of editorial standards." Media critic Alex 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 campaign season should have surprised no one. ... Traffic trumps ethics."
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 on social 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' and Cass Sunstein (2001, pp. 98–136) on 'cybercascades'.)" 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."
Robison warns that emotional contagion should not be confused with the contagion of passions that James Madison and David Hume were concerned with. 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 the Arab 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.
Andrew Jackson's followers felt he was one of them, enthusiastically supporting his defiance of politically 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 the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Worcester v. Georgia and initiated the forced Cherokee 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, 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 a xenophobic, "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?'" 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.
Morris agrees with Mead, locating Trumpism's roots in the Jacksonian era from 1828 to 1848 under the presidencies of Jackson, Martin Van Buren and James K. Polk. On Morris's view, Trumpism also shares similarities with the post-World War I faction of the progressive movement which catered to a conservative populist recoil from the looser morality of the cosmopolitan cities and America's changing racial complexion. In his book The Age of Reform (1955), historian Richard Hofstadter identified this faction's emergence when "a large part of the Progressive-Populist tradition had turned sour, became illiberal and ill-tempered."
An article by NPR's Ron Elving likens the populism of late-19th and early-20th century Populist politician William Jennings Bryan to the later right-wing populism of Trump. Bryan, while economically liberal, was socially and theologically conservative, supporting creationism, Prohibition and other aspects of Christian fundamentalism. However, Trump also draws inspiration from Bryan's 1896 and 1900 Republican opponent, William McKinley, both in regard to protectionist tariffs and imperialism.
Prior to World War II, conservative themes of Trumpism were expressed in the America First Committee movement in the early 20th century, and after World War II were attributed to a Republican Party faction known as the Old Right. By the 1990s, it became referred to as the paleoconservative movement, which according to Morris has now been rebranded as Trumpism. Leo Löwenthal's book Prophets of Deceit (1949) summarized common narratives expressed in the post-World War II period of this populist fringe, specifically examining American demagogues 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.
Writing in The New Yorker, journalist Nicholas Lemann states the post-war Republican Party ideology of fusionism, a fusion of pro-business party establishment with nativist, isolationist elements who gravitated towards the Republican and not the Democratic Party, later joined by Christian evangelicals "alarmed by the rise of secularism", was made possible by the Cold War and the "mutual fear and hatred of the spread of Communism". An article in Politico has referred to Trumpism as "McCarthyism on steroids".
Championed by William F. Buckley Jr. and brought to fruition by Ronald Reagan in 1980, the fusion lost its glue with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was followed by a growth of income inequality in the United States and globalization that "created major discontent among middle and low income whites" within and without the Republican Party. After the 2012 United States presidential election saw the defeat of Mitt Romney by Barack Obama, the party establishment embraced an "autopsy" report, titled the Growth and Opportunity Project, which "called on the Party to reaffirm its identity as pro-market, government-skeptical, and ethnically and culturally inclusive."
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 analyst Karl Rove. 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.
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 and Illiberalism. Others have more identified it as a form of mild fascism specific to the US. Some historians, including many employing new fascism to describe Trumpism, write of the hazards of direct comparisons with European fascist regimes of the 1930s, stating that while there are parallels, there are important dissimilarities.
Historian Robert Paxton changed his opinion about whether the democratic backsliding caused by Trumpism is in line with fascism. In 2017, Paxton believed it bore greater resemblance to plutocracy. Paxton changed his opinion following the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, stating it is "necessary" to understand Trumpism as a form of fascism. Drawing on Umberto Eco's essay Ur-Fascism, which outlines 14 characteristics of fascism, Bret Devereaux discusses how Trumpism satisfies all 14. Sociology Dylan John Riley calls Trumpism "neo-Bonapartist patrimonialism" because it does not capture the same mass movement appeal of classical fascism.
Federico Finchelstein believes intersections exist between Peronism and Trumpism in terms of their disregard for the political system. Christopher Browning considers the long-term consequences of Trump's policies and support which he receives from the Republican Party to be dangerous for democracy. 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. German literature has a more diverse range of analysis of Trumpism.
