Trumpism

For the characteristic rhetoric and statements of Donald Trump, see Trumpisms.

See also: Factions in the Republican Party (United States) § Trumpists, and Make America Great Again

Trumpism is a political movement in the United States that comprises the political ideologies associated with Donald Trump and his political base. It incorporates ideologies such as right-wing populism, national conservatism and neo-nationalism, and features significant illiberal and authoritarian beliefs. There is significant academic debate over the prevalence of neo-fascist and fascist elements of Trumpism. Trumpists and Trumpians are terms that refer to individuals exhibiting its characteristics.

Clockwise from top:

Donald Trump 2020 presidential campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina; Donald Trump at a 2016 rally in Arizona; armed supporters of Trump at a Minnesota demonstration, September 2020; a supporter kneeling in prayer at a 2016 Trump rally in Tucson; a supporter holding a sign that reads, "Fuck your feelings!" at a rally in 2019; Trump supporters storming the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021

Trumpism is associated with the belief that the President is above the rule of law. It has been referred to as an American political variant of the far-right and the national-populist and neo-nationalist sentiment seen in multiple nations starting in the late 2010s. Trump's political base has been compared to a cult of personality. Trump supporters became the largest faction of the United States Republican Party, with the remainder often characterized as "the elite" or "the establishment" in contrast. In response to the rise of Trump, there has arisen a Never Trump movement.

The label Trumpism has been applied to national-conservative and national-populist movements in other democracies. Politicians labeled as Trumpist by news agencies include Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte and Bongbong Marcos of the Philippines, Shinzo Abe of Japan, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, Javier Milei of Argentina, and Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia.

Themes and methods

See also: Rhetoric of Donald Trump

Trumpist rhetoric features anti-immigrant, xenophobic, nativist, and racist attacks against minority groups. Identified aspects include conspiracist, isolationist, Christian nationalist, evangelical Christian, protectionist, anti-feminist, and anti-LGBT beliefs.

Trumpism emerged during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Trump's rhetoric has its roots in a populist political method that suggests nationalistic answers to political, economic, and social problems. These inclinations lead to policies such as immigration restrictionism, trade protectionism, isolationism, migrant family separation and opposition to entitlement reform. As a political method, populism is not driven by any particular ideology. Former National Security Advisor and close Trump advisor John Bolton states this is true of Trump, disputing that Trumpism even exists in any meaningful philosophical sense, adding that "[t]he man does not have a philosophy. And people can try and draw lines between the dots of his decisions. They will fail."

Writing for the Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (2019), Olivier Jutel notes, "What Donald Trump reveals is that the various iterations of right-wing American populism have less to do with a programmatic social conservatism or libertarian economics than with enjoyment."

Grievance

Referring to the populism of Trump, sociologist Michael Kimmel states that it "is not a theory [or] an ideology, it's an emotion. And the emotion is righteous indignation that the government is screwing 'us'". Kimmel notes that "Trump is an interesting character because he channels all that sense of what I called 'aggrieved entitlement,'" a term Kimmel defines as "that sense that those benefits to which you believed yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unseen forces larger and more powerful. You feel yourself to be the heir to a great promise, the American Dream, which has turned into an impossible fantasy for the very people who were supposed to inherit it."

Vagueness

Communications scholar Zizi Papacharissi explains the utility of being ideologically vague, and using terms and slogans that can mean anything the supporter wants them to mean. "When these publics thrive in affective engagement it's because they've found an affective hook that's built around an open signifier that they get to use and reuse and re-employ. So yes, of course you know, President Trump has used MAGA; that's an open signifier that pulls in all of these people, and is open because it allows them all to assign different meanings to it. So MAGA works for connecting publics that are different, because it is open enough to permit people to ascribe their own meaning to it."

Other contributors to the Routledge Handbook of Populism note that populist leaders, rather than being ideology-driven, are instead pragmatic and opportunistic regarding themes, ideas and beliefs that strongly resonate with their followers. Exit polling data suggests the campaign was successful at mobilizing the "white disenfranchised", the lower- to working-class European-Americans who are experiencing growing social inequality and who often have stated opposition to the American political establishment. Ideologically, Trumpism has a right-wing populist accent.

Some prominent conservatives formed a Never Trump movement in response to his anti-establishment rhetoric, seen as a rebellion of conservative elites against the base.

Right-wing authoritarian populism

Former Chief Strategist for the first Trump Administration Steve Bannon is an influential right-wing populist figure in the U.S., and supported many national populist political movements around the world including creating a network of far-right groups in Europe.

Other academics have made politically urgent warnings about Trumpian authoritarianism, such as Yale sociologist Philip S. Gorski who writes,

the election of Donald Trump constitutes perhaps the greatest threat to American democracy since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There is a real and growing danger that representative government will be slowly but effectively supplanted by a populist form of authoritarian rule in the years to come. Media intimidation, mass propaganda, voter suppression, court packing, and even armed paramilitaries—many of the necessary and sufficient conditions for an authoritarian devolution are gradually falling into place.

Some academics regard such authoritarian backlash as a feature of liberal democracies. Some have even argued that Trump is a totalitarian capitalist exploiting the "fascist impulses of his ordinary supporters that hide in plain sight." Michelle Goldberg, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, compares "the spirit of Trumpism" to classical fascist themes. The "mobilizing vision" of fascism is of "the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it", which "sounds a lot like MAGA" (Make America Great Again) according to Goldberg. Similarly, like the Trump movement, fascism sees a "need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's historical destiny." They believe in "the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason".

Conservative columnist George Will considers Trumpism similar to fascism, stating that Trumpism is "a mood masquerading as a doctrine". Will argues that national unity is based "on shared domestic dreads"—for fascists the "Jews", for Trump the media ("enemies of the people"), "elites" and "globalists". Solutions come not from tedious "incrementalism and conciliation", but from the leader (who claims "only I can fix it") unfettered by procedure. The political base is kept entertained with mass rallies, but inevitably the strongman develops a contempt for those he leads. Will argues both are based on machismo, and in the case of Trumpism, "appeals to those in thrall to country-music manliness: 'We're truck-driving, beer-drinking, big-chested Americans too freedom-loving to let any itsy-bitsy [COVID-19] virus make us wear masks.'"

Hillary Clinton famously said in a September 9, 2016, speech that "you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables...racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it." The comments were later described as a gaffe that came across as liberal elitism, and she said the next day that she regretted saying "half", but others have said she wasn't wrong.

Disputing the view that the surge of support for Trumpism and Brexit represents a new phenomenon, political scientist Karen Stenner and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt present the argument that

the far-right populist wave that seemed to 'come out of nowhere' did not in fact come out of nowhere. It is not a sudden madness, or virus, or tide, or even just a copycat phenomenon—the emboldening of bigots and despots by others' electoral successes. Rather, it is something that sits just beneath the surface of any human society—including in the advanced liberal democracies at the heart of the Western world—and can be activated by core elements of liberal democracy itself.

Discussing the statistical basis for their conclusions regarding the triggering of such waves, Stenner and Haidt present the view that "authoritarians, by their very nature, want to believe in authorities and institutions; they want to feel they are part of a cohesive community. Accordingly, they seem (if anything) to be modestly inclined toward giving authorities and institutions the benefit of the doubt, and lending them their support until the moment these seem incapable of maintaining 'normative order'"; the authors write that this normative order is regularly threatened by liberal democracy itself because it tolerates a lack of consensus in group values and beliefs, tolerates disrespect of group authorities, nonconformity to group norms, or norms proving questionable, and in general promotes diversity and freedom from domination by authorities. Stenner and Haidt regard such authoritarian waves as a feature of liberal democracies noting that the findings of their 2016 study of Trump and Brexit supporters was not unexpected, as they wrote:

Across two decades of empirical research, we cannot think of a significant exception to the finding that normative threat tends either to leave non-authoritarians utterly unmoved by the things that catalyze authoritarians or to propel them toward being (what one might conceive as) their 'best selves.' In previous investigations, this has seen non-authoritarians move toward positions of greater tolerance and respect for diversity under the very conditions that seem to propel authoritarians toward increasing intolerance.

Author and authoritarianism critic Masha Gessen contrasted the "democratic" strategy of the Republican establishment making policy arguments appealing to the public, with the "autocratic" strategy of appealing to an "audience of one" in Donald Trump. Gessen noted the fear of Republicans that Trump would endorse a primary election opponent or otherwise use his political power to undermine any fellow party members that he felt had betrayed him.

The 2020 Republican Party platform simply endorsed "the President's America-first agenda", prompting comparisons to contemporary leader-focused party platforms in Russia and China.

General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, has described Trump as a "wannabe dictator":

We are unique among the world's militaries. We don't take an oath to a country, we don't take an oath to a tribe, we don't take an oath to a religion. We don't take an oath to a king, or a queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the Constitution and we take an oath to the idea that is America—and we're willing to die to protect it.

Gender and masculinity

See also: Social policy of Donald Trump § Women's rights, and Social policy of Donald Trump § LGBTQ rights

Opposition to aspects of transgender rights is a theme of Trumpism.

Nostalgic masculinity

Google Trends search term for "Toxic masculinity" began a substantial increase in 2016, at the time of the campaign for the U.S. presidential election.

After the December 2020 introduction of COVID vaccines, a partisan gap in death rates developed, indicating the effects of vaccine skepticism. As of March 2024, more than 30 percent of Republicans had not received a COVID vaccine, compared with less than 10 percent of Democrats. Aversion to wearing masks has been associated with Trumpism's celebration of masculinity.

According to Philip Gorski, Trumpian nostalgia "severs the traditional connection between greatness and virtue ... In this narrative, decline is brought about by docility and femininity and the return to greatness requires little more than a reassertion of dominance and masculinity. In this way, 'virtue' is reduced to its root etymology of manly bravado." Michael Kimmel describes male Trump supporters who despaired "over whether or not anything could enable them to find a place with some dignity in this new, multicultural, and more egalitarian world. ... These men were angry, but they all looked back nostalgically to a time when their sense of masculine entitlement went unchallenged. They wanted to reclaim their country, restore their rightful place in it, and retrieve their manhood in the process."

Social psychologists Theresa Vescio and Nathaniel Schermerhorn note that "In his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump embodied HM [hegemonic masculinity] while waxing nostalgic for a racially homogenous past that maintained an unequal gender order. Trump performed HM by repeatedly referencing his status as a successful businessman ("blue-collar businessman") and alluding to how tough he would be as president. ... Trump was openly hostile toward gender-atypical women, sexualized gender typical women, and attacked the masculinity of male peers and opponents." In their studies involving 2,007 people, they found that endorsement of hegemonic masculinity better predicted support for Trump than other factors, such as support for antiestablishment, antielitist, nativist, racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic perspectives.

Toxic masculinity

Kimmel's angry white males engage in toxic masculinity which, according to William Liu, editor of the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity, applies especially to Trump. Kimmel was surprised at the sexual turn the 2016 election took and thinks that Trump is for many men a fantasy figure, an uber-male free to indulge every desire. "Many of these guys feel that the current order of things has emasculated them, by which I mean it has taken away their ability to support a family and have great life. Here's a guy who says: 'I can build anything I want. I can do anything I want. I can have the women I want.' They're going, 'This guy is awesome!'"

Trump supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire attending a rally, August 15, 2019

Neville Hoad, an expert on gender issues in South Africa, sees this as a common theme with another strongman leader, Jacob Zuma, comparing his "Zulu Big Man version of toxic masculinity versus a dog whistle white supremacist version; the putative real estate billionaire turned reality television star". Both men express a "masculinist fantasy of freedom", similar to Jacques Lacan's mythic leader of the primal horde whose power to satisfy every pleasure or whim has not been castrated. By activating such fantasies, toxic masculine behaviors from opulent displays of greed (the dream palaces of Mar-a-Lago and Nkandla), violent rhetoric, "grab them by the pussy" "locker room" "jokes" to misogynist insults, philandering, and even sexual predatory behavior including allegations of groping and raping become political assets not liabilities.

Gender role scholar Colleen Clemens describes toxic masculinity as "a narrow and repressive description of manhood, designating manhood as defined by violence, sex, status and aggression ... where strength is everything while emotions are a weakness; where sex and brutality are yardsticks by which men are measured, while supposedly 'feminine' traits—which can range from emotional vulnerability to simply not being hypersexual—are the means by which your status as "man" can be taken away." Writing in the Journal of Human Rights, Kimberly Theidon notes the COVID-19 pandemic's irony of Trumpian toxic masculinity: "Being a tough guy means wearing the mask of masculinity: Being a tough guy means refusing to don a mask that might preserve one's life and the lives of others."

Tough guy bravado appeared on the internet prior to attack on Congress on January 6, 2021, with one poster writing, "Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in ... . Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die." Of the rioters arrested for the attack on the U.S. Capitol, 88% were men, and 67% were 35 years or older.

Christian Trumpism

Donald Trump photo op at St. John's Church

According to 2016 election exit polls, 26% of voters self identified as white evangelical Christians, of whom more than three-fourths in 2017 approved of Trump's performance, most of them approving "very strongly" as reported by a Pew Research Center study. In contrast, approximately two-thirds of non-white evangelicals supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, with 90% of black Protestants also voting for her even though their theological views are similar to evangelicals. According to Yale researcher Philip Gorski, "the question is not so much why evangelicals voted for Trump then—many did not—but why so many white evangelicals did." Gorski's answer was simply "because they are also white Christian nationalists and Trumpism is inter alia a reactionary version of white Christian nationalism."

Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir sees the politics of purity in the white Christian nationalist rhetoric of evangelical supporters, such as the comparison of Nehemiah's wall around Jerusalem to Trump's wall keeping out the enemy, writing, "the notion of the enemy includes 'Mexican migrants', 'filthy' gays, and even Catholics 'led astray by Satan', and the real danger these enemies pose is degradation to a 'blessed—great— ... nation' whose God is the Lord."

Theologian Michael Horton believes Christian Trumpism represents the confluence of three trends that have come together, namely Christian American exceptionalism, end-times conspiracies, and the prosperity gospel, with Christian Americanism being the narrative that God specially called the United States into being as an extraordinary if not miraculous providence and end-times conspiracy referring to the world's annihilation (figurative or literal) due to some conspiracy of nefarious groups and globalist powers threatening American sovereignty. Horton thinks that what he calls the "cult of Christian Trumpism" blends these three ingredients with "a generous dose of hucksterism" as well as self-promotion and personality cult.

