Donald Trump

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 (1946-06-14) June 14, 1946 Queens, New York City, U.S.
Political party	Republican (1987–1999, 2009–2011, 2012–present)
Other political affiliations	Reform (1999–2001) Democratic (2001–2009) Independent (2011–2012)
Spouses	Ivana Zelníčková ​ ​ (m. 1977; div. 1990)​ Marla Maples ​ ​ (m. 1993; div. 1999)​ Melania Knauss ​ (m. 2005)​
Children	Donald Jr. Ivanka Eric Tiffany Barron
Parents	Fred Trump Mary Anne MacLeod
Residence(s)	Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Florida
Alma mater	Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (BS Econ.)
Occupation	Politician businessman media personality

Donald Trump (born June 14, 1946) is a far-right 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. Trump's celebrity and late political career were encouraged and partially manufactured by major, mainstream liberal media outlets as well as establishment Democratic Party political operatives.

Trump announced his intention to run for president during June 2015 in a speech that decried immigration and Chinese influence and was publicly mocked by mainstream political operatives and cultural figures. Trump initially ran 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.

In a leaked April 2015 memo, Hillary Clinton staffers and DNC insiders discussed a strategy for a hypothetical Clinton presidential run that would use connections in the establishment media to elevate Trump and other fringe, "unpalatable" Republicans into "pied piper candidates", extremists who would shift the Overton window to the right in the Republican field.This strategy was played out throughout 2015 on networks such as CNN and MSNBC. In an August 2016 campaign speech, Clinton popularized the term "alt-right" in reference to the extreme right-wing base that her campaign had consciously and deliberately helped to promote for over a year.

Prior to his entry in the presidential race, Trump was best known for co-producing and starring in the NBC reality TV show The Apprentice, in which contestants vied for Trump's approval and "hiring" into the business world. Jeff Zucker, president of NBC at the time, would go on to become head of CNN before and during Trump's 2016 campaign. Throughout 2016, Zucker privately spoke in flattering terms about Trump with his campaign staff, made suggestions and encouragements, and referred to Trump as "the boss". Starting with Zucker's tenure, CNN treated every Trump campaign utterance as "breaking news". Leslie Moonves, then CEO of CBS News, said of Trump's presidential run, "It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS."

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. Trump's first two years as president were focused on deregulation of the American energy sector, an anti-worker-safety bill, an attempted trade war against the People's Republic of China, a failed ban on immigration from Muslim-majority countries, and withdrawing the US from an international trade agreement, before a failed attempt to enter into a modified version of it again.

In 2020, average Americans widely considered Trump responsible for the US mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak, and polls began to favor a Democratic presidential victory. Becoming increasingly desperate about his chances of re-election, Trump turned increasingly to anti-democratic rhetoric, including calling for election delays, casting doubt on the integrity of the results well before the election was held,^{[citation needed]} and refusing to resign if voted out.Trump lost both the popular and the electoral vote in 2020 to the Democrat Joe Biden and, as promised, refused to accept the result. Later revelations indicate that Trump conspired to overturn the election's outcome during this time. This anti-democratic effort culminated when Trump held a rally in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021, outside of the US Capitol while a joint session of Congress formalized the election result. Trump's rhetoric incited a riot, sometimes characterized as a "half-hearted coup attempt", in which his supporters stormed and vandalized the Capitol building, some with the intent to stop the certification of the vote. In 2023, Trump and 18 co-conspirators were indicted on several RICO charges and other counts relating to Trump's attempts to overturn the election in Georgia; in August 2023, the state of Georgia arrested and booked Trump for his forthcoming trial. However, at the time of his arrest, Trump continued to poll at higher than 50% among the Republican primary field.

Presidency

Main article: Presidency of Donald Trump

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.

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

Federal agencies

Donald Trump made infamous appointments to several agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education.

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 furthered policy that was hostile to non-government workers.

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.

Like previous presidents, virtually all Trumps enacted policies were niche and were not 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. His more ambitious executive orders did not last long. For example, he signed an executive order instituting a travel ban for citizens of Islamic countries entering the USA. However, this travel ban only lasted 90 days. Additionally, an executive order to finish construction of the US-Mexico border wall mostly went nowhere, as the wall was not sufficiently funded by either Trump or Republicans, and thus will likely never be finished.

One of Trump's more material executive orders was withdrawing the US from an Obama-era international trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This trade agreement was previously mostly criticized by populists in the American left for restricting the ability for governments to regulate corporate abuses. Trump then tried to re-enter the agreement under unspecified terms, but was rejected by the member states.

Trump was vague about his reasons for initially withdrawing from the partnership but wanted to be seen as an anti-Obama politician to his supporters.

