Donald Trump: Difference between revisions
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=== Political style and ideology === | === Political style and ideology === | ||
{{See also|Trumpism}} | |||
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''.<ref>[https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-socialist-gm-reopen-factory-ohio-2019-3?op=1 'Trump's accusations about socialism should be taken seriously — because when it comes to business, he's a socialist', by Matthew DeBord]</ref> | 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''.<ref>[https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-socialist-gm-reopen-factory-ohio-2019-3?op=1 'Trump's accusations about socialism should be taken seriously — because when it comes to business, he's a socialist', by Matthew DeBord]</ref> | ||
Trump had initial, famous support from prominent American national socialists, including NPI president Richard Spencer. This support among the national socialist think tanks withered as Trump's term came to be increasingly defined by lawlessness. Additionally, a small segment of the national-socialist sympathetic right, including Richard Spencer, were financially targeted during or shortly after Trump's presidency. | Trump had initial, famous support from prominent American national socialists, including NPI president Richard Spencer. This support among the national socialist think tanks withered as Trump's term came to be increasingly defined by lawlessness. Additionally, a small segment of the national-socialist sympathetic right, including Richard Spencer, were financially targeted during or shortly after Trump's presidency. | ||
Most of the American mainstream media | Most of the American mainstream media portrays Trump as an egomaniac rather than a representative of any particular ideology. | ||
=== Appointments === | === Appointments === | ||
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===Executive orders=== | ===Executive orders=== | ||
Trump's executive orders were mostly ceremonial, temporary, or advisory in nature, but were more in line with his campaign promises than the bills he passed. For example, his travel ban for citizens of Islamic countries entering the USA only lasted 90 days. Additionally, an order to finish | Trump's executive orders were mostly ceremonial, temporary, or advisory in nature, but were more in line with his campaign promises than the bills he passed. For example, his travel ban for citizens of Islamic countries entering the USA only lasted 90 days. Additionally, an order to finish construction of the [[US-Mexico border wall]] was another executive order that went mostly nowhere, as the wall was never close to being finished and likely won't be. | ||
==Analysis== | ==Analysis== | ||
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=== Influence on American politics === | === Influence on American politics === | ||
Both in and out of office, Donald Trump has had a significant influence on political culture, social discourse, media system, party system, [[conspiracy theories]], and political [[consciousness]] in the United States. | Both in and out of office, Donald Trump has had a significant influence on political culture, social discourse, media system, party system, [[conspiracy theories]], and political [[consciousness]] in the United States. His presidency has been considered a turning point in the American Republicans from adherence towards [[neoliberal]] bourgeois democracy to increasingly [[Neo-fascism|fascistic]] and authoritarian positions. | ||
Particularly in the months during and after the 2020 presidential election, the belief in and support for traditionally far-right conspiracy theories and ideology drastically increased among the Trump electorate, with the [[antisemitic]] [[QAnon]] movement becoming increasingly popular and the acceptance of Trump's false claims of electoral fraud likewise increasing.<ref>''[https://icsr.info/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ICSR-Report-Far-From-Gone-The-Evolution-of-Extremism-in-the-First-100-Days-of-the-Biden-Administration.pdf Far From Gone: The Evolution of Extremism in the First 100 Days of the Biden Administration]'' Marc-André Argentino, Blyth Crawford, Florence Keen, Hannah Rose (2021) International Centre for the Study and Radicalisation </ref> Further, the size and influence of neofascist terrorist militias such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, 3%ers, and others become much more noticeable.<ref>''[https://d3qi0qp55mx5f5.cloudfront.net/cpost/i/docs/americas_insurrectionists_online_2021_04_06.pdf?mtime=1617807009|chapter=STUDY%201:WHO%20ARE%20THE%20INSURRECTIONISTS%20AND%20WHERE%20DID%20THEY%20COME%20FROM|section=MANY%20BUSINESS%20OWNERS/WHITECOLLAR Understanding American Domestic Terrorism]'' DR. ROBERT A. PAPE (2021) University of Chicago Division of Social Sciences </ref> | |||
