Historians will have much to write about when they look back on current political affairs in America, and analysis of the rightwing brand of ‘populist’ politics will be a major aspect of this. When it comes to his desperate desire to move back into the White House, the former U.S. President Donald Trump has made some dangerously deluded claims, including that he is a ‘victim’ of ‘fake news’ put out by his political opponents. He has attacked the MSM (mainstream media) in particular, arguing that it is ‘liberal’ and ‘socialist’ and out to ‘get’ him through ‘political persecution’.
Trump has also been highly critical of the Washington ‘elites’ and the so-called ‘Deep State’. When it was announced that he was to be indited over alleged hush money paid to ‘Stormy’ Daniels, he quickly called this a ‘witchhunt’ and claimed that justice in America had been ‘weaponised’. Similarly, the absurd idea that he lost the last presidential election to Joe Biden because of widespread fraud has been repeated over and over in his speeches. Nothing, it seems, no matter how spurious the claim, is off limits to Trump.
In a sense, Trump has always enjoyed being in the news headlines. Despite his love/hate relationship with the media, Trump has embraced the new forms of media that have become available in the last 20 years, and he has often ‘dumbed down’ and indulged in the populist over-simplification of complex issues, reaching out to people’s hearts rather than their heads. In truth, the former President has had a long history of saying just about anything that comes into his head at any given moment – whether accurate or not – if he calculates there will be some kind of electoral advantage in doing so.
Take the question of race and ethnicity, for example, often a major part of ‘populist’ discourse. Trump’s past attempts to exploit ‘race’ to mobilise his core base of supporters (with attendees at one rally even chanting ‘send her back, send her back’ about a Muslim congresswoman), and his behaviour and comments during the Black Lives Matter protests in the USA, undoubtedly increased divisions and tensions in American society to unprecedented levels, further inspiring those who see the answer to all the country’s problems as being through explicit xenophobia or, in some cases, simply via the barrel of a gun.
But Trump evidently felt that this was a gamble worth taking, and, ever since he announced that he would bid for the White House in 2024, it has appeared that he will do or say whatever it takes to secure a second term as President. The temptation to be ‘populist’ in all he says has remained an essential part of his political makeup. Psychologically, Trump has an enormous ego and a narcissistic self-regard for his own over-inflated abilities, qualities which appeared to fit well with the new age of ‘selfie’ politics and Twitter-style sound-bites.
More importantly, though, Trump has been been viewed as an out-and-out ‘populist’ by his critics. In fact, the word ‘populism’ has become one of the major academic concepts of recent years. It has increasingly been taken up by historians and political scientists, and is used regularly by various media commentators to try to capture the essence of what they believe has been happening to liberal democracies across the globe, particularly in Europe and the USA. But what does ‘populism’ actually mean? Can it be pinned down?
The Nature of ‘Populist’ Politics
It is no exaggeration to say that former President Trump and his controversial style of politics has exemplified what most observers have in mind when they employ the term ‘populist’.
However, at the same time, there has also been much debate among political science scholars about the actual meaning of the word ‘populist’. It constitutes what the Dutch academic Cas Mudde has called an ‘essentially contested concept’. Indeed, there has been little consensus in the political science literature as to the precise meaning of the term.
Helpfully, though, Mudde and other like-minded scholars have gone to considerable lengths to try to clarify what ‘populism’ actually is. Unlike some creeds, populism is not a coherent ideology, with a clear or logical set of principles or policies. Instead, it is what some political scientists refer to as a ‘thin ideology’, and tends to make use of ’emotional’ heartfelt appeal rather than considered intellectual reflection.
Nevertheless, populism can still be described as an ideology; it is one that (to quote Mudde) ‘considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups’ i.e. the ‘pure people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’. It argues that politics should be an expression of the ‘general will’ of the people. While a charismatic leader is not essential to such an approach, the typical populist leader will often claim to represent the virtuous ‘people’ against the scheming and greedy ‘elites’.
Importantly, in their book Populism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2017), Casse Mudde and Cristobel Rovira Kaltwasser also noted that populism is fundamentally a ‘Manichean’ view of the political world, a simplistic binary approach where everything is divided into ‘good’ or ‘bad’, black or white, mass or elite.
‘Trumpism’
With his incendiary populist rhetoric and the highly stage-managed mass rallies held during his first Presidential campaign in 2016, Donald Trump often promised to ‘drain the swamp’ of ‘corrupt’ Washington politics and directly confront the ‘self-serving elites’ in the name of ‘the people’. In other words, he said he would represent the masses against the ‘dishonest’ elites. It was a classic populist and Manichean approach, rooted in emotion rather than logic, and has already characterised many of his rally appearances during 2024.
Even the wider world has often been divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’ in Trump’s mind. When he became President, Trump regularly self-identified as a ‘nationalist’ and labelled his opponents as ‘globalists’ in press conferences. Using highly emotive rhetoric about protecting ‘hard-working Americans’, he promised to ‘Build a Wall’ and close the borders to illegal Mexicans; he also restricted the travelling rights of Muslims into the country, and proclaimed that his overall objective was to ‘make America Great Again’. The ‘elitist’ Democrats in Congress, he claimed, were really ‘Marxists’ and anarchists who were out to subvert and block such policies, and were thus ‘out of touch’. Again, this was a nakedly populist version of politics, and all the evidence has indicated that ‘The Donald’ has been seeking to use these very same messages and tactics while campaigning for a second term in the White House.
The Language of ‘Outsiders’
All in all, Trump has regularly sought to portray himself as an anti-establishment ‘disrupter’ or rebel – an ‘outsider’ who, in the name of ‘ordinary’ American people, has been determined to take on both the political elites and the dreaded mainstream media, and in the process restore democratic direct power to the masses. In line with this, Trump has regarded elected rival politicians, along with the media and journalists, as problems standing in the way of his ‘historic’ mission and message; tellingly, he has not been been keen on spontaneous questions being fired at him, or being quizzed or held to account by opposition politicians or journalists.
Notoriously, when he was running for President the first time round, Trump even turned the spotlight (so to speak) on journalists at his rallies, and encouraged his supporters to boo and jeer at media commentators, sometimes to chilling effect. There was an echo of this tactic once again at his March, 2023, election rally in Waco, Texas. Similarly, when he was President, Trump on occasion simply refused to answer certain questions at his press conferences, or petulantly boycotted selected newspaper representatives in revenge for what he claimed was their ‘Fake News’.
Moreover, the former President cut out the media ‘middle man’ as far as possible and clearly much preferred to announce policy directly to the public through his social media account. He has been been a frequent user of this form of communication, to the point where some commentators have seen his regular employment of this powerful digital tool as heralding a new form of populist ‘Tweetocracy’.
There is persuasive evidence that other ‘populist’ leaders around the globe, such as the new president of Argentina, Javier Milei, have also borrowed this strategy and sought to directly communicate with the ‘masses’ in Trumpian fashion, enabling them to disseminate what they see as ‘undiluted’ messages.
Trump has emphasised that a major part of his 2024 campaign is about ‘revenge’ – he wants ‘revenge’ against all of his enemies on behalf of the mass of hard-working Americans, who have been let down (he alleges) by a huge ‘conspiracy’ against democracy perpetrated by President Biden. Whether this vulgar hyper-populism will be enough to secure Trump a second term in the White House is very much open to question.
Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics
(All images: Wikimedia Commons)
Note: An earlier version of this blog was published here in August, 2019.
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