Evangelical Christian and historian John Fea believes "the church has warned against the pursuit of political power for a long, long time", but that many modern-day evangelicals such as Trump advisor and televangelist Paula White ignore these admonitions. Televangelist Jim Bakker praises prosperity gospel preacher White's ability to "walk into the White House at any time she wants to" and have "full access to the King." According to Fea, there are several other "court evangelicals" who have "devoted their careers to endorsing political candidates and Supreme Court justices who will restore what they believe to be the Judeo-Christian roots of the country" and who in turn are called on by Trump to "explain to their followers why Trump can be trusted in spite of his moral failings", including James Dobson, Franklin Graham, Johnnie Moore Jr., Ralph Reed, Gary Bauer, Richard Land, megachurch pastor Mark Burns and Southern Baptist pastor and Fox political commentator Robert Jeffress.

Christian Trumpism
Orientation	American civil religion American exceptionalism Christian nationalism Christian right Conservatism in the United States Cult of personality
Polity	Decentralized

For prominent Christians who fail to support Trump, the cost is a loss of presidential access and a substantial risk of criticism, a lesson learned by Timothy Dalrymple, president of the flagship magazine of evangelicals Christianity Today, and former chief editor Mark Galli, who were condemned by more than two hundred evangelical leaders for co-authoring a letter arguing that Christians were obligated to support the impeachment of Trump.

Historian Stephen Jaeger traces the history of admonitions against becoming beholden religious courtiers back to the 11th century, with warnings of curses placed on holy men barred from heaven for taking too "keen an interest in the affairs of the state." Dangers to the court clergy were described by Peter of Blois, a 12th-century French cleric, theologian and courtier who "knew that court life is the death of the soul" and that despite believing that participation at court was "contrary to God and salvation," the clerical courtiers justified it with comparisons to Moses being sent by God to the Pharaoh. Pope Pius II opposed the clergy's presence at court, believing it was difficult for a Christian courtier to "rein in ambition, suppress avarice, tame envy, strife, wrath, and cut off vice, while standing in the midst of these [very] things." The history of warnings of the corrupting influence of power on holy leaders is recounted by Fea who compares it to behavior of Trump's court evangelical leaders, warning that Christians risk "making idols out of political leaders."

A Trump supporter carries a QAnon tagged placard with Jesus wearing a MAGA hat at the moment the U.S. Congress was violently attacked by rioters on January 6, 2021.

External image
Same image as above, without the blurring

Jeffress claims that evangelical leaders' support of Trump is moral regardless of behavior that Christianity Today's chief editor called "a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused." Jeffress argues that "the godly principle here is that governments have one responsibility, and that is Romans 13 [which] says to avenge evil doers." This same biblical chapter was used by Jeff Sessions to claim biblical justification for Trump's policy of separating children from immigrant families. Historian Lincoln Muller explains this is one of two types of interpretations of Romans 13 which has been used in American political debates since its founding and is on the side of "the thread of American history that justifies oppression and domination in the name of law and order."

From Jeffress's reading, government's purpose is as a "strongman to protect its citizens against evildoers", adding: "I don't care about that candidate's tone or vocabulary, I want the meanest toughest son of a you-know-what I can find, and I believe that is biblical." Jeffress, who referred to Barack Obama as "paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist," Mitt Romney as a cult follower of a non-Christian religion and Roman Catholicism as a "Satanic" result of "Babylonian mystery religion" traces the Christian libertarian perspective on government's sole role to suppress evil back to Saint Augustine who argued in The City of God against the Pagans (426 CE) that government's role is to restrain evil so Christians can peacefully practice their beliefs. Martin Luther similarly believed that government should be limited to checking sin.

Like Jeffress, Richard Land refused to cut ties with Trump after his reaction to the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, with the explanation that "Jesus did not turn away from those who may have seemed brash with their words or behavior," adding that "now is not the time to quit or retreat, but just the opposite—to lean in closer." Johnnie Moore's explanation for refusing to repudiate Trump after his Charlottesville response was that "you only make a difference if you have a seat at the table."

Methods of persuasion

Further information: Big lie, Personal branding, and Truthiness

Children wearing "Make America Great Again" hats at the 2017 inauguration, a theme earlier established by Reagan to elicit a sense of restoration of hope

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild thinks emotional themes in Trump's rhetoric are fundamental, writing that his "speeches—evoking dominance, bravado, clarity, national pride, and personal uplift—inspire an emotional transformation," deeply resonating with their "emotional self-interest". Hochschild's perspective is that Trump is best understood as an "emotions candidate", arguing that comprehending the emotional self-interests of voters explains the paradox of the success of such politicians raised by Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas?, an anomaly which motivated her five-year immersive research into the emotional dynamics of the Tea Party movement which she believes has mutated into Trumpism.

The book resulting from her research, Strangers in Their Own Land, was named one of the "6 books to understand Trump's Win" by the New York Times. Hochschild claims it is wrong for progressives to assume that well-educated individuals have mainly been persuaded by political rhetoric to vote against their rational self-interest through appeals to the "bad angels" of their nature: "their greed, selfishness, racial intolerance, homophobia, and desire to get out of paying taxes that go to the unfortunate." She grants that the appeal to bad angels is made by Trump, but states that it "obscures another—to the right wing's good angels—their patience in waiting in line in scary economic times, their capacity for loyalty, sacrifice, and endurance", qualities she describes as a part of a motivating narrative she calls their "deep story", a social contract narrative that appears to be widely shared in other countries as well. She thinks Trump's approach towards his audience creates group cohesiveness among his followers by exploiting a crowd phenomenon Emile Durkheim called "collective effervescence", "a state of emotional excitation felt by those who join with others they take to be fellow members of a moral or biological tribe ... to affirm their unity and, united, they feel secure and respected."

Rhetorically, Trumpism employs absolutist framings and threat narratives characterized by a rejection of the political establishment. The absolutist rhetoric emphasizes non-negotiable boundaries and moral outrage at their supposed violation. The rhetorical pattern within a Trump rally is common for authoritarian movements. First, elicit a sense of depression, humiliation and victimhood. Second, separate the world into two opposing groups: a relentlessly demonized set of others versus those who have the power and will to overcome them. This involves vividly identifying the enemy supposedly causing the current state of affairs and then promoting paranoid conspiracy theories and fearmongering to inflame fear and anger. After cycling these first two patterns through the populace, the final message aims to produce a cathartic release of pent-up ochlocracy and mob energy, with a promise that salvation is at hand because there is a powerful leader who will deliver the nation back to its former glory.

Trump relies on theatrical devices to market his messages, including animated gestures, pantomiming and facial expressions. Photo is from the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference.

This three-part pattern was first identified in 1932 by Roger Money-Kyrle and later published in his Psychology of Propaganda. A constant barrage of sensationalistic rhetoric serves to rivet media attention while achieving multiple political objectives, not the least of which is that it serves to obscure actions such as profound neoliberal deregulation. One study gives the example that significant environmental deregulation occurred during the first year of the Trump administration due to its concurrent use of spectacular racist rhetoric but escaped much media attention. According to the authors, this served political objectives of dehumanizing its targets, eroding democratic norms, and consolidating power by emotionally connecting with and inflaming resentments among the base of followers but most importantly served to distract media attention from deregulatory policymaking by igniting intense media coverage of the distractions, precisely due to their radically transgressive nature.

Trump's skill with personal branding allowed him to effectively market himself as the Money-Kyrle extraordinary leader by leveraging his celebrity status and name recognition. As one of the communications director for the MAGA super PAC put it in 2016, "Like Hercules, Donald Trump is a work of fiction." Journalism professor Mark Danner explains that "week after week for a dozen years millions of Americans saw Donald J. Trump portraying the business magus [in The Apprentice], the grand vizier of capitalism, the wise man of the boardroom, a living confection whose every step and word bespoke gravitas and experience and power and authority and ... money. Endless amounts of money."

Political science scholar Andrea Schneiker regards the heavily promoted Trump public persona as that of a superhero, a genius but still "an ordinary citizen that, in case of an emergency, uses his superpowers to save others, that is, his country. He sees a problem, knows what has to be done in order to solve it, has the ability to fix the situation and does so. According to the branding strategy of Donald Trump ... a superhero is needed to solve the problems of ordinary Americans and the nation as such, because politicians are not able to do so. Hence, the superhero per definition is an anti-politician. Due to his celebrity status and his identity as entertainer, Donald Trump can thereby be considered to be allowed to take extraordinary measures and even to break rules."

Trump was the most prominent promoter of the birther conspiracy theory used to delegitimize his political rival employing a political tactic known as the big lie.

According to civil rights lawyer Burt Neuborne and political theorist William E. Connolly, Trumpist rhetoric employs tropes similar to those used by fascists in Germany to persuade citizens (at first a minority) to give up democracy, by using a barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, threats, xenophobia, national-security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never-ending search for scapegoats. Neuborne found twenty parallel practices, such as creating what amounts to an "alternate reality" in adherents' minds, through direct communications, by nurturing a fawning mass media and by deriding scientists to erode the notion of objective truth; organizing carefully orchestrated mass rallies; bitterly attacking judges when legal cases are lost or rejected; using an uninterrupted stream of lies, half-truths, insults, vituperation and innuendo designed to marginalize, demonize and eventually destroy opponents; making jingoistic appeals to ultranationalist fervor; and promising to slow, stop and even reverse the flow of "undesirable" ethnic groups who are cast as scapegoats for the nation's ills.

Connolly presents a similar list in his book Aspirational Fascism (2017), adding comparisons of the integration of theatrics and crowd participation with rhetoric, involving grandiose bodily gestures, grimaces, hysterical charges, dramatic repetitions of alternate reality falsehoods, and totalistic assertions incorporated into signature phrases that audiences are strongly encouraged to join in chanting. Despite the similarities, Connolly stresses that Trump is no Nazi but "is rather, an aspirational fascist who pursues crowd adulation, hyperaggressive nationalism, white triumphalism, and militarism, pursues a law-and-order regime giving unaccountable power to the police, and is a practitioner of a rhetorical style that regularly creates fake news and smears opponents to mobilize support for the Big Lies he advances."

Appeal to emotions

Historian Peter E. Gordon observes that "Trump, far from being a violation of the norm, actually signifies an emergent norm of the social order" where the categories of the psychological and political have dissolved. In accounting for Trump's election and ability to sustain high approval ratings among voters, Erika Tucker points out in the book Trump and Political Philosophy that though all presidential campaigns have strong emotions associated with them, Trump was able to recognize, and then to gain the trust and loyalty of those who felt strong emotions about perceived changes in the United States. She notes, "Political psychologist Drew Westen has argued that Democrats are less successful at gauging and responding to affective politics—issues that arouse strong emotional states in citizens."

Like many academics examining the populist appeal of Trump's messaging, Hidalgo-Tenorio and Benítez-Castro draw on the theories of Ernesto Laclau, writing, "The emotional appeal of populist discourse is key to its polarising effects, this being so much so that populism 'would be unintelligible without the affective component.' (Laclau 2005, 11)"

Trump uses rhetoric that political scientists have deemed to be both dehumanizing and connected to physical violence by Trump's followers.

Emotion, trust and media

Communications scholar Michael Carpini states that "Trumpism is a culmination of trends that have been occurring for several decades. What we are witnessing is nothing short of a fundamental shift in the relationships between journalism, politics, and democracy." Among the shifts, Carpini identifies "the collapsing of the prior [media] regime's presumed and enforced distinctions between news and entertainment." Examining Trump's use of media for the book Language in the Trump Era, communication professor Marco Jacquemet writes that "It's an approach that, like much of the rest of Trump's ideology and policy agenda, assumes (correctly, it appears) that his audiences care more about shock and entertainment value in their media consumption than almost anything else."

The perspective is shared among other communication academics, with Plasser & Ulram (2003) describing a media logic which emphasizes "personalization ... a political star system ... [and] sports based dramatization." Olivier Jutel notes that "Donald Trump's celebrity status and reality-TV rhetoric of 'winning' and 'losing' corresponds perfectly to these values", asserting that "Fox News and conservative personalities from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Alex Jones do not simply represent a new political and media voice but embody the convergence of politics and media in which affect and enjoyment are the central values of media production."

Studying paranoia in media, anthropologist Jessica Johnson writes, "Rather than finding accurate news meaningful, Facebook users find the affective pleasure of connectivity addictive, whether or not the information they share is factual, and that is how communicative capitalism captivates subjects as it holds them captive." Looking back at the world prior to social media, communications researcher Brian L. Ott writes: "I'm nostalgic for the world of television that [Neil] Postman (1985) argued, produced the 'least well-informed people in the Western world' by packaging news as entertainment. (pp. 106–107) Twitter is producing the most self-involved people in history by treating everything one does or thinks as newsworthy. Television may have assaulted journalism, but Twitter killed it." Commenting on Trump's support among Fox News viewers, Hofstra University Communication Dean Mark Lukasiewicz has a similar perspective, writing, "Tristan Harris famously said that social networks are about 'affirmation, not information'—and the same can be said about cable news, especially in prime time."

The American way affirming upward mobility for the deserving is, according to academics such as Kimmel and Hochschild, a promise that many Americans feel has been denied them due to forces described within a shared "deep story" commonly held among Trump supporters.

Arlie Russell Hochschild holds that Trump supporters trust their preferred sources of information due to the affective bond they have with them. As media scholar Daniel Kreiss summarizes Hochschild, "Trump, along with Fox News, gave these strangers in their own land the hope that they would be restored to their rightful place at the center of the nation, and provided a very real emotional release from the fetters of political correctness that dictated they respect people of color, lesbians and gays, and those of other faiths ... that the network's personalities share the same 'deep story' of political and social life, and therefore they learn from them 'what to feel afraid, angry, and anxious about.'"

From Kreiss's 2018 account of conservative personalities and media, information became less important than providing a sense of familial bonding, where "family provides a sense of identity, place, and belonging; emotional, social, and cultural support and security; and gives rise to political and social affiliations and beliefs." Hochschild gives the example of a woman who states, "Bill O'Reilly is like a steady, reliable dad. Sean Hannity is like a difficult uncle who rises to anger too quickly. Megyn Kelly is like a smart sister. Then there's Greta Van Susteren. And Juan Williams, who came over from NPR, which was too left for him, the adoptee. They're all different, just like in a family."

