Donald Trump
Donald Trump is an American politician, celebrity, luxury real estate developer, and billionaire who served as US president from 2016-2020. Prior to being elected president, Trump was most known for starring in The Apprentice, a reality TV show produced by Jeff Zucker which promised immense monetary wealth to those hired by Trump. Zucker was a prominent corporate media executive who later promoted Trump's 2016 presidential run through thousands of hours of imbalanced media coverage in Trump's favor. This included, but was not limited to, airing entire speeches of his rather than those of his opponents.
According to leaked campaign documents obtained by Wikileaks, Trump's main 2016 general election rival explicitly conspired to elevate Trump through utilizing the press. Their stated intention was to elevate Trump as a "pied piper candidate" which would concentrate Republican extremists at the front of the Republican Party.[1] The point of this exercise was/is that the presence of Republican Party extremists supposedly makes Democratic neoliberals more attractive in comparison. Trump's 2016 Democratic Party rival popularized a term for this coalition they elevated, called the 'alt-right' in a famous speech she gave.
Despite losing the 2016 popular vote, Trump was elected president for 4 years, initially on a platform of American nationalism, locking up his main political opponent, and US-located businesses controlling the means of production rather than foreign-located businesses. During his presidency, he did almost none of these things outside a few anti-globalist bills and a brief immigration ban. During 2020, Trump famously became hostile to Democratic governance while facing a slim chance at re-election. He openly wanted to delay the 2020 elections by disputing the results way before the 2020 election took place. While losing the 2020 vote, he asked the Georgia governor to manufacture votes for him, leading to his 2023 arrest for conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Political style
Before, during, and after his presidency, Trump's speaking style was defined by self-deprecation, insult comedy, appeal to cruel law and order, and a framing of America as in decline. Trump offered himself as a cult figure opposed to entrenched Washington bureaucrats, and said he was the only person who could fix American decline. Trump's nominal focus on stopping the offshoring of manufacturing led a former professor of business, Matthew DeBord, to label Trump a 'heavy metal socialist' in Business Insider.[2]
Expansion and utilization of the lumpenproletariat
The American Marxist commentator and Professor of Political Science Clyde Barrow, painted Trump as a "lumpen-candidate". According to Barrow, Trump has a unique ability to recruit America's unemployed and often criminal class for 'in-real-life' electoral support. Barrow compares Trump to Louis Bonaparte, who had a comical political style and recruited the Parisian underclass in a paramilitary support for Bonapart. According to Barrow, Bonapart used this support in his campaign against France's working class. Barrow argues that post-industrial capitalism itself expands the lumpenproletariat, and that Trump is simply a symptom of this extended pattern.[3]
Clyde also successfully predicted in the Fall of 2020 that a large amount of unemployed or gig-working Americans would try a coup d'état of the American federal government in favor of Trump. Clyde got details wrong however. He predicted this would partially mirror how Bonapart allegedly recruited a paramilitary of 'petite bourgeois peasants' to act as 'shock troops' in the 1848 French election.[4] Unlike Bonapart in 1848, Trump lost his re-election bid.
Median household income of Trump electorate
Despite possibly utilizing the lumpenproletariat, the median household income of the Trump electorate was a relatively high income rather than a relatively low one. The median household income of the Trump electorate was $72,000/year, 12% higher than the overall national median household income of about $57,600 a year.[5][6]
Neoliberals moving the overton window to the right for partisan games
As reported by Gabriel Debenedetti among others, Clinton's campaign team wrote a memo to the the DNC seeking to elevate extremist Republican candidates to reduce the electoral viability of moderate Republican candidates. In the memo they also state they want rally press to promote Republican extremists and to move the overton window in the Republican Party to the right. It read:
The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.
Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to: • Ted Cruz • Donald Trump • Ben Carson
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.[1]
Clinton aides pushed this further in an agenda item for top aides, which read:
How do we prevent Bush from bettering himself/how do we maximize Trump and others?"[1]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 'They Always Wanted Trump' by Gabriel Debenedetti
- ↑ 'Trump's accusations about socialism should be taken seriously — because when it comes to business, he's a socialist', by Matthew DeBord
- ↑ Barrow, Clyde (2020). The Dangerous Class: The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat. United States: University of Michigan Press.
- ↑ Emperor of the Lumpenproletariat (ft. Clyde Barrow)
- ↑ The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support, by Nate Silver
- ↑ Household Income: 2016, by Gloria G. Guzman