==Median household income of Trump electorate== | ==Median household income of Trump electorate== | ||
Revision as of 22:10, 26 August 2023
Donald Trump | |
|---|---|
 Official portrait, 2017 | |
| President of the United States | |
| In office January 20, 2017 – January 20, 2021 | |
| Vice President | Mike Pence |
| Preceded by | Barack Obama |
| Succeeded by | Joe Biden |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Donald John Trump June 14, 1946 Queens, New York City, U.S. |
| Political party | Republican (1987–1999, 2009–2011, 2012–present) |
| Other political affiliations |
|
| Spouses | Ivana Zelníčková
(m. 1977; div. 1990)Marla Maples
(m. 1993; div. 1999)Melania Knauss (m. 2005) |
| Children |
|
| Parents |
|
| Residence(s) | Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Florida |
| Alma mater | Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (BS Econ.) |
| Occupation |
|
| Website | |
Donald Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American media personality, politician, luxury real estate developer, and billionaire who served as US president from 2017 to 2021. While affiliated with several parties throughout his life, Trump ran as a Republican in 2016 and has been largely seen as the party's leader ever since. Trump is a member of the wealthy Trump family, having inherited his real estate business from his father, Fred Trump, in 1971.
Prior to his entry in the presidential race, Trump was best known for hosting and starring in The Apprentice, a reality TV show in which contestants vied for Trump's approval and "hiring" into the business world. Jeff Zucker, the show's producer, went on to serve as an executive at CNN, a channel which later promoted Trump's 2016 presidential campaign by running thousands of hours of imbalanced media coverage focused on Trump.[citation needed] This included, but was not limited to, airing entire speeches of Trump's over those of other candidates.
A relative outsider, Trump suddenly announced his intention to run for president in 2015 in a speech that decried immigrants and Chinese influence and was mocked by establishment media and cultural figures. According to documents leaked by WikiLeaks, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate in 2016, conspired with insider Democrats to elevate Trump in the media in order to function as a "pied piper candidate" who would concentrate Republican extremists at the front of the presidential race,[clarification needed] damaging the Republicans' chances in the general election.[1] In a well-known[citation needed] campaign speech, Clinton popularized the term "alt-right" in reference to the extreme right-wing base that she herself had helped to promote. In the general election, Trump lost the popular vote but secured an electoral college victory, thanks in part to a low Democratic turnout in key swing states. While Trump had run on an America-centered, nationalistic platform which included "locking up" Hillary Clinton and returning control of the domestic means of production to American capitalists rather than foreign investors, Trump's first year as president was focused on an attempted trade war against the People's Republic of China, a 90-day ban on immigration from Muslim-majority countries, and passing some "anti-globalist" bills.[clarification needed][citation needed]
In 2020, Trump made increasingly hostile statements about the American electoral process as his chances of being re-elected began to seem slim, such as sarcastically calling democracy a "nice word",[citation needed] openly calling for election delays, casting doubt on the integrity of the results well before the election was held,[citation needed] and announcing that he would refuse to resign if voted out.[citation needed] Trump lost the popular and electoral votes in 2020 to the Democrat Joe Biden and, as promised, decried the result as "corrupt". This led to a rally held in Washington, DC, by Trump and other far-right Republicans on January 6, 2021, intended to coincide with a joint session of Congress was scheduled to hold the traditional vote-counting ceremony that formalized a presidential election. Trump's rhetoric incited a riot in which his supporters stormed the US Capitol, attacked Capitol police, and vandalized the building.
During the election, Trump asked the Georgia governor to manufacture votes for him.[clarification needed] In 2023, Trump was indicted on several counts relating to his attempt to influence the election results and was arrested by a Georgia state court in August of 2023 on counts of conspiracy to overturn the election.