Others have argued that Trump is a totalitarian capitalist exploiting the "fascist impulses of his ordinary supporters that hide in plain sight." Michelle Goldberg compares Trumpism to classical fascist themes. The "mobilizing vision" of fascism is of "the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it", which "sounds a lot like MAGA" (Make America Great Again) according to Goldberg. Similarly, like 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".
Conservative columnist George 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"), "" and "globalism". 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 the strongman develops a contempt for those he leads. Will argues both are based on machismo, 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 virus make us wear masks.'"
In , Ece Temelkuran describes Trumpism as similar to rhetoric and actions of the Turkish politician Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. These are right-wing populism, demonization of the press, subversion of well-established and proven facts through the big lie, democratic backsliding such as dismantling judicial and political mechanisms; portraying systematic issues such as sexism or racism as isolated incidents, and crafting an ideal citizen.
Mark Blyth and Jonathan Hopkin believe similarities exist between Trumpism and similar movements towards illiberal 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 of neo-nationalist coalitions which find followers who want to be free of the constraints which are being placed on them by establishment elites whose members advocate neoliberal economics and globalism.
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 like Leo Löwenthal and Norbert 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's Prophets 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.
Limbaugh, to whom Trump awarded the Presidential 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". 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."
In 2024, President Kevin Roberts of The Heritage Foundation stated that he sees the role of Heritage as "institutionalizing Trumpism." Stating in June 2025 that "'The Age of Trump' Enters Its Second Decade", Peter Baker of The 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 than Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan".
In June 2025, some supporters of Donald Trump in the United States, including Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Rand Paul, Charlie Kirk, Saagar Enjeti, Mollie Hemingway and Marjorie Taylor Greene, criticized Trump's support for Israeli strikes against Iran and opposed possible United States involvement in the war. There is a significant divide within the Republican Party and the MAGA movement on whether the United States should get involved in such a war overseas. For example, Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the United States shouldn't get involved at all in foreign matters.
Trump has been critical of what he sees as a persecution of Christians. On February 6, following the National 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". Donald Trump appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi to lead the task force and appointed Paula White to direct the White House Faith Office.
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. Erin O'Toole, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, featured the slogan—"Take Back Canada"—in a video, stating "join our fight, let's take back Canada." When asked if his "Canada First" policy was different from Trump's "America First" policy, O'Toole said, "No, it was not." O'Toole criticized what he considered to be Trumpism following one of Liberal Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland's tweets being flagged as "manipulated media" and compared her to Trump's flagged tweets, prior to Twitter's acquisition by Elon Musk. Writing for The 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 supporting access to abortion and his support for Canada's single-payer health care system.: "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." Rennenkampff also described Canadian Conservatives as "far more closely aligned with Democrats than Republicans".: "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."
Following the 2022 Conservative Party leadership election, some journalists have compared Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre to American Republicans such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz; however many journalists have dismissed these comparisons due to Poilievre's pro-abortion access, pro-immigration, and pro-same-sex marriage positions. In 2024, Zack Beauchamp of Vox stated that while Poilievre's rhetoric draws Trump comparisons, in terms of policy "he's actually considerably more moderate than Trump or European radicals".
During the 2025 Canadian federal election, Liberal Party of Canada staffers created Donald Trump-style "Stop The Steal" buttons and were caught planting them at a Canada Strong and Free Network conference which was supporting the Conservative Party of Canada. 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".
Restart has been compared to QAnon by Ariane Tabatabai, in terms of "conspiracist thinking going global". Among conspiracy theories advocated by the group is that Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has died (or went into coma) in 2017 and a Look-alike plays his role in public.
Netto-uyoku is the term used to refer to netizens 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 an attempt to overturn the 2020 American presidential election.
After Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election, IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu wrote a letter to Trump stating he had a "historic and moral burden ... to liberate the enslaved nations in Africa". 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. On January 30, 2020, IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu attended a Trump rally in Iowa as a special VIP guest, at the invitation of the Republican Party of Iowa. According to a 2020 poll from Pew Research, 58% of Nigerians had favorable views of Donald Trump, the fourth highest percentage globally.
According to John Campbell of Council 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.
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