Donald Trump

Donald Trump is an American politician, businessman, 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 a real estate tycoon. 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, Trump's main 2016 general election rival sought to elevate Trump through establishment media channels. Their stated intention was to elevate Trump as a "pied piper candidate" which would concentrate Republican extremists at the front of the Republican Party. The point of this exercise was that Republican extremists would supposedly be unpalatable to a general American electorate. 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 elections, dispute the results, and refuse to resign way before any 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.

Expansion of 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.

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. Unlike Bonapart in 1848, Trump lost his re-election bid.