Media scholar Olivier Jutel notes that, "Affect is central to the brand strategy of Fox which imagined its journalism not in terms of servicing the rational citizen in the public sphere but in 'craft[ing] intensive relationships with their viewers' (Jones, 2012: 180) in order to sustain audience share across platforms." In this segmented market, Trump "offers himself as an ego-ideal to an individuated public of enjoyment that coalesce around his media brand as part of their own performance of identity." Jutel states that news media companies benefit from offering spectacle and drama. "Trump is a definitive product of mediatized politics providing the spectacle that drives ratings and affective media consumption, either as part of his populist movement or as the liberal resistance."

Researchers give differing emphasis to which emotions are important to followers. Michael Richardson argues in the Journal of Media and Cultural Studies that "affirmation, amplification and circulation of disgust is one of the primary affective drivers of Trump's political success." Richardson agrees with Ott about the "entanglement of Trumpian affect and social media crowds" who seek "affective affirmation, confirmation and amplification. Social media postings of crowd experiences accumulate as 'archives of feelings' that are both dynamic in nature and affirmative of social values (Pybus 2015, 239)."

Using Trump as an example, social trust expert Karen Jones follows philosopher Annette Baier in explaining that the masters of the art of creating trust and distrust are populist politicians and criminals, who "show a masterful appreciation of the ways in which certain emotional states drive out trust and replace it with distrust." Jones sees Trump as an exemplar of this class who recognize that fear and contempt are tools that can reorient networks of trust and distrust in social networks in order to alter how a potential supporter "interprets the words, deeds, and motives of the other." She holds that "A core strategy of Donald Trump, both as candidate and president, has been to manufacture fear and contempt towards some undocumented migrants (among other groups)", a strategy which "has gone global ... in Australia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Italy and the United Kingdom."

Trump rallies

Trump at a Make America Great Again rally in Arizona, 2018

Reporting on the crowd dynamics of Trumpist rallies has documented expressions of the Money-Kyrle pattern and associated stagecraft, with some comparing the symbiotic dynamics of crowd pleasing to that of the sports entertainment style of events which Trump was involved with since the 1980s. Critical theory scholar Douglas Kellner compares the elaborate staging of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will with that used with Trump supporters using the example of the preparation of photo op sequences and aggressive hyping of huge attendance expected for Trump's 2015 primary event in Mobile, Alabama, when the media coverage repeatedly cuts between the Trump jet circling the stadium, the rising excitement of rapturous admirers below, the motorcade and the final triumphal entrance of the individual Kellner claims is being presented as the "political savior to help them out with their problems and address their grievances".

Connolly thinks the performance draws energy from the crowd's anger as it channels it, drawing it into a collage of anxieties, frustrations and resentments about malaise themes, such as deindustrialization, offshoring, racial tensions, political correctness, a more humble position for the United States in global security, economics and so on. Connolly observes that animated gestures, pantomiming, facial expressions, strutting and finger pointing are incorporated as part of the theater, transforming the anxiety into anger directed at particular targets, concluding that "each element in a Trump performance flows and folds into the others until an aggressive resonance machine is formed that is more intense than its parts."

Some academics point out that the narrative common in the popular press describing the psychology of such crowds is a repetition of a 19th-century theory by Gustave Le Bon when organized crowds were seen by political elites as potential threats to the social order. In his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), Le Bon described a sort of collective contagion uniting a crowd into a near religious frenzy, reducing members to barbaric, if not subhuman levels of consciousness with mindless goals. Since such a description depersonalizes supporters, this type of Le Bon analysis is criticized because the would-be defenders of liberal democracy simultaneously are dodging responsibility for investigating grievances while also unwittingly accepting the same us vs. them framing of illiberalism. Connolly acknowledges the risks but considers it more risky to ignore that Trumpian persuasion is successful due to deliberate use of techniques evoking more mild forms of affective contagion.

Falsehoods

See also: Stop the Steal and False or misleading statements by Donald Trump

Fact-checkers from The Washington Post, the Toronto Star, and CNN compiled data on "false or misleading claims", and "false claims", respectively. The Post reported 30,573 false or misleading claims in four years, an average of more than 20.9 per day.

To sow election doubt, Trump escalated use of "rigged election" and "election interference" statements in advance of the 2024 election compared to the previous two elections—the statements described as part of a "heads I win; tails you cheated" rhetorical strategy.

Google Trends topic searches for "Gaslighting" began a substantial increase in 2016, at the time of the campaign for the U.S. presidential election.

Google Trends topic searches for "Fake news" began a substantial increase in late 2016, about the time of the U.S. presidential election.

The absolutist rhetoric employed heavily favors crowd reaction over veracity, with a large number of falsehoods which Trump presents as facts. Drawing on Harry G. Frankfurt's book On Bullshit, political science professor Matthew McManus points out that it is more precise to identify Trump as a bullshitter whose sole interest is to persuade, and not a liar (e.g. Richard Nixon) who takes the power of truth seriously and so deceitfully attempts to conceal it. Trump by contrast is indifferent to the truth or unaware of it. Unlike conventional lies of politicians exaggerating their accomplishments, Trump's lies are egregious, making lies about easily verifiable facts. At one rally Trump stated his father "came from Germany", even though Fred Trump was born in New York City.

Trump is surprised when his falsehoods are contradicted, as was the case when leaders at the 2018 United Nations General Assembly burst into laughter at his boast that he had accomplished more in his first two years than any other United States president. Visibly startled, Trump responded to the audience: "I didn't expect that reaction." Trump lies about the trivial, such as claiming that there was no rain on the day of his inauguration when in fact it did rain, as well as making grandiose "Big Lies", such as claiming that Obama founded ISIS, or promoting the birther movement, a conspiracy theory which claims that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. Connolly points to the similarities of such reality-bending gaslighting with fascist and post Soviet techniques of propaganda including Kompromat (scandalous material), stating that "Trumpian persuasion draws significantly upon the repetition of Big Lies."

Robert Jay Lifton, a scholar of psychohistory and authority on the nature of cults, emphasizes the importance of understanding Trumpism "as an assault on reality". A leader has more power if he is in any part successful at making truth irrelevant to his followers. Trump biographer Timothy L. O'Brien agrees, stating: "It is a core operating principle of Trumpism. If you constantly attack objective reality, you are left as the only trustworthy source of information, which is one of his goals for his relationship with his supporters—that they should believe no one else but him." Lifton believes Trump is a purveyor of a solipsistic reality which is hostile to facts and is made collective by amplifying frustrations and fears held by his community of zealous believers.

More combative, less ideological base

Journalist Elaina Plott suggests ideology is not as important as other characteristics of Trumpism. Plott cites political analyst Jeff Roe, who observed Trump "understood" and acted on the trend among Republican voters to be "less ideological" but "more polarized". Republicans are now more willing to accept policies like government mandated health care coverage for pre-existing conditions or trade tariffs, formerly disdained by conservatives as burdensome government regulations. At the same time, strong avowals of support for Trump and aggressive partisanship have become part of Republican election campaigning—in at least some parts of America—reaching down even to non-partisan campaigns for local government which formerly were collegial and issue-driven. Research by political scientist Marc Hetherington and others has found Trump supporters tend to share a "worldview" transcending political ideology, agreeing with statements like "the best strategy is to play hardball, even if it means being unfair." In contrast, those who agree with statements like "cooperation is the key to success" tend to prefer Trump's adversary former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

On January 31, 2021, a detailed overview of the attempt by combative Trump supporters to subvert the election of the United States was published in The New York Times. Journalist Nicholas Lemann writes of the disconnect between some of Trump's campaign rhetoric and promises, and what he accomplished once in office—and the fact that the difference seemed to bother very few supporters. The campaign themes being anti-free-trade nationalism, defense of Social Security, attacks on big business, "building that big, beautiful wall and making Mexico pay for it", repealing Obama's Affordable Care Act, a trillion dollar infrastructure-building program. The accomplishments being "conventional" Republican policies and legislation—substantial tax cuts, rollbacks of federal regulations, and increases in military spending. Many have noted that instead of the Republican National Convention issuing the customary "platform" of policies and promises for the 2020 campaign, it offered a "one-page resolution" stating that the party was not "going to have a new platform, but instead ... 'has and will continue to enthusiastically support the president's America-first agenda.'"

An alternate nonideological circular definition of Trumpism widely held among Trump activists was reported by Saagar Enjeti, chief Washington correspondent for The Hill, who stated: "I was frequently told by people wholly within the MAGA camp that trumpism meant anything Trump does, ergo nothing that he did is a departure from trumpism."

Ideological themes

Trumpism differs from classical Abraham Lincoln Republicanism in many ways regarding free trade, immigration, equality, checks and balances in federal government, and the separation of church and state. Peter J. Katzenstein of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center believes that Trumpism rests on three pillars, namely nationalism, religion and race. According to Jeff Goodwin, Trumpism is characterized by five key elements: social conservatism, neoliberal capitalism, economic nationalism, nativism, and white nationalism.

At the 2021 CPAC conference, Trump gave his own definition of what defines Trumpism: "What it means is great deals, ... . Like the USMCA replacement of the horrible NAFTA. ... It means low taxes and eliminated job killing regulations, ... . It means strong borders, but people coming into our country based on a system of merit. ... [I]t means no riots in the streets. It means law enforcement. It means very strong protection for the second amendment and the right to keep and bear arms. ... [I]t means a strong military and taking care of our vets ... ."

Social psychology

Dominance orientation

Trump supporters employed a variety of dominance imagery in flags, clothing and a mock gallows on January 6, 2021, when violent Trumpist rioters attempted to overturn the 2020 election, temporarily succeeding in preventing Congress from certifying Trump's loss.

Social psychology research into the Trump movement, such as that of Bob Altemeyer, Thomas F. Pettigrew, and Karen Stenner, views the Trump movement as primarily being driven by the psychological predispositions of its followers, although political and historical factors (reviewed elsewhere in this article) are also involved. An article in Social Psychological and Personality Science described a study concluding that Trump followers prefer hierarchical and ethnocentric social orders that favor their in-group.

In the non-academic book, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers, Altemeyer and John Dean describe research which reaches the same conclusions. Despite disparate and inconsistent beliefs and ideologies, a coalition of such followers can become cohesive and broad in part because each individual "compartmentalizes" their thoughts and they are free to define their sense of the threatened tribal in-group in their own terms, whether it is predominantly related to their cultural or religious views (e.g. the mystery of evangelical support for Trump), nationalism (e.g. the Make America Great Again slogan), or their race (maintaining a white majority).

Mock gallows and Trump supporters attacking Congress on January 6, 2021

Altemeyer, MacWilliams, Feldman, Choma, Hancock, Van Assche and Pettigrew claim that instead of directly attempting to measure such ideological, racial or policy views, supporters of such movements can be reliably predicted by using two social psychology scales (singly or in combination), namely right-wing authoritarian (RWA) measures which were developed in the 1980s by Altemeyer and other authoritarian personality researchers, and the social dominance orientation (SDO) scale developed in the 1990s by social dominance theorists.

In May 2019, Monmouth University Polling Institute conducted a study in collaboration with Altemeyer in order to empirically test the hypothesis using the SDO and RWA measures. The finding was that social dominance orientation and affinity for authoritarian leadership are highly correlated with followers of Trumpism. This study further confirmed of the studies discussed in MacWilliams (2016), Feldman (2020), Choma and Hancock (2017), and Van Assche & Pettigrew (2016).

The research does not imply that the followers always behave in an authoritarian manner but that expression is contingent, which means there is reduced influence if it is not triggered by fear and what the subject perceives as threats. Similar social psychological techniques for analyzing Trumpism have been effective in identifying adherents of similar movements in Europe, including in Belgium and France (Lubbers & Scheepers, 2002; Swyngedouw & Giles, 2007; Van Hiel & Mervielde, 2002; Van Hiel, 2012), the Netherlands (Cornelis & Van Hiel, 2014) and Italy (Leone, Desimoni & Chirumbolo, 2014). Quoting comments from participants in focus groups made up of people who had voted for Democrat Obama in 2012 but flipped to Trump in 2016, pollster Diane Feldman noted the anti-government, anti-coastal-elite anger: "'They think they're better than us, they're P.C., they're virtue-signallers.' '[Trump] doesn't come across as one of those people who think they're better than us and are screwing us.' 'They lecture us.' 'They don't even go to church.' 'They're in charge, and they're ripping us off.'"

Comparisons to animal social behavior

Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich explained the central role of dominance in his speech "Principles of Trumpism", comparing the needed leadership style to that of a violent bear. Psychology researcher Dan P. McAdams thinks a better comparison is to the dominance behavior of alpha male chimpanzees such as Yeroen, the subject of an extensive study of chimp social behavior conducted by renowned primatologist Frans de Waal. Christopher Boehm, a professor of biology and anthropology agrees, writing, "his model of political posturing has echoes of what I saw in the wild in six years in Tanzania studying the Gombe chimpanzees," and "seems like a classic alpha display."

Using the example of Yeroen, McAdams describes the similarities: "On Twitter, Trump's incendiary tweets are like Yeroen's charging displays. In chimp colonies, the alpha male occasionally goes berserk and starts screaming, hooting, and gesticulating wildly as he charges toward other males nearby. Pandemonium ensues as rival males cower in fear ... Once the chaos ends, there is a period of peace and order, wherein rival males pay homage to the alpha, visiting him, grooming him, and expressing various forms of submission. In Trump's case, his tweets are designed to intimidate his foes and rally his submissive base ... These verbal outbursts reinforce the president's dominance by reminding everybody of his wrath and his force."

Primatologist Dame Jane Goodall explains that like the dominance performances of Trump, "In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: Stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position." The comparison has been echoed by political observers sympathetic to Trump. Nigel Farage, an enthusiastic backer of Trump, stated that in the 2016 United States presidential debates where Trump loomed up on Clinton, he "looked like a big silverback gorilla", and added that "he is that big alpha male. The leader of the pack!"

McAdams points out the audience gets to vicariously share in the sense of dominance due to the parasocial bonding that his performance produces for his fans, as shown by Shira Gabriel's research studying the phenomenon in Trump's role in The Apprentice. McAdams writes that the "television audience vicariously experienced the world according to Donald Trump", a world where Trump says "Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat."

Collective narcissism

Further information: Collective narcissism, Donald Trump on social media, and Post-truth politics

Cultural anthropologist Paul Stoller thinks Trump masterfully employed the fundamentals of celebrity culture-glitz, illusion and fantasy to construct a shared alternate reality where lies become truth and reality's resistance to one's own dreams are overcome by the right attitude and bold self-confidence. Trump's father indoctrinated his children from an early age into the sort of positive thinking approach to reality advocated by the family's pastor Norman Vincent Peale. Trump boasted that Peale considered him the greatest student of his philosophy that regards facts as not important, because positive attitudes will instead cause what you "image" to materialize. Trump biographer Gwenda Blair thinks Trump took Peale's self-help philosophy and "weaponized it".

