Does Donald Trump Have an Ideology?

No, not exactly. But he has a consistent, grievance-fueled idea of how power and status should be distributed, and that aligns him with the Right’s ideologues just fine

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

The intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview or gain access to the audio version of the newsletter, please consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.

Being an independent writer offers a lot of autonomy, which is a privilege. But it is also precarious and comes with lots of financial uncertainty. If you can become a paid member, please do.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

What’s up with Donald Trump?

No, seriously: What the hell is going on with the man who is President of the United States?

Considering that Trump has dominated U.S. politics for over a decade, I don’t talk or write about him all that much. As my work often focuses on the American Right, he is always there, of course. But I tend to emphasize how he is himself the manifestation rather than the cause of long-standing anti-democratic tendencies and pathologies of the political culture; and I generally focus on the different factions on the Right, on Trump’s role in mobilizing and integrating them as opposed to the Donald himself.

That’s partially because writing about Trump seems to be such an over-saturated market. I have certainly encountered a general exasperation with all things Trump even among my own readers (more than once, people have informed me that they have canceled their subscription because I kept using photos of Trump as illustrations for my essays and they simply didn’t want to see his face anymore…).

I do find myself wondering: Do we need more analysis of Trump? What else is there to say?

Then again, I do think it might be a misperception that we all understand what’s up with Trump, that there is a consensus about what animates him. In conversations with both audiences and readers as well as with journalists and politicians, I still encounter a wide range of assumptions and interpretations – many of which I find rather misleading or even dangerously off the mark. Even among those on the (small-d) democratic political spectrum – meaning: excluding everyone who supports Trump or has devoted themselves to anti-anti-Trump obstructionism – you still get a wide range of opinions: Is Trump a bumbling fool or a master manipulator? Is he a puppet controlled by sinister interests in the background or a quasi-totalitarian leader of a devoted cult? Is he a fully committed ideologue or purely animated by greed – a dealmaker, perhaps, with no convictions or sincere commitments, really no discernable politics whatsoever?

I am not interested in writing a biography of Trump nor am I qualified to provide a comprehensive psychological profile. But the man is President and has shaped the Republican Party in his image. We need a plausible operating theory of what drives him, what motivates his actions, if we want to predict where things are going and where the greatest danger lies. That remains true even if we acknowledge – as we must! – that Trump has retreated deep into his own unreality. It is entirely unclear what information about the world Trump still receives; much of it seems to be channeled through a very narrow system of loyalists (or perhaps just one loyalist in particular). He is a disturbed authoritarian who is surrounded by people who either share his delusions, are too sycophantic to confront him, or believe the president’s warped perception of the world serves just fine as a vehicle for their own zealotry and ideological extremism.

Trump’s behavior is, euphemistically put, erratic. But I contend it is not random – in the sense that his actions, his raging, his unhinged ranting… all of it has a consistent direction, targeting his personal enemies and the many enemies of the Right.

Trump is not an ideologue in a strict sense. But he has a very clear view of how society should be ordered, how power and status should be distributed, and who should be at the top. He has, we might say, a consistent worldview that aligns him quite well with the extreme ideologues on the Right and helps explain why they have united behind him in the first place. It defines his perspective, structures how he perceives the world around him, shapes his relationships to other people and what actions he gravitates towards. We better take it seriously, because it animates the man who, even in his feeble state of mind, holds the most powerful political office in the world. Grappling in earnest with Trump’s worldview can also, at the very least, inoculate us against the many misleading, disingenuous, and frankly irresponsibly ignorant notions about him that have been floating around since the moment he entered politics, pushed by people who don’t know better themselves or hope we don’t. “Trump the dove”; Trump is secretly a “moderate”; Trump the businessman who only wants a good deal; Trump the inscrutable leader… Forget all this bollocks.

What follows may not explain every single thing about Trump or predict his every future action. But let us at least make sure we don’t get him catastrophically wrong.

The pitfalls of studying “Trumpism”

Let me try to make sure we are all on the same page here: When I say underneath the madness lies a fairly consistent worldview, I am not suggesting we should contribute to the rather bizarre attempts to intellectualize Trump and whatever comes out of his mouth.

The rest of this piece is reserved for paid members of Democracy Americana.

If you are not a member, but still want to read Democracy Americana, fear not: I will keep publishing free long-form essays regularly.

But if you can, please consider becoming a paid member over on Steady: You’ll gain access to additional member-exclusive essays every week - and members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible. Democracy Americana is entirely reader-supported and my main source of income as an independent writer.