Foreign policy

Trump adopted a foreign policy toward Russia that was slightly more dovish than some of his Democratic counterparts. Trump was favored by the Russian government to win the election over Hillary Clinton. Democrats used this fact, along with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election campaign as a scapegoat for their electoral failures. The famous American left-libertarian Noam Chomsky partially commended Trump's stance on Russia, highlighting the dangers of the Democratic Party's past role in inflaming Cold War tensions and further nuclear threats.

Trump briefly wanted to go to war with Iran, but was talked out of it by his allies in the media.

Analysis

Political base

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.

Mobilization of the Lumpenproletariat

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 Marx's description of Louis Bonaparte in the The Eighteenth Brumaire‎‎ as well as the media's description of Bonaparte's 1848 campaign. Bonaparte‎‎ had a comical, or 'clownish', 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 expands the lumpenproletariat, and that Trump is a symptom of this extended pattern.

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 Bonaparte allegedly recruited a paramilitary of 'petite bourgeois peasants' to act as 'shock troops' in the 1848 French election. Moreover, unlike Bonaparte in 1848, Trump in fact lost his re-election bid.

Michael Moore

During the 2016 election, American left-populist political commentator Michael Moore predicted, contrary to the (erroneous) polling data circulating in the media, that Donald Trump had a serious chance of winning due to the frustration of Americans who had been dispossessed by free trade laws and the offshoring of American jobs.However, Moore would later incorrectly predict that Trump's reactionary Supreme Court nominations would provoke a Democratic "blue wave" in the 2022 midterms, instead of the actual, highly indecisive result.

Influence on American politics

See also: MAGA

Both in and out of office, Donald Trump has had a significant influence on the political culture, social discourse, media industry, two-party dynamic, conspiracy theories, and political consciousness of the United States. His presidency has been considered a turning point in the history of the Republican Party, from adherence towards neoliberal bourgeois democracy to increasingly fascistic and authoritarian positions. In the months before and after the 2020 general election, support for previously fringe far-right positions, including conspiracy theories, increased drastically among the Trump electorate and, to some extent, the general population, with the antisemitic QAnon movement at the forefront of this trend. Belief that the election had been fraudulent also increased. Most notably, the size and influence of neo-fascist terrorist militias such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters also grew noticeably.

Democratic Party influence on Trump's victory

As reported by Gabriel Debenedetti among others, Clinton staff, together with the DNC, sought to use the 2016 presidential race to shift the political discussion in the Republican Party further to the right. The goal of this was to reduce the electoral viability of moderate Republican candidates by making their rhetoric more right-leaning. Clinton allies presumably saw moderate Republicans as more electable than the extremist candidates, and possibly thought that by increasing the radicalism of their rhetoric, they could decrease their popular appeal.

This was stated explicitly in an April 2015 memo shared among Clinton staff and the DNC, where they also state they intended to conspire with allies in the press to accomplish their aforementioned goals. This 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.

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?"

Anti-democratic initiatives

Failed, half-hearted (Domestic) coup

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, vandalized the building, with some attempting to stop the election certification process.

Multiple members of the 'Proud Boys' who attended the riot, including Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Zachary Rehl, have so far have been convicted of seditious conspiracy for their attempt to stop the election certification process that day and face 20–30 years in prison each.

Hundreds of riot attendees have been convicted with trespassing-related charges, which were not exactly hard to prosecute given the rioters were keep on using selfie-sticks and livestreaming their crimes. At least one attendee, a young attractive white woman named Riley June Williams, was seen trying to direct the rioters. Riley stated that she stole Nancy Pelosis laptop and hard drives and attempted to sell it to unspecified Russians. So far, she has been sentenced to three years in prison.

Other notable convictions from this riot include Stewart Rhodes, who received an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy related to the failed coup and riot. Stewart is the founder of the Oath Keepers, a group of right-wing militia members.

Peter Schwartz was sentenced to 14 years in prison for attacking police officers present at the riot with pepper spray and a chair. Thomas Webster was sentenced to 10 years in prison for swinging a metal flagpole at police at the event.

A pro-Trump rioter named Ashli Babbit was shot and killed at the riot by law enforcement for barging past a barricade erected to protect Congress members from the riot, and after warned not to pass the barricade. The law enforcement officer was cleared of any possible wrongdoing.

Attempt to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia

After year 2020 votes for president were cast in Georgia, Trump tried to overturn the election in Georgia through lobbying the Georgia legislature to create a fake slate of electors for him, harassing a poll worker to falsely admit to election fraud, and personally pressuring the Georgia governor to manufacture over 11 thousand additional votes for him in a long private phone call.

See also

• Barack Obama
• George W. Bush