Social psychologists describe as collective narcissism as a commonly held and strong emotional investment in the idea that one's group has a special status in society. It is often accompanied by chronic expressions of intolerance towards out-groups, intergroup aggression and frequent expressions of group victimhood whenever the in-group feels threatened by perceived criticisms or lack of proper respect for the in-group. Identity of group members is closely tied to the collective identity expressed by its leader, motivating multiple studies to examine its relationship to authoritarian movements. Collective narcissism measures have been shown to be a powerful predictor of membership in such movements including Trump's.

External videos
Presentation by John Fea on Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, July 7, 2018, C-SPAN
Washington Journal interview with Fea on Believe Me, July 8, 2018, C-SPAN

In his book Believe Me which details Trump's exploitation of white evangelical politics of fear, Messiah College history professor John Fea points out the narcissistic nature of the fanciful appeals to nostalgia, noting that "In the end, the practice of nostalgia is inherently selfish because it focuses entirely on our own experience of the past and not on the experience of others. For example, people nostalgic for the world of Leave It to Beaver may fail to recognize that other people, perhaps even some of the people living in the Cleaver's suburban "paradise" of the 1950s, were not experiencing the world in a way that they would describe as 'great.' Nostalgia can give us tunnel vision. Its selective use of the past fails to recognize the complexity and breadth of the human experience ... ."

According to historian John Fea, many Trump followers find common ground with others who seek refuge from change by urging return to a utopian Leave it to Beaver version of America that never actually existed.

According to Fea, the hopelessness of achieving such fanciful versions of an idealized past "causes us to imagine a future filled with horror" making anything unfamiliar the fodder for conspiratorial narratives that easily mobilize white evangelicals who cannot summon "the kind of spiritual courage necessary to overcome fear." As a result, they not only embrace these fears but are easily captivated by a strongman such as Trump who repeats and amplifies their fears while posing as the deliverer from them. In his review of Fea's analysis of the impact of conspiracy theories on white evangelical Trump supporters, scholar of religious politics David Gutterman writes: "The greater the threat, the more powerful the deliverance." Gutterman's view is that "Donald J. Trump did not invent this formula; evangelicals have, in their lack of spiritual courage, demanded and gloried in this message for generations. Despite the literal biblical reassurance to 'fear not,' white evangelicals are primed for fear, their identity is stoked by fear, and the sources of fear are around every unfamiliar turn.

Social theory scholar John Cash notes that disaster narratives of impending horrors have a broader audience than a single community whose identity is associated with specific collectively held certainties offered by white evangelical leaders, pointing to a 2010 Pew study which found that 41 percent of those in the US think that the world will either definitely or probably be destroyed by the middle of the century. Cash points out that certainties may be found in other narratives which also have the unifying effect of binding like minded individuals into shared "us versus them" narratives such as those based on race or political absolutisms.

Cash notes that all political systems must endure some such exposure to the lure of narcissism, fantasy, illogicality and distortion. Cash thinks that psychoanalytic theorist Joel Whitebook is correct that "Trumpism as a social experience can be understood as a psychotic like phenomenon, that "[Trumpism is] an intentional [...] attack on our relation to reality." Whitebook thinks Trump's playbook is like that of Putin's strategist Vladislav Surkov who employs "ceaseless shapeshifting, appealing to nationalist skinheads one moment and human rights groups the next."

Cash makes comparisons to an Alice in Wonderland world when describing Trump's adept ability to hold a looking glass up to followers with disparate fantasies by seemingly embracing all of them in a series of contradictory tweets and pronouncements. Cash cites examples such as Trump appearing to support and encourage the "very fine people" among the "neo-Nazi protestors [who] carried torches that were clear signifiers of a nostalgia" after Charlottesville or for audiences with felt grievances about America's first black president, conspiracy fantasies such as the claim that Obama wiretapped him. Cash writes: "Unlike the resilient Alice, who, having stepped through the looking-glass, insists on truth and accuracy when confronted by a world of reversals, contradictions, nonsense and irrationality, Trump reverses this process. Captivated by his own image and, hence, both unwilling and unable to step through the looking-glass for fear of disturbing and dissolving that narcissistic fascination with his preferred self-image, Trump has dragged the uninhibited and distorted world of the other side of the looking-glass into our shared world."

Although the leader possesses dominant ownership of the reality shared by the group, Lifton sees important differences between Trumpism and typical cults, such as not advancing a totalist ideology and that isolation from the outside world is not used to preserve group cohesion. Lifton does identify multiple similarities with the kinds of cults disparaging the fake world that outsiders are deluded by in preference for their true reality—a world that transcends the illusions and false information created by the cult's titanic enemies. Persuasion techniques similar to those of cults are used such as indoctrination employing constant echoing of catch phrases (via rally response, retweet, or Facebook share), or in participatory response to the guru's like utterances either in person or in online settings. Examples include the use of call and response ("Clinton" triggers "lock her up"; "immigrants" triggers "build that wall"; "who will pay for it?" triggers "Mexico"), thereby deepening the sense of participation with the transcendent unity between the leader and the community. Participants and observers at rallies have remarked on the special kind of liberating feeling that is often experienced which Lifton calls a "high state" that "can even be called experiences of transcendence".

Conspiracy theories

See also: List of conspiracy theories promoted by Donald Trump

Far-right conspiracy theories such as QAnon are widely accepted among Trump supporters with half believing both elements of the theory according to polling data from 2020. Pictured are Vice President Mike Pence and members of the Broward County, Florida SWAT team assigned to a high-profile security detail, one of whom is wearing a QAnon patch.

Conservative culture commentator David Brooks observes that under Trump, this post-truth mindset heavily reliant on conspiracy themes came to dominate Republican identity, providing its believers a sense of superiority since such insiders possess important information most people do not have. This results in an empowering sense of agency with the liberation, entitlement and group duty to reject "experts" and the influence of hidden cabals seeking to dominate them. Social media amplify the power of members to promote and expand their connections with like minded believers in insular alternate reality echo chambers. Social psychology and cognitive science research shows that individuals seek information and communities that confirm their views and that even those with critical thinking skills sufficient to identify false claims with non political material cannot do so when interpreting factual material that does not conform to political beliefs.

While such media-enabled departures from shared, fact-based reality dates at least as far back as 1439 with the appearance of the Gutenberg press, what is new about social media is the personal bond created through direct and instantaneous communications from the leader, and the constant opportunity to repeat the messages and participate in the group identity signaling behavior. Prior to 2015, Trump already had firmly established this kind of parasocial bond with a substantial base of followers due to his repeated television and media appearances. For those sharing political views similar to his, Trump's use of Twitter to share his conspiratorial views caused those emotional bonds to intensify, causing his supporters to feel a deepened empathetic bond as with a friend—sharing his anger, sharing his moral outrage, taking pride in his successes, sharing in his denial of failures and his oftentimes conspiratorial views.

Dominance imagery using the Stop the Steal conspiracy theme erected on the day of the Capitol assault. Three of every four Republicans believe the conspiracy theory with nearly half approving of the Capitol assault.

Given their effectiveness as an emotional tool, Brooks thinks such sharing of conspiracy theories has become the most powerful community bonding mechanism of the 21st century. Conspiracy theories usually have a strong political component and books such as Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics describe the political efficacy of these alternate takes on reality. Some attribute Trump's political success to making such narratives a regular staple of Trumpist rhetoric, such as the purported rigging of the 2016 election to defeat Trump, that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, that Obama was not born in the United States, multiple conspiracy theories about the Clintons, that vaccines cause autism and so on. One of the most popular though disproven and discredited conspiracy theories is QAnon, which asserts that top Democrats run an elite child sex-trafficking ring and President Trump is making efforts to dismantle it. An October 2020 Yahoo-YouGov poll showed that these QAnon claims are mainstream, not fringe beliefs among Trump supporters, with both elements of the theory said to be true by fully half of Trump supporters polled.

Some social psychologists see the predisposition of Trumpists towards interpreting social interactions in terms of dominance frameworks as extending to their relationship towards facts. A study by Felix Sussenbach and Adam B. Moore found that the dominance motive strongly correlated with hostility towards disconfirming facts and affinity for conspiracies among 2016 Trump voters but not among Clinton voters. Many critics note Trump's skill in exploiting narrative, emotion, and a whole host of rhetorical ploys to draw supporters into the group's common adventure as characters in a story much bigger than themselves.

It is a story that involves not just a community-building call to arms to defeat titanic threats, or of the leader's heroic deeds restoring American greatness, but of a restoration of each supporter's individual sense of liberty and power to control their lives. Trump channels and amplifies these aspirations, explaining in one of his books that his bending of the truth is effective because it plays to people's greatest fantasies. By contrast, Clinton was dismissive of such emotion-filled storytelling and ignored the emotional dynamics of the Trumpist narrative.

Media and pillarization

Culture industry

Further information: Culture industry

Peter E. Gordon, Alex Ross, sociologist David L. Andrews and Harvard political theorist David Lebow look on Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's concept of the "culture industry" as useful for comprehending Trumpism. As Ross explains the concept, the culture industry replicates "fascist methods of mass hypnosis ... blurring the line between reality and fiction", explaining, "Trump is as much a pop-culture phenomenon as he is a political one." Gordon observes that these purveyors of popular culture are not just leveraging outrage, but are turning politics into a more commercially lucrative product, a "polarized, standardized reflection of opinion into forms of humor and theatricalized outrage within narrow niche markets ... within which one swoons to one's preferred slogan and already knows what one knows. Name just about any political position and what sociologists call 'pillarization'—or what the Frankfurt School called 'ticket' thinking—will predict, almost without fail, a full suite of opinions."

Trumpism is from Lebow's perspective, more of a result of this process than a cause. In the intervening years since Adorno's work, Lebow believes the culture industry has evolved into a politicizing culture market "based increasingly on the internet, constituting a self-referential hyperreality shorn from any reality of referants ... sensationalism and insulation intensify intolerance of dissonance and magnify hostility against alternative hyperrealities. In a self-reinforcing logic of escalation, intolerance and hostility further encourage sensationalism and the retreat into insularity." From Gordon's view, "Trumpism itself, one could argue, is just another name for the culture industry, where the performance of undoing repression serves as a means for carrying on precisely as before."

From this viewpoint, the susceptibility to psychological manipulation of individuals with social dominance inclinations is not at the center of Trumpism, but is instead the "culture industry" which exploits these and other susceptibilities by using mechanisms that condition people to think in standardized ways. The burgeoning culture industry respects no political boundaries as it develops these markets with Gordon emphasizing "This is true on the left as well as the right, and it is especially noteworthy once we countenance what passes for political discourse today. Instead of a public sphere, we have what Jürgen Habermas long ago called the refeudalization of society."

What Kreiss calls an "identity-based account of media" is important for understanding Trump's success because "citizens understand politics and accept information through the lens of partisan identity. ... The failure to come to grips with a socially embedded public and an identity group–based democracy has placed significant limits on our ability to imagine a way forward for journalism and media in the Trump era. As Fox News and Breitbart have discovered, there is power in the claim of representing and working for particular publics, quite apart from any abstract claims to present the truth."

Profitability of spectacle and outrage

Further information: Outrage discourse

Examining trumpism as an entertainment product, some media research focuses on the heavy reliance on outrage discourse which in terms of media coverage privileged Trump's rhetoric over that of other candidates due to the symbiotic relationship between his focus on the entertainment value of such storytelling and the commercial interests of media companies. A unique form of incivility, the use of outrage narratives on political blogs, talk radio and cable news opinion shows had in the decades prior become representative of a relatively new political opinion media genre which had experienced significant growth due to its profitability.

Media critic David Denby writes, "Like a good standup comic, Trump invites the audience to join him in the adventure of delivering his act—in this case, the barbarously entertaining adventure of running a Presidential campaign that insults everybody." Denby's claim is that Trump is simply good at delivering the kind of political entertainment product consumers demand. He observes that "The movement's standard of allowable behavior has been formed by popular culture—by standup comedy and, recently, by reality TV and by the snarking, trolling habits of the Internet. You can't effectively say that Donald Trump is vulgar, sensational, and buffoonish when it's exactly vulgar sensationalism and buffoonery that his audience is buying. Donald Trump has been produced by America."

Although Trump's outrage discourse was characterized by fictional assertions, mean spirited attacks against various groups and dog whistle appeals to racial and religious intolerance, media executives could not ignore its profitability. CBS's CEO Les Moonves remarked that "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," demonstrating how Trumpism's form of messaging and the commercial goals of media companies are not only compatible but mutually lucrative. Peter Wehner, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center considers Trump a political "shock jock" who "thrives on creating disorder, in violating rules, in provoking outrage."

The political profitability of incivility was demonstrated by the extraordinary amount of free airtime gifted to Trump's 2016 primary campaign—estimated at two billion dollars, which according to media tracking companies grew to almost five billion by the end of the national campaign. The advantage of incivility was as true in social media, where "a BuzzFeed analysis found that the top 20 fake election news stories emanating from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated more engagement on Facebook (as measured by shares, reactions, and comments) than the top 20 election stories produced by 19 major news outlets combined, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, and NBC News."

Social media

Further information: Collective narcissism, Group polarization, and Social media use by Donald Trump

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

My use of social media is not Presidential – it's MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!

July 1, 2017

Surveying research of how Trumpist communication is well suited to social media, Brian Ott writes that, "commentators who have studied Trump's public discourse have observed speech patterns that correspond closely to what I identified as Twitter's three defining features [Simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility]." Media critic Neal Gabler has a similar viewpoint writing that "What FDR was to radio and JFK to television, Trump is to Twitter." Outrage discourse expert Patrick O'Callaghan argues that social media is most effective when it utilizes the particular type of communication which Trump relies on. O'Callaghan notes that sociologist Sarah Sobieraj and political scientist Jeffrey M. Berry almost perfectly described in 2011 the social media communication style used by Trump long before his presidential campaign.