Presidency
Political style and ideology
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]
Trump had initial, famous support from prominent American national socialists, including NPI president Richard Spencer. This support among the national socialist think tanks withered as Trump's term came to be increasingly defined by lawlessness. Additionally, a small segment of the national-socialist sympathetic right, including Richard Spencer, were financially targeted during or shortly after Trump's presidency.
Most of the American mainstream media portrays Trump as an egomaniac rather than a representative of any particular ideology.
Appointments
Cabinet
Federal agencies
Donald Trump made infamous appointments to several agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education.
Public image
Bills passed as president
As president, Trump mostly continued unpopular policy directions of Obama, including removing Obama's own safeguards on his own unpopular policy directions. This meant Trump continued to make the internet a vehicle for mass surveillance, aimed his policies to favor 'the swamp' (with the exception of a single, merely advisory executive order), and further adopted worker-hostile policy.
More specifically, Trump rolled back regulation aimed at energy firms, increased protections for federal workers, favored state government employees over civilians in retirement plans, prolonged the war against ISIS, improved weather warnings, allowed internet providers to share more civilian data, and decreased worker safety protections.[3]
Like previous presidents, virtually all Trumps enacted policies were niche and weren't particularly impactful, and he was the most impactful in his inaction.
Executive orders
Trump's executive orders were mostly ceremonial, temporary, or advisory in nature, but were more in line with his campaign promises than the bills he passed. For example, his travel ban for citizens of Islamic countries entering the USA only lasted 90 days. Additionally, an order to finish construction of the US-Mexico border wall was another executive order that went mostly nowhere, as the wall was never close to being finished and likely won't be.
Analysis
Comparisons to Louis Napoleon
Clyde Barrow
The American Marxist commentator and political scientist 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 for paramilitary support. According to Barrow, Bonaparte 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 a symptom of this extended pattern.[4]
Barrow also successfully predicted in autumn of 2020 that a large amount of unemployed or gig-working Americans would attempt a coup d'état of the American federal government in favor of Trump. However, some details of his predictions were incorrect. 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.[5] Moreover, unlike Bonaparte in 1848, Trump in fact lost his re-election bid.
Michael Moore
American political commentator Michael Moore predicted that Donald Trump had a serious chance of winning in 2016 in spite of the (erroneous) polling data in the media.
Influence on American politics
Both in and out of office, Donald Trump has had a significant influence on political culture, social discourse, media system, party system, conspiracy theories, and political consciousness in the United States. His presidency has been considered a turning point in the American Republicans from adherence towards neoliberal bourgeois democracy to increasingly fascistic and authoritarian positions.
Particularly in the months during and after the 2020 presidential election, the belief in and support for traditionally far-right conspiracy theories and ideology drastically increased among the Trump electorate, with the antisemitic QAnon movement becoming increasingly popular and the acceptance of Trump's false claims of electoral fraud likewise increasing.[6] Further, the size and influence of neofascist terrorist militias such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, 3%ers, and others become much more noticeable.[7]
Median household income of Trump electorate
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.[8][9]
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. The memo 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 Debenedetti, Gabriel (7 Nov 2016). "They Always Wanted Trump". POLITICO Magazine. Retrieved 26 Aug 2023.
- ↑ 'Trump's accusations about socialism should be taken seriously — because when it comes to business, he's a socialist', by Matthew DeBord
- ↑ https://www.startribune.com/bills-passed-by-congress-and-signed-by-the-president-so-far-this-year/432015273/
- ↑ Barrow, Clyde (2020). The Dangerous Class: The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat. United States: University of Michigan Press.
- ↑ Emperor of the Lumpenproletariat (ft. Clyde Barrow)
- ↑ Far From Gone: The Evolution of Extremism in the First 100 Days of the Biden Administration Marc-André Argentino, Blyth Crawford, Florence Keen, Hannah Rose (2021) International Centre for the Study and Radicalisation
- ↑ Understanding American Domestic Terrorism DR. ROBERT A. PAPE (2021) University of Chicago Division of Social Sciences
- ↑ The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support, by Nate Silver
- ↑ Household Income: 2016, by Gloria G. Guzman