They explained that such discourse "[involves] efforts to provoke visceral responses (e.g., anger, righteousness, fear, moral indignation) from the audience through the use of overgeneralizations, sensationalism, misleading or patently inaccurate information, ad hominem attacks, and partial truths about opponents, who may be individuals, organizations, or entire communities of interest (e.g., progressives or conservatives) or circumstance (e.g., immigrants). Outrage sidesteps the messy nuances of complex political issues in favor of melodrama, misrepresentative exaggeration, mockery, and improbable forecasts of impending doom. Outrage talk is not so much discussion as it is verbal competition, political theater with a scorecard."

Trump's hourly tweet activity from his first tweet in May 2009 until his suspension from the website in 2021. His tweet activity pattern changed markedly in 2013.

Due to Facebook's and Twitter's narrowcasting environment in which outrage discourse thrives, Trump's employment of such messaging at almost every opportunity was from O'Callaghan's account extremely effective because tweets and posts were repeated in viral fashion among like minded supporters, thereby rapidly building a substantial information echo chamber, a phenomenon Cass Sunstein identifies as group polarization, and other researchers refer to as a kind of self re-enforcing homophily. Within these information cocoons, it matters little to social media companies whether much of the information spread in such pillarized information silos is false, because as digital culture critic Olivia Solon points out, "the truth of a piece of content is less important than whether it is shared, liked, and monetized."

Citing Pew Research's survey that found 62% of US adults get their news from social media, Ott expresses alarm, "since the 'news' content on social media regularly features fake and misleading stories from sources devoid of editorial standards." Media critic Alex Ross is similarly alarmed, observing, "Silicon Valley monopolies have taken a hands-off, ideologically vacant attitude toward the upswelling of ugliness on the Internet," and that "the failure of Facebook to halt the proliferation of fake news during the [Trump vs. Clinton] campaign season should have surprised no one. ... Traffic trumps ethics."

O'Callaghan's analysis of Trump's use of social media is that "outrage hits an emotional nerve and is therefore grist to the populist's or the social antagonist's mill. Secondly, the greater and the more widespread the outrage discourse, the more it has a detrimental effect on social capital. This is because it leads to mistrust and misunderstanding amongst individuals and groups, to entrenched positions, to a feeling of 'us versus them'. So understood, outrage discourse not only produces extreme and polarising views but also ensures that a cycle of such views continues. (Consider also in this context Wade Robison (2020) on the 'contagion of passion' and Cass Sunstein (2001, pp. 98–136) on 'cybercascades'.)" Ott agrees, stating that contagion is the best word to describe the viral nature of outrage discourse on social media, and writing that "Trump's simple, impulsive, and uncivil Tweets do more than merely reflect sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia; they spread those ideologies like a social cancer."

Robison warns that emotional contagion should not be confused with the contagion of passions that James Madison and David Hume were concerned with. Robison states they underestimated the contagion of passions mechanism at work in movements, whose modern expressions include the surprising phenomena of rapidly mobilized social media supporters behind both the Arab Spring and the Trump presidential campaign writing, "It is not that we experience something and then, assessing it, become passionate about it, or not", and implying that "we have the possibility of a check on our passions." Robison's view is that the contagion affects the way reality itself is experienced by supporters because it leverages how subjective certainty is triggered, so that those experiencing the contagiously shared alternate reality are unaware they have taken on a belief they should assess.

Similar movements, politicians and personalities

See also: List of politicians associated with Trumpism, List of Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign political endorsements, and List of Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign non-political endorsements

Historical background in the United States

An 1832 political cartoon depicting two-term President Andrew Jackson as an autocratic king, with the constitution trampled beneath his feet

The roots of Trumpism in the United States can be traced to the Jacksonian era according to scholars Walter Russell Mead, Peter Katzenstein, and Edwin Kent Morris. Eric Rauchway says: "Trumpism—nativism and white supremacy—has deep roots in American history. But Trump himself put it to new and malignant purpose."

Andrew Jackson's followers felt he was one of them, enthusiastically supporting his defiance of politically correct norms of the nineteenth century and even constitutional law when they stood in the way of public policy popular among his followers. Jackson ignored the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Worcester v. Georgia and initiated the forced Cherokee removal from their treaty protected lands to benefit white locals at the cost of between 2,000 and 6,000 dead Cherokee men, women, and children. Notwithstanding such cases of Jacksonian inhumanity, Mead's view is that Jacksonianism provides the historical precedent explaining the movement of followers of Trump, marrying grass-roots disdain for elites, deep suspicion of overseas entanglements, and obsession with American power and sovereignty, acknowledging that it has often been a xenophobic, "whites only" political movement. Mead thinks this "hunger in America for a Jacksonian figure" drives followers towards Trump but cautions that historically "he is not the second coming of Andrew Jackson," stating that Trump's "proposals tended to be pretty vague and often contradictory," exhibiting the common weakness of newly elected populist leaders, commenting early in his presidency that "now he has the difficulty of, you know, 'How do you govern?'"

Morris agrees with Mead, locating Trumpism's roots in the Jacksonian era from 1828 to 1848 under the presidencies of Jackson, Martin Van Buren and James K. Polk. On Morris's view, Trumpism also shares similarities with the post-World War I faction of the progressive movement which catered to a conservative populist recoil from the looser morality of the cosmopolitan cities and America's changing racial complexion. In his book The Age of Reform (1955), historian Richard Hofstadter identified this faction's emergence when "a large part of the Progressive-Populist tradition had turned sour, became illiberal and ill-tempered."

A 1927 "America First" political advertisement advocating isolationism and establishing emotional ties of 1927 Chicago mayoral candidate William Hale Thompson with his German and Irish supporters by vilifying the United Kingdom, a close ally

Prior to World War II, conservative themes of Trumpism were expressed in the America First Committee movement in the early 20th century, and after World War II were attributed to a Republican Party faction known as the Old Right. By the 1990s, it became referred to as the paleoconservative movement, which according to Morris has now been rebranded as Trumpism. Leo Löwenthal's book Prophets of Deceit (1949) summarized common narratives expressed in the post-World War II period of this populist fringe, specifically examining American demagogues of the period when modern mass media was married with the same destructive style of politics that historian Charles Clavey thinks Trumpism represents. According to Clavey, Löwenthal's book best explains the enduring appeal of Trumpism and offers the most striking historical insights into the movement.

Writing in The New Yorker, journalist Nicholas Lemann states the post-war Republican Party ideology of fusionism, a fusion of pro-business party establishment with nativist, isolationist elements who gravitated towards the Republican and not the Democratic Party, later joined by Christian evangelicals "alarmed by the rise of secularism", was made possible by the Cold War and the "mutual fear and hatred of the spread of Communism". An article in Politico has referred to Trumpism as "McCarthyism on steroids".

Championed by William F. Buckley Jr. and brought to fruition by Ronald Reagan in 1980, the fusion lost its glue with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was followed by a growth of income inequality in the United States and globalization that "created major discontent among middle and low income whites" within and without the Republican Party. After the 2012 United States presidential election saw the defeat of Mitt Romney by Barack Obama, the party establishment embraced an "autopsy" report, titled the Growth and Opportunity Project, which "called on the Party to reaffirm its identity as pro-market, government-skeptical, and ethnically and culturally inclusive."

Ignoring the findings of the report and the party establishment in his campaign, Trump was "opposed by more officials in his own Party ... than any Presidential nominee in recent American history," but at the same time he won "more votes" in the Republican primaries than any previous presidential candidate. By 2016, "people wanted somebody to throw a brick through a plate-glass window", in the words of political analyst Karl Rove. His success in the party was such that an October 2020 poll found 58% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents surveyed considered themselves supporters of Trump rather than the Republican Party.

Parallels with fascism and trend towards illiberal democracy

Main article: Donald Trump and fascism

Further information: Democratic backsliding and Democratic backsliding in the United States

Historians and election experts have compared Trump's anti-democratic tendencies and egotistical personality to the sentiments and rhetoric of Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism.

Trumpism has been likened to Machiavellianism and to Benito Mussolini's Italian fascism. Trumpism heavily features authoritarian elements, and siginifcant academic debate exists over the prevalence of fascism and neo-fascism within Trumpism. Several scholars have refused direct comparisons with fascism, instead viewing Trump as authoritarian and populist.

Some commentators have rejected the populist designation for Trumpism and view it instead as part of a trend towards a new form of fascism or neo-fascism, with some referring to it as explicitly fascist and others as authoritarian and illiberal. Others have more mildly identified it as a specific light version of fascism in the United States. Some historians, including many of those using a new fascism classification, write of the hazards of direct comparisons with European fascist regimes of the 1930s, stating that while there are parallels, there are also important dissimilarities.

American historian Robert Paxton poses the question as to whether the democratic backsliding evident in Trumpism is fascism or not. As of 2017, Paxton believed it bore greater resemblance to plutocracy, a government which is controlled by a wealthy elite. Paxton changed his opinion following the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, and stated that it is "not just acceptable but necessary" to understand Trumpism as a form of fascism. Drawing on Umberto Eco's 1995 essay Ur-Fascism, which outlines 14 characteristics of fascism, historian Bret Devereaux discusses how Trumpism satisfies each of the 14. Sociology professor Dylan John Riley calls Trumpism "neo-Bonapartist patrimonialism" because it does not capture the same mass movement appeal of classical fascism to be fascism.

Activist group SumOfUs's Projection of "Resist Trumpism Everywhere" on London's Marble Arch as part of protests during Trump's July 2018 visit

Argentine historian Federico Finchelstein believes significant intersections exist between Peronism and Trumpism because their mutual disregard for the contemporary political system (in the areas of both domestic and foreign policy) is discernible. American historian Christopher Browning considers the long-term consequences of Trump's policies and the support which he receives for them from the Republican Party to be potentially dangerous for democracy. In the German-speaking debate, the term initially appeared only sporadically, mostly in connection with the crisis of confidence in politics and the media and described the strategy of mostly right-wing political actors who wish to stir up this crisis in order to profit from it. German literature has a more diverse range of analysis of Trumpism.

In How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, Turkish author Ece Temelkuran describes Trumpism as echoing a number of views and tactics which were expressed and used by the Turkish politician Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during his rise to power. Some of these tactics and views are right-wing populism, demonization of the press, subversion of well-established and proven facts through the big lie (both historical and scientific), democratic backsliding such as dismantling judicial and political mechanisms; portraying systematic issues such as sexism or racism as isolated incidents, and crafting an ideal citizen.

Political scientist Mark Blyth and his colleague Jonathan Hopkin believe strong similarities exist between Trumpism and similar movements towards illiberal democracies worldwide, but they do not believe Trumpism is a movement which is merely being driven by revulsion, loss, and racism. Hopkin and Blyth argue that both on the right and on the left the global economy is driving the growth of neo-nationalist coalitions which find followers who want to be free of the constraints which are being placed on them by establishment elites whose members advocate neoliberal economics and globalism.

Others emphasize the lack of interest in finding real solutions to the social malaise which have been identified, and they also believe those individuals and groups who are executing policy are actually following a pattern which has been identified by sociology researchers like Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman as originating in the post-World War II work of the Frankfurt School of social theory. Based on this perspective, books such as Löwenthal and Guterman's Prophets of Deceit offer the best insights into how movements like Trumpism dupe their followers by perpetuating their misery and preparing them to move further towards an illiberal form of government.

Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh speaking in West Palm Beach in 2019

Trump is considered by some analysts to be following a blueprint of leveraging outrage, which was developed on partisan cable TV and talk radio shows such as the Rush Limbaugh radio show—a style that transformed talk radio and American conservative politics decades before Trump. Both shared "media fame" and "over-the-top showmanship", and built an enormous fan base with politics-as-entertainment, attacking political and cultural targets in ways that would have been considered indefensible and beyond the pale in the years before them. Both featured "the insults, the nicknames", and conspiracy theories. Both maintained global warming was a hoax, Barack Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen, and the danger of COVID-19 was vastly exaggerated by liberals. Both mocked people with disabilities.

Limbaugh, to whom Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020, preceded Trump in moving the Republican Party away from "serious and substantive opinion leaders and politicians", towards political provocation, entertainment, and anti-intellectualism, and popularizing and normalizing for "many Republican politicians and voters" what before his rise "they might have thought" but would have "felt uncomfortable saying". His millions of fans were intensely loyal and "developed a capacity to excuse ... and deflect" his statements no matter how offensive and outrageous, "saying liberals were merely being hysterical or hateful. And many loved him even more for it."

Future impact

Writing in The Atlantic, Yaseem Serhan states Trump's post-impeachment claim that "our historic, patriotic, and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun," should be taken seriously as Trumpism is a "personality-driven" populist movement, and other such movements—such as Berlusconism in Italy, Peronism in Argentina and Fujimorism in Peru, "rarely fade once their leaders have left office". Joseph Lowndes, a professor of political science at the University of Oregon, argued that while current far-right Republicans support Trump, the faction rose before and will likely exist after Trump. Bobby Jindal and Alex Castellanos wrote in Newsweek that separating Trumpism from Donald Trump himself was key to the Republican Party's future following his loss in the 2020 United States presidential election.

In 2024, President Kevin Roberts of The Heritage Foundation stated that he sees the role of Heritage as "institutionalizing Trumpism."

Economic policy

Further information: Economic policy of the first Donald Trump administration

In terms of economic policy, Trumpism "promises new jobs and more domestic investment". Trump's hard line against export surpluses of American trading partners and general protectionist trade policies led to a tense situation in 2018 with mutually imposed punitive tariffs between the United States on the one hand and the European Union and China on the other. Trump secures the support of his political base with a policy that strongly emphasizes neo-nationalism and criticism of globalization. In contrast, the book Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America suggested that Trump "radicalized economics" to his base of white working- to middle-class voters by the promoting the idea that "undeserving [minority] groups are getting ahead while their group is being left behind."

Foreign policy

Further information: Foreign policy of the first Donald Trump administration

In terms of foreign policy in the sense of Trump's "America First", unilateralism and isolationism is preferred to a multilateral policy. National interests are particularly emphasized, especially in the context of economic treaties and alliance obligations. Trump has shown a disdain for traditional American allies such as Canada as well as transatlantic partners NATO and the European Union. Conversely, Trump has shown sympathy for autocratic rulers, such as Russian president Vladimir Putin, whom Trump often praised even before taking office, and during the 2018 Russia–United States summit. The "America First" foreign policy includes promises by Trump to end American involvement in foreign wars, notably in the Middle East, while also issuing tighter foreign policy through sanctions against Iran, among other countries.

Beyond the United States

Main article: Neo-nationalism

Canada

According to Global News, Maclean's magazine, the National Observer, Toronto Star, and The Globe and Mail, there is Trumpism in Canada. In a November 2020 interview on The Current, immediately following the 2020 US elections, law professor Allan Rock, who served as Canada's attorney general and as Canada's ambassador to the U.N., described Trumpism and its potential impact on Canada. Rock said that even with Trump's losing the election, he had "awakened something that won't go away". He said it was something "we can now refer to as Trumpism"—a force that he has "harnessed" Trump has "given expression to an underlying frustration and anger, that arises from economic inequality, from the implications from globalisation."

Rock cautioned that Canada must "keep up its guard against the spread of Trumpism", which he described as "destabilizing", "crude", "nationalistic", "ugly", "divisive", "racist", and "angry"; Rock added that one measurable impact on Canada of the "overtly racist behaviour" associated with Trumpism is that racists and white supremacists have become emboldened since 2016, resulting in a steep increase in the number of these organizations in Canada and a shockingly high increase in the rate of hate crimes in 2017 and 2018 in Canada.

Maclean's and the Star, cited the research of Frank Graves who has been studying the rise of populism in Canada for a number of years. In a June 30, 2020 School of Public Policy journal article, he co-authored, the authors described a decrease in trust in the news and in journalists since 2011 in Canada, along with an increase in skepticism which "reflects the emergent fake news convictions so evident in supporters of Trumpian populism." Graves and Smith wrote of the impact on Canada of a "new authoritarian, or ordered, populism" that resulted in the 2016 election of President Trump. They said 34% of Canadians hold a populist viewpoint—most of whom are in Alberta and Saskatchewan—who tend to be "older, less-educated, and working-class", are more likely to embrace "ordered populism", and are "more closely aligned" with conservative political parties. This "ordered populism" includes concepts such as a right-wing authoritarianism, obedience, hostility to outsiders, and strongmen who will take back the country from the "corrupt elite" and return it a better time in history, where there was more law and order. It is xenophobic, does not trust science, has no sympathy for equality issues related to gender and ethnicity, and is not part of a healthy democracy. The authors say this ordered populism had reached a "critical force" in Canada that is causing polarization and must be addressed.

According to an October 2020 Léger poll for 338Canada of Canadian voters, the number of "pro-Trump conservatives" has been growing in Canada's Conservative Party, which was under the leadership of Erin O'Toole at the time of the poll. Maclean's said this might explain O'Toole's "True Blue" social conservative campaign. The Conservative Party in Canada also includes "centrist" conservatives as well as Red Tories,—also described as small-c conservative, centre-right or paternalistic conservatives as per the Tory tradition in the United Kingdom. O'Toole featured a modified version of Trump's slogan—"Take Back Canada"—in a video released as part of his official leadership candidacy platform. At the end of the video he called on Canadians to "[j]oin our fight, let's take back Canada."

In a September 8, 2020 CBC interview, when asked if his "Canada First" policy was different from Trump's "America First" policy, O'Toole said, "No, it was not." In his August 24, 2019 speech conceding the victory of his successor Erin O'Toole as the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Scheer cautioned Canadians to not believe the "narrative" from mainstream media outlets but to "challenge" and "double check ... what they see on TV on the internet" by consulting "smart, independent, objective organizations like The Post Millennial and True North. The Observer said Jeff Ballingall, who is the founder of the right-wing Ontario Proud, and is also the Chief Marketing Officer of The Post Millennial.

Following the 2020 United States elections, National Post columnist and former newspaper "magnate", Conrad Black, who had had a "decades-long" friendship with Trump, and received a presidential pardon in 2019, in his columns, repeated Trump's "unfounded claims of mass voter fraud" suggesting that the election had been stolen.

Europe

Further information: Radical right (Europe)

Trumpism has also been said to be on the rise in Europe. Political parties such as the Finns Party, France's National Rally and Spain's far-right Vox party have been described as Trumpist in nature. Trump's former advisor Steve Bannon called Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán "Trump before Trump". Isabel Díaz Ayuso has also received the Trumpism label.

Brazil

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes referred to as the "Brazilian Donald Trump", who is often described as a right-wing extremist, sees Trump as a role model and according to Jason Stanley uses the same fascist tactics. Like Trump, Bolsonaro finds support among evangelicals for his views on culture war issues. Along with allies he publicly questioned Joe Biden's vote tally after the November election.

Argentina

Javier Milei, an Argentinian Austrian economist who was elected in 2023 as President of Argentina has sometimes been likened to Donald Trump. Many other commentators have stressed that the two men are different, however, describing Milei's views as mostly libertarian, such as rejecting protectionism and supporting free trade.

Nigeria

According to The Guardian and The Washington Post, there is a significant affinity towards Trump in Nigeria. Donald Trump's comments on the ethno-religious conflicts between Christians and the predominantly Muslim Fulani tribe has contributed to his popularity among Christians in Nigeria, in which he stated: "We have had very serious problems with Christians who are being murdered in Nigeria. We are going to be working on that problem very, very hard because we cannot allow that to happen". Donald Trump is praised by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a secessionist group that supports the independence of Biafra from Nigeria and is designated as a terrorist group by the Nigerian government. IPOB has claimed that he "believes in the inalienable right of an indigenous people to self-determination" and it also praised him for "the direct and serious manner he addressed and demanded immediate end to the serial slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, especially Biafran Christians".

After Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election, IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu wrote a letter to Trump that claimed his victory placed upon him a "historic and moral burden ... to liberate the enslaved nations in Africa". As Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, IPOB organized a rally in support of Trump that resulted in violent clashes with Nigerian security forces and resulted in multiple deaths and arrests. On January 30, 2020, IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu attended a Trump rally in Iowa as a special VIP guest, at the invitation of the Republican Party of Iowa. According to a 2020 poll from Pew Research, 58% of Nigerians had favorable views of Donald Trump, the fourth highest percentage globally.

According to John Campbell of Council on Foreign Relations, Trump's popularity in Nigeria can be explained by a "manifestation of the widespread disillusionment in a country characterized by growing poverty, multiple security threats, an expanding crime wave, and a government seen as unresponsive and corrupt", and his popularity is likely to be reflective of wealthier urban Nigerians rather than the majority of Nigerians who live in rural areas or urban slums and are unlikely to have strong opinions on Trump.

Iran

Main article: Restart (group)

Donald Trump and his policy towards Iran has been praised by the Iranian opposition group 'Restart', led by Mohammad Hosseini, which also supports American military action against Iran and offered to fight alongside Americans to overthrow the Iranian government. The group has adopted the slogan "Make Iran Great Again".

Restart has been compared to QAnon by Ariane Tabatabai, in terms of "conspiracist thinking going global". Among conspiracy theories advocated by the group is that Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has died (or went into coma) in 2017 and a double plays his role in public.

Japan

Further information: Japanese nationalism

Shinzo Abe and US President Trump in 2017 with "MAGA"-style hats reading "Donald & Shinzo, Make Alliance Even Greater"

In Japan, in a speech to Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers in Tokyo on 8 March 2019, Steve Bannon said that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was "Trump before Trump" and "a great hero to the grassroots, the populist, and the nationalist movement throughout the world." Shinzo Abe was described as a "right-wing nationalist" or "ultra-nationalist", but whether he was a "populist" is controversial.

Netto-uyoku is the term used to refer to netizens who espouse ultranationalist far-right views on Japanese social media, as well as in English to those who are proficient. Netto-uyoku are typically very friendly not only to Japanese nationalists but also to Donald Trump, and oppose liberal politics. They began spreading Trump's conspiracy theories in an attempt to overturn the 2020 American presidential election.

South Korea

The politics of Yoon Suk Yeol, the president of South Korea, has been called "Trumpist" for his right-wing populist elements.

Philippines

Sheila S. Coronel has argued that the political strategies of Ferdinand Marcos, who was President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, and Rodrigo Duterte, who held the same position from 2016 to 2022, share certain features with Trumpism, including disregard for facts, encouragement of fear, and a "loud, bombastic, hypermasculine" aesthetic; and that each has benefited from uncertain political environments.

See also

• Blue MAGA
• Enemy of the people
• Firehose of falsehood
• God Emperor Trump (statue)
• List of conspiracy theories promoted by Donald Trump
• Radical right (United States)
• Reality distortion field
• Freedom Caucus
• Agenda 47
• Political positions of Donald Trump
• Sedition Caucus
• Racial views of Donald Trump

Organizations

• America First Policies
• Conservative Partnership Institute
• John Birch Society
• MAGA Inc.
• Republican Accountability
• The Lincoln Project
• Republicans for the Rule of Law

Bibliography

Books

• Andrews, David L. (2019). "Making Sport Great Again". Making Sport Great Again: The Uber-Sport Assemblage, Neoliberalism, and the Trump Conjuncture (e-book ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-15002-0. ISBN 978-3030150020. S2CID 159089360.
• Badiou, Alain (2019). Trump (e-book ed.). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. ISBN 978-1509536092. ...we could speak of these new figures in terms of a kind of "democratic fascism", a paradoxical but effective designation. After all, the Berlusconis, the Sarkozys, the Le Pens, the Trumps, are operating inside the democratic apparatus, with its elections, its oppositions, its scandals, etc. But, within this apparatus, they are playing a different score, another music. This is certainly the case with Trump, who is racist, a male chauvinist, violent—all of which are fascist tendencies—but who, in addition, displays a contempt for logic and rationality and a muffled hatred of intellectuals. The music proper to this type of democratic fascism is a discourse that does not worry in the least bit about coherence, a discourse of impulse, comfortable with a few nighttime tweets, and that imposes a sort of dislocation of language, positively flaunting its ability to say everything and its opposite. For these new political figures, the aim of language is no longer to explain anything or to defend a point of view in an articulate manner. Its aim is to produce affects, which are used to create a fleetingly powerful unity, largely artificial but capable of being exploited in the moment.
• Berry, Jeffrey M.; Sobieraj, Sarah (2014). The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility (e-book ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199928972. Archived from the original on March 14, 2024. Retrieved March 14, 2024.
• Blair, Gwenda (2000). The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684808498.
• Boggs, Carl (2018). Fascism Old and New (e-book ed.). New York: Routledge. p. xii. ISBN 978-1351049696. At this juncture [November 2017] it is worth noting that the 2016 ascendancy of Donald Trump to the White House does not occur to the author as a specifically fascist moment in U.S. history, contrary to what is commonly heard in liberal and progressive circles. To be sure, Trump does possess strong elements of a leadership cult, replete with narcissism and grandiose visions ('making American great again') ... I have chosen to view Trump as representing an interregnum between existing power arrangements—that is, a militarized state-capitalism—and potential American fascism.
• Boyd, Gregory (2005). The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan. ISBN 0310281245.
• Connolly, William (2017). Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-1517905125.
• Dean, John; Altemeyer, Robert A. (2020). "Chapter 10: National Survey on Authoritarianism". Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and his Followers (e-book ed.). Brooklyn, New York: Melville House Publishing. ISBN 978-1612199061.
• de la Torre, Carlos; Barr, Robert R.; Arato, Andrew; Cohen, Jean L.; Ruzza, Carlo (2019). Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. Routledge International Handbooks. London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1315226446.
• Frum, David (2018). Trumpocracy. New York: Harper. p. 336. ISBN 978-0062796745.
• Dionne, E. J.; Mann, Thomas E.; Ornstein, Norman (2017). One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-yet Deported. New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 384. ISBN 978-1250293633.
• Fea, John (2018). Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans. ISBN 978-1467450461.
• Feldman, Stanley (2020). "Authoritarianism, threat, and intolerance". In Borgida; Federico; Miller (eds.). At the Forefront of Political Psychology: Essays in Honor of John L. Sullivan. Abingdon, England: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1000768275. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved October 14, 2020.
• Fuchs, Christian (2018). Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter. London, England: Pluto Press. JSTOR j.ctt21215dw.8. Archived from the original on October 10, 2022. Retrieved August 29, 2020.
• Hart, Roderick P. (2020). "Trump's Arrival". Trump and Us (What He Says and Why People Listen). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–22. doi:10.1017/9781108854979.001. ISBN 978-1108854979. S2CID 234899569.
• Hochschild, Arlie Russell (2016). Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (e-book ed.). New York: The New Press. ISBN 978-1620972267.
• Horkheimer, Max; Adorno, Theodor W. (2002) [1947]. Noerr, Gunzelin Schmid (ed.). Dialectic of Enlightenment – Philosophical Fragments. Cultural Memory in the Present. Translated by Jephcott, Edmund (e-book ed.). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0804788090.
• Jaeger, C. Stephen (1985). The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. ASIN B008UYP8H8.
• Jeffress, Robert (2011). Twilight's Last Gleaming: How America's Last Days Can Be Your Best Days. Brentwood, Tennessee: Worthy Publishing. ISBN 978-1936034581.
• Kellner, Douglas (2018). "Donald Trump as Authoritarian Populist: A Frommian Analysis". In Morelock, Jeremiah (ed.). Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism. Vol. 9. London: University of Westminster Press. pp. 71–82. doi:10.2307/j.ctv9hvtcf.8. ISBN 978-1912656059. JSTOR j.ctv9hvtcf.8.
• Kellner, Douglas (2020). "Donald Trump and the Politics of Lying". In Peters, Michael A.; Rider, Sharon; Hyvonen, Mats; Besley, Tina (eds.). Post-Truth, Fake News: Viral Modernity & Higher Education. New York: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-981-10-8013-5. ISBN 978-9811080135.
• Kessler, Glenn; Rizzo, Salvador; Kelly, Meg (2020). Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The Presidents Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lie. Washington Post Books. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1982151089.
• Kimmel, Michael (2017) [2013]. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (2017 ed.). New York: Perseus Books – PublicAffairs. ISBN 978-1568589626.
• Kimmel, Michael (2018). Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into – and Out of – Violent Extremism (e-book ed.). Davis, California: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520966086.
• Laclau, Ernesto (2005). On Populist Reason. New York: Verso. ISBN 978-1788731331.
• Le Bon, Gustave (2002) [1st pub. 1895]. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. ISBN 978-0486419565.
• Lifton, Robert Jay (2019). Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry (ePub) ed.). New York: New Press. ISBN 978-1620975121. (Page numbers correspond to the ePub edition.)
• Löwenthal, Leo; Guterman, Norbert (1949). Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (PDF). New York: Harper & Brothers. ISBN 978-0870151828. Archived from the original on November 1, 2020. Retrieved November 8, 2020.
• Mansfield, Stephen (2017). Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books. ISBN 978-1493412259. Archived from the original on March 14, 2024. Retrieved March 14, 2024.
• McIntyre, Lee (2018). Post-Truth. MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262535045.
• McAdams, Dan P. (2020). The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning (EPUB ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0197507469.
• McManus, Matthew (2020). "The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism". In Hardwick, David; Marsh, Leslie (eds.). The Rise Of Post-Modern Conservatism Neoliberalism, Post-Modern Culture, And Reactionary Politics (e-book ed.). New York: Palgrave MacMillan. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-24682-2. ISBN 978-3030246822. S2CID 241523759.
• Money-Kyrle, Roger (2015) [1941]. "The Psychology of Propaganda". In Meltzer, Donald; O'Shaughnessy, Edna (eds.). The Collected Papers of Roger Money-Kyrle. Clunie Press. Money – Kyle describes not a rhetorical pattern of problem–conflict–resolution, but a progression of psychoanalytic states of mind in the three steps: 1) melancholia, 2) paranoia and 3) megalomania.
• Nash, George H. (2017). "American Conservatism and the Problem of Populism". In Kimball, Roger (ed.). Vox Populi: The Perils and Promises of Populism. New York: Encounter Books. p. 216. ISBN 978-1594039584. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved October 14, 2020.
• Neuborne, Burt (2019). When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen's Guide to Defending Our Republic (ePub) ed.). New York: The New Press. ISBN 978-1620973585.
• Pfiffner, James (2020). "The Lies of Donald Trump: A Taxonomy". Presidential Leadership and the Trump Presidency (PDF). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 17–40. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-18979-2_2. ISBN 978-3030189792. S2CID 235085363. Archived (PDF) from the original on December 27, 2020. Retrieved November 24, 2020.
• Postman, Neil (2005) [1985]. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (20th Anniversary ed.). New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-0143036531.
• Pybus, Jennifer (2015). "Accumulating affect: social networks and their archives of feeling". In Hillis, Ken; Paasonen, Susanna; Petit, Michael (eds.). Networked affect. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262028646.
• Resano, Dolores (2017). American Literature in the Era of Trumpism: Alternative Realities. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3030738570.
• Sexton, Jared Yates (2017). The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage. Berkeley, California: Counterpoint Press. ISBN 978-1619029569. Archived from the original on March 14, 2024. Retrieved March 14, 2024.
• Smith, David Livingstone (2020). On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (ePub ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0190923020.
• Sunstein, Cass (2007). Republic 2.0 (e-book ed.). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691133560.
• Tarizzo, Davide (2021). Political grammars : the unconscious foundations of modern democracy. Square One: First Order Questions in the Humanities. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-1503615328.
• Temelkuran, Ece (2019). How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0008340612.
• Traverso, Enzo (2017). The New Faces of Fascism. Brooklyn, New York: Verso. ISBN 978-1788730464. 'Populism' is a category used as a self-defence mechanism by political elites who stand ever further from the people. According to Jacques Rancière: "Populism is the convenient name under which is dissimulated the exacerbated contradiction between popular legitimacy and expert legitimacy, that is, the difficulty the government of science has in adapting itself to manifestations of democracy and even to the mixed form of representative system. This name at once masks and reveals the intense wish of the oligarch: to govern without people, in other words, without any dividing of the people; to govern without politics.
• Trump, Donald J.; Schwartz, Tony (2011) [1987]. Trump: The Art of the Deal. New York: Random House – Ballantine Books. ISBN 978-0307575333.
• van Prooijen, Jan-Willem (2018). The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories. The Psychology of Everything. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1315525419.
• Woodward, Bob (2018). Fear: Trump in the White House. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 448. ISBN 978-1471181306.

Articles

• Adebayo, Bukola (January 9, 2020). "A majority of Nigerians and Kenyans have confidence in President Trump, according to Pew research". CNN. Archived from the original on August 29, 2022. Retrieved October 1, 2022.
• Akinwotu, Emmanuel (October 31, 2020). "'He just says it as it is': why many Nigerians support Donald Trump". The Guardian. Archived from the original on July 21, 2022. Retrieved October 1, 2022.
• Alter, Ethan (January 14, 2021). "'The Punisher' star Jon Bernthal lashes out at 'misguided and lost' Capitol rioters for appropriating Marvel hero's famous skull symbol". Yahoo Entertainment. Archived from the original on February 9, 2021. Retrieved February 8, 2021.
• Appel, Edward C. (March 12, 2018). "Burlesque, Tragedy, and a (Potentially) 'Yuuuge' 'Breaking of a Frame': Donald Trump's Rhetoric as 'Early Warning'?". Communication Quarterly. 66 (2): 157–175. doi:10.1080/01463373.2018.1439515. S2CID 149031634.
• Andersen, Travis (January 6, 2021). "Before mob stormed US Capitol, Trump told them to 'fight like hell'". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on January 7, 2021. Retrieved January 7, 2021.
• Assheuer, Thomas (May 16, 2018). "Donald Trump: Das Recht bin ich". Die Zeit (in German). Archived from the original on January 26, 2021. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
• Bader, Michael (December 25, 2016). "The Decline of Empathy and the Appeal of Right-Wing Politics – Child psychology can teach us about the current GOP". Psychology Today. Archived from the original on March 17, 2021. Retrieved December 6, 2020.
• Bailey, Sarah Pulliam (November 28, 2017). "Acts of Faith. A Trump-like politician in Brazil could snag the support of a powerful religious group: evangelicals". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on February 18, 2018. Retrieved March 1, 2018.
• Baker, Joseph O.; Perry, Samuel L.; Whitehead, Andrew L. (May 14, 2020). "Keep America Christian (and White): Christian Nationalism, Fear of Ethnoracial Outsiders, and Intention to Vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election". Sociology of Religion. 81 (3): 272–293. doi:10.1093/socrel/sraa015. hdl:1805/26339. In the penultimate year before Trump's reelection campaign, the strongest predictors of supporting Trump, in order of magnitude, were political party, xenophobia, identifying as African American (negative), political ideology, Christian nationalism, and Islamophobia.
• Baker, Peter (February 11, 2024). "Favoring Foes Over Friends, Trump Threatens to Upend International Order". The New York Times. ISSN 1553-8095. Archived from the original on February 20, 2024. Retrieved February 21, 2024.
• Bankole, Idowu (February 3, 2020). "Trump's rally: IPOB commends US over Kanu's VIP invitation". Vanguard News. Archived from the original on July 22, 2022. Retrieved September 30, 2022.
• Barrett, David; Zapotosky, Matt (January 13, 2021). "FBI report warned of 'war' at Capitol, contradicting claims there was no indication of looming violence". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on April 15, 2021. Retrieved April 17, 2021.
• Bebout, Lee (January 7, 2021). "Trump tapped into white victimhood – leaving fertile ground for white supremacists". The Conversation. Archived from the original on January 10, 2021. Retrieved January 14, 2021. Trumpism tapped into a long-standing sense of aggrievement that often—but not exclusively—manifests as white victimhood.
• Beer, Tommy (January 16, 2021). "Fox News Viewership Plummets: First Time Behind CNN And MSNBC In Two Decades". Forbes. Archived from the original on April 9, 2021. Retrieved April 9, 2021.
• Bennhold, Katrin (September 7, 2020). "Trump Emerges as Inspiration for Germany's Far Right". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 20, 2020. Retrieved November 20, 2020.
• Benjamin, Rich (September 28, 2020). "Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism". The Intercept. Archived from the original on January 31, 2021. Retrieved May 19, 2020.
• Lempinen, Edward (December 7, 2020). "Despite drift toward authoritarianism, Trump voters stay loyal. Why?". University of California, Berkeley News. Archived from the original on January 5, 2024. Retrieved June 24, 2021.
• Bidgood, Jess; Ulloa, Jazmine (October 1, 2020). "A debate and a rally show Trump's closing strategy: Tapping into the white grievance of his political bubble". The Boston Globe. Duluth, Minneapolis. Archived from the original on January 22, 2021. Retrieved January 16, 2021.
• Blair, Leonardo (December 15, 2020). "Beth Moore draws flak and praise after warning Christians against 'dangerous' Trumpism". Christian Post. Archived from the original on December 15, 2020. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
• Blake, Aaron (January 7, 2021). "'Let's have trial by combat': How Trump and allies egged on the violent scenes Wednesday". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Archived from the original on January 7, 2021. Retrieved January 8, 2021.
• Bleiberg, Joshua; West, Darrell M. (May 13, 2015). "Political Polarization on Facebook". The Brookings Institution. Archived from the original on October 10, 2017. Retrieved March 2, 2021.
• Blyth, Mark (November 15, 2016). "Global Trumpism: Why Trump's Victory was 30 Years in the Making and Why It Won't Stop Here". Foreign Affairs. Archived from the original on March 4, 2021. Retrieved October 8, 2020.
• Bond, Paul (February 29, 2016). "Leslie Moonves on Donald Trump: "It May Not Be Good for America, but It's Damn Good for CBS"". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on February 9, 2021. Retrieved February 12, 2021.
• Boehm, Christopher (February 13, 2016). "Political Animals". New Scientist. 229 (3060): 26–27. Bibcode:2016NewSc.229...26B. doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(16)30320-7.
• Boucheron, Patrick (February 8, 2020). "'Real power is fear': what Machiavelli tells us about Trump in 2020". The Guardian. Archived from the original on February 1, 2021. Retrieved January 26, 2021.
• Boler, Megan; Davis, Elizabeth (2021). "Affect, Media, Movement – Interview with Susanna Paasonen and Zizi Papacharissi". In Boler, Megan; Davis, Elizabeth (eds.). Affective Politics of Digital Media (e-book ed.). New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1003052272.
• Bote, Joshua (October 22, 2020). "Half of Trump supporters believe in QAnon conspiracy theory's baseless claims, poll finds". USA Today. Archived from the original on January 15, 2021. Retrieved January 15, 2021.
• Brant, Danielle (October 4, 2018). "Bolsonaro Uses Same Fascist Tactics As Trump, Says Yale Professor". Folha de São Paulo. São Paulo. Archived from the original on March 27, 2019. Retrieved February 22, 2021.
• Brazile, Donna (August 28, 2020). "Convention shows Republican Party has died and been replaced by Trump Party". Fox News (Opinion). Archived from the original on August 31, 2020. Retrieved August 31, 2020.
• Brewster, Jack (November 22, 2020). "Republicans Ask, Whether Or Not Trump Runs In 2024, What Will Come Of Trumpism?". Forbes. Archived from the original on January 10, 2021. Retrieved November 22, 2020.
• Husser, Jason (April 6, 2020). "Why Trump is reliant on white evangelicals". The Brookings Institution. Archived from the original on March 2, 2021. Retrieved March 6, 2021.
• Brooks, David (November 26, 2020). "The rotting of the Republican mind". The New York Times (Opinion). Archived from the original on December 5, 2020. Retrieved December 9, 2020.
• Browning, Christopher R. (October 25, 2018). "The Suffocation of Democracy". The New York Review. 65 (16). Archived from the original on June 9, 2020. Retrieved June 9, 2020. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
• Bump, Philip (October 20, 2020). "Even if they haven't heard of QAnon, most Trump voters believe its wild allegations". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on December 13, 2020. Retrieved December 13, 2020.
• Butler, Judith; Salmon, Christian (December 29, 2016). "Trump, fascism, and the construction of "the people": An interview with Judith Butler". VersoBooks. Translated by Broder, David. Verso. Archived from the original on May 14, 2021. Retrieved May 14, 2021.
  • The Verso published English translation is of the article: Butler, Judith; Salmon, Christian (December 18, 2016). "Judith Butler: pourquoi "Trump est un phénomène fasciste"". Mediapart (in French). Archived from the original on May 18, 2021. Retrieved May 14, 2021.
• Campbell, John (February 11, 2020). "Despite Travel Ban, Trump Remains Popular in Nigeria". Council on Foreign Relations. Archived from the original on August 29, 2022. Retrieved September 30, 2022.
• Carpini, Michael X. Delli (2018). "Alternative Facts: Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New U.S. Media Regime". In Boczkowski, Pablo; Papacharissi, Zizi (eds.). Trump and the Media (e-book ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262037969. Archived from the original on January 15, 2024. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
• Cash, John (2017). Fitzroy, Vic (ed.). "Trumped in the Looking-glass" (pdf). Arena Magazine. No. 151. Archived from the original on May 24, 2021. Retrieved May 14, 2021.
• "Andrew Scheer praises Erin O'Toole as next leader of Conservative Party". CBC. August 24, 2020. Archived from the original on January 18, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Erin O'Toole (newly-elected leader of the CPC) (September 8, 2020). O'Toole on his 'Canada First' policy. Power & Politics. Archived from the original on January 16, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Rahn, Will; Patterson, Dan (September 29, 2020). "What is the QAnon conspiracy theory?". CBS News. Archived from the original on October 2, 2020. Retrieved October 2, 2020.
• Cegielski, Stephanie (March 29, 2016). "An Open Letter to Trump Voters from His Top Strategist-Turned-Defector". xoJane. Archived from the original on August 25, 2018. Retrieved February 9, 2021.
• Choma, Becky L.; Hanoch, Yaniv (February 2017). "Cognitive ability and authoritarianism: Understanding support for Trump and Clinton". Personality and Individual Differences. 106 (1): 287–291. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2016.10.054. hdl:10026.1/8451.
• Chomsky, Noam; Polychroniou, Chronis J. (November 26, 2020). "Noam Chomsky: Trump Has Revealed the Extreme Fragility of American Democracy". Global Policy. Wiley-Blackwell. Archived from the original on May 18, 2021. Retrieved May 18, 2021.
• Cillizza, Chris (February 4, 2021). "Three-quarters of Republicans believe a lie about the 2020 election". CNN. Archived from the original on February 7, 2021. Retrieved February 8, 2021.
• Clavey, Charles H. (October 20, 2020). "Donald Trump, Our Prophet of Deceit". Boston Review. Archived from the original on October 21, 2020. Retrieved October 20, 2020.
• Clemens, Colleen (December 11, 2017). "What We Mean When We Say 'Toxic Masculinity.'". Learning for Justice. Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on April 18, 2021. Retrieved April 17, 2021.
• Cockburn, Patrick (November 4, 2020). "Trump's bid to stop the count risks turning America into an 'illiberal democracy' like Turkey". The Independent (U.K.). Archived from the original on June 25, 2021. Retrieved June 25, 2021.
• Confessore, Nicholas; Yourish, Karen (March 25, 2016). "$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Donald Trump". The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 27, 2021. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
• Colvin, Geoff (August 25, 2020). "The Republican Party turns its platform into a person: Donald Trump". Fortune. Archived from the original on September 14, 2021. Retrieved September 15, 2021.
• Conroy, J Oliver (February 7, 2017). "'Angry white men': the sociologist who studied Trump's base before Trump". The Guardian. Archived from the original on January 31, 2021. Retrieved February 14, 2021.
• Continetti, Matthew (December 22, 2020). "Is Trump Really All That Holds the G.O.P. Together?". The New York Times (Opinion). Archived from the original on January 1, 2021. Retrieved January 4, 2021.
• Cornelis, Ilse; Van Hiel, Alain (2015). "Extreme right-wing voting in Western Europe: The role of social-cultural and antiegalitarian attitudes". Political Psychology. 35 (6): 749–760. doi:10.1111/pops.12187. hdl:1854/LU-01H4EFGEE1S6ZQ7EBMD2PGNBCB. Archived from the original on January 14, 2024. Retrieved January 14, 2024.
• Coronel, Sheila S. (November 9, 2020). "A warning from the Philippines on how a demagogue can haunt politics for decades". The Washington Post (Opinion). Archived from the original on June 29, 2022. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
• Cox, Ana Marie (October 12, 2016). "Russell Moore Can't Support Either Candidate". The New York Times. New York. Archived from the original on April 18, 2021. Retrieved April 18, 2021.
• Cui, Xi (2018). "Emotional Contagion or Symbolic Cognition? A Social Identity Perspective on Media Events". Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. 62 (1): 91–108. doi:10.1080/08838151.2017.1402906. S2CID 149162170.
• da Silva, Chantal (November 6, 2020). "'Reckless' and 'stupid': Trump Jr calls for 'total war' over election results". The Independent. Archived from the original on January 14, 2021. Retrieved January 10, 2021.
• Danner, Mark (May 26, 2016). "The Magic of Donald Trump" (PDF). The New York Review of Books. Archived (PDF) from the original on September 20, 2020. Retrieved February 8, 2021.
• Delacourt, Susan (November 8, 2020). "Donald Trump lost, but Trumpism is still thriving. Could it take hold in Canada, too?". Toronto Star (Opinion). Archived from the original on January 14, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Denby, David (December 15, 2015). "The Plot Against America: Donald Trump's Rhetoric". New Yorker. Archived from the original on November 8, 2020. Retrieved December 6, 2020.
• Devore, Molly (April 3, 2019). "'Trumpism' is not enough of a mass movement to be fascism, visiting professor says". The Badger Herald. Archived from the original on August 14, 2021. Retrieved August 14, 2021.
• Dreher, Rod (December 17, 2020). "Church Of Trumpianity". The American Conservative. Washington, D.C. Archived from the original on March 4, 2021. Retrieved March 28, 2021.
• Diamond, Jeremy (July 29, 2016). "Timeline: Donald Trump's praise for Vladimir Putin". CNN. Archived from the original on August 9, 2020. Retrieved July 24, 2020.
• Donolo, Peter (August 21, 2020). "Trumpism won't happen in Canada – but not because of our politics". The Globe and Mail (Opinion). Archived from the original on January 7, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Donolo, Peter (January 9, 2021). "What will become of Trump's Canadian fan base?". Toronto Star (Opinion). Toronto. Archived from the original on January 11, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Drutman, Lee (June 8, 2021). "The Republican party is now an explicitly illiberal party". The Guardian. Archived from the original on June 30, 2021. Retrieved June 25, 2021.
• Enjeti, Saagar (March 3, 2021). "Trump defines Trumpism". Rising. The Hill. Archived from the original on March 9, 2021. Retrieved March 5, 2021.
• Evans, Richard J. (January 13, 2021). "Why Trump isn't a fascist – The storming of the Capitol on 6 January was not a coup. But American democracy is still in danger". New Statesman. Archived from the original on March 12, 2021. Retrieved March 14, 2021.
• Fallows, James (October 10, 2016). "Trump Time Capsule #137: Primate Dominance Moves at the Debate". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on February 19, 2021. Retrieved February 23, 2021.
• Fawcett, Max (January 12, 2021). "Rigged Canadian election? Why Canada's Conservatives can't seem to quit Donald Trump". National Observer (Opinion). Archived from the original on January 12, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Federico, Christopher M.; Golec de Zavala, Agnieszka (March 6, 2018). "Collective Narcissism and the 2016 US Presidential Vote" (PDF). Public Opinion Quarterly. 82 (1). Oxford University Press: 110–121. doi:10.1093/poq/nfx048. Archived from the original on February 14, 2022. Retrieved December 17, 2020.
• Feldman, Stanley; Stenner, Karen (June 28, 2008). "Perceived threat and authoritarianism". Political Psychology. 18 (4): 741–770. doi:10.1111/0162-895X.00077.
• Finchelstein, Federico (2017). From Fascism to Populism in History. University of California Press. pp. 11–13. ISBN 978-0520968042. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved October 29, 2020.
• Finn, Ed (May 13, 2017). "Is Trump a fascist?". The Independent. Newfoundland. Archived from the original on June 4, 2020. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
• Fisher, Marc (May 16, 2019). "After a two-decade friendship and waves of lavish praise, Trump pardons newspaper magnate Conrad Black". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Archived from the original on January 16, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Foster, John Bellamy (June 1, 2017). "This Is Not Populism". Monthly Review (Editorial). Archived from the original on July 1, 2017. Retrieved May 14, 2015. Commenting on the hegemonic framing of the radical right as populist, and the analytical problems that it presents, Andrea Mammone observes in his Transnational Neofascism in France and Italy that "the terms populism and national populism" were deliberately introduced in recent decades by liberal European commentators in order to "replace fascism/neofascism as the used terminology." This move was designed to "provide a sort of political and democratic legitimization of right-wing extremism."
• Fournier, Philippe J. (October 1, 2020). "How much do Canadians dislike Donald Trump? A lot". Maclean's. Archived from the original on January 11, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Fournier, Philippe J. (January 10, 2021). "Canada is not immune to Trumpism". Maclean's. Archived from the original on January 12, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Franks, Andrew S.; Hesami, Farhang (September 18, 2021). "Seeking Evidence of The MAGA Cult and Trump Derangement Syndrome: An Examination of (A)symmetric Political Bias". Societies. 11 (3): 113. doi:10.3390/soc11030113. Trump supporters consistently showed bias in favor of the interests and ostensible positions of Trump, whereas Trump's detractors did not show an opposing bias ... Results of the current study do not support the broad existence of so-called 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' on the left, but they may lend credence to accusations that some Trump supporters have a cult-like loyalty to the 45th president.
• Gabler, Neal (April 29, 2016). "Donald Trump, the Emperor of Social Media". Moyers On Democracy. Schumann Media Center. Archived from the original on March 2, 2021. Retrieved March 2, 2021.
• Gabriel, Shira; Paravati, Elaine; Green, Melanie C.; Flomsbee, Jason (2018). "From Apprentice to president: The role of parasocial connection in the election of Donald Trump". Social Psychological and Personality Science. 9 (3): 299–307. doi:10.1177/1948550617722835. S2CID 149911195. Archived from the original on January 15, 2024. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
• Galli, Mark (December 19, 2019). "Trump Should Be Removed from Office". Christianity Today (Editorial). Archived from the original on December 23, 2019. Retrieved December 30, 2020.
• Garcia-Navarro, Lulu (January 21, 2024). "Inside the Heritage Foundation's Plans for 'Institutionalizing Trumpism'". The New York Times Magazine. New York City: The New York Times Company. ISSN 0028-7822. Archived from the original on February 13, 2024. Retrieved February 21, 2024.
• Giroux, Henry A. (December 14, 2017). "Fascism's return and Trump's war on youth". The Conversation. Archived from the original on April 16, 2021. Retrieved May 14, 2021.
• Giroux, Henry A. (2021). "Trumpism and the challenge of critical education". Educational Philosophy and Theory. 55 (6): 5. doi:10.1080/00131857.2021.1884066. S2CID 234851204. As the social state came under severe attack, the punishing state grew with its ongoing militarization of civil society and its increasing criminalization of social problems. War, dehumanization, divisiveness, hate, and the language of racial cleansing and sorting became central governing principles and set the stage for the rebirth of an updated fascist politics. Trumpism reached into every niche and crack of civil and political society and in doing so cross-pollinated politics, culture, and everyday life with a range of right-wing policies, authoritarian impulses, and the emerging presence of right-wing movements.
• Glasser, Susan (January 22, 2018). "The Man Who Put Andrew Jackson in Trump's Oval Office". Politico. Archived from the original on November 22, 2020. Retrieved November 15, 2020.
• "Trumpism in Canada". Global News. Archived from the original on January 13, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Goldberg, Michelle (December 15, 2020). "Just how dangerous was Trump?" (Opinion). The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 16, 2020. Retrieved December 17, 2020.
• Golec de Zavala, Agnieszka; Cichocka, Aleksandra; Eidelson, Roy; Jayawickreme, Nuwan (2009). "Collective Narcissism and Its Social Consequences" (PDF). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 97 (6): 1074–1096. doi:10.1037/a0016904. PMID 19968420. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 24, 2018. Retrieved September 25, 2020.
• Gordon, Peter E. (2018). "The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump". In Brown, Wendy; Gordon, Peter E.; Pensky, Max (eds.). Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory (e-book ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226597300.001.0001. ISBN 978-0226597300.
  • An earlier version appeared in peer-reviewed journal Boundary 2: Gordon, Peter E. (June 15, 2016). "Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory". Boundary 2. Archived from the original on December 8, 2020. Retrieved February 21, 2021.
• Gorski, Philip (2019). "Why Evangelicals Voted for Trump: A Critical Cultural Sociology". In Mast, Jason L.; Alexander, Jeffrey C. (eds.). Politics of Meaning/Meaning of Politics. Cultural Sociology. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 165–183. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95945-0_10. ISBN 978-3319959450. S2CID 239775845. Archived from the original on February 14, 2022. Retrieved April 19, 2021 – via Springer Link.
• Gottfried, Jeffrey; Shearer, Elisa (May 26, 2016). "News use across social media platforms 2016". Pew Research Center. Archived from the original on April 14, 2021. Retrieved March 2, 2021.
• Graves, Frank; Smith, Jeff (June 30, 2020). "Northern Populism: Causes and Consequences of the New Ordered Outlook". School of Public Policy. 13. doi:10.11575/sppp.v13i0.69884. ISSN 2560-8320. Archived from the original on January 17, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Green, Emma (January 8, 2021). "A Christian Insurrection". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on January 25, 2021. Retrieved January 23, 2021.
• Greenberg, David (December 11, 2016). "An Intellectual History of Trumpism". Politico. Archived from the original on November 15, 2020. Retrieved November 15, 2020.
• Gryboski, Michael (November 8, 2012). "Texas Megachurch Pastor Says Obama Will 'Pave Way' for Antichrist". The Christian Post. Archived from the original on February 14, 2022. Retrieved April 15, 2021.
• Guilford, Gwynn (April 1, 2016). "Inside the Trump machine: The bizarre psychology of America's newest political movement". Quartz. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved November 17, 2020.
• Gutterman, David (2020). "Book Review: Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump". eJournal of Public Affairs. 9 (2). doi:10.1111/1467-9809.12592. S2CID 199267291.
• Haberman, Maggie (January 6, 2021). "Trump Told Crowd 'You Will Never Take Back Our Country With Weakness'". The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 9, 2021. Retrieved January 9, 2021.
• Haltiwanger, John (October 9, 2018). "The 'Brazilian Donald Trump,' Jair Bolsonaro, is visiting the White House. He was elected president despite saying he couldn't love a gay son and that a colleague was too 'ugly' to be raped". Business Insider. Archived from the original on December 10, 2020. Retrieved February 22, 2021.
• Hall, Kira; Goldstein, Donna M.; Ingram, Matthew Bruce (2016). "The hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle". HAU:Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 6 (2). doi:10.14318/hau6.2.009. S2CID 55012627. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
• Hamilton, Lawrence C. (January 10, 2024). Ettinger, Aaron (ed.). "Trumpism, climate and COVID: Social bases of the new science rejection". PLOS ONE. 19 (1): e0293059. Bibcode:2024PLoSO..1993059H. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0293059. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 10781192. PMID 38198461. Trumpism itself is predicted by age, race, evangelical religion, ideology, and receptivity to seemingly non-political conspiracy beliefs. Considering direct as well as indirect effects (through Trumpism), climate change and vaccine rejection are similarly predicted by white and evangelical identity, conspiracism, and by education×ideology and friends×party interactions.
• Harwood, John (January 20, 2017). "Why Trumpism May Not Endure". The New York Times (Opinion). Archived from the original on November 16, 2020. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
• Hasan, Mehdi (June 4, 2020). "Is This Trump's Reichstag Fire Moment?". The Intercept. Archived from the original on February 2, 2021. Retrieved January 26, 2021.
• Hedges, Chris (January 3, 2020). "Onward, Christian fascists". Salon.com. Archived from the original on December 28, 2020. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
• "Trumpism comes to Finland, exporting happiness, and Kardashians in Lapland – Finland in the World Press". Helsinki Times. April 13, 2019. Archived from the original on January 24, 2021. Retrieved January 23, 2021.
• Henderson, Bruce (August 24, 2017). "Evangelical Leader Stays on Trump Advisory Council Despite Charlottesville Response". Charlotte Observer. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
• Henninger, Daniel (March 3, 2021). "Trumpism According to Trump". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on March 14, 2021. Retrieved March 17, 2021.
• Hidalgo-Tenorio, Encarnación; Benítez-Castro, Miguel-Ángel (2021). "Trump's populist discourse and affective politics, or on how to move 'the People' through emotion". Globalisation, Societies and Education. 20 (2): 86–109. doi:10.1080/14767724.2020.1861540. hdl:10481/86686. S2CID 234260705.
• Hoad, Neville (November 20, 2020). "Big man sovereignty and sexual politics in pandemic time". Safundi the Journal of SouthAfrican and American Studies. 21 (4): 433–455. doi:10.1080/17533171.2020.1832801. S2CID 228896339.
• Hogg, Michael; van Knippenberg, Daan; Rast, David E. (2012). "The social identity theory of leadership: Theoretical origins, research findings, and conceptual developments". European Review of Social Psychology. 23: 258–304. doi:10.1080/10463283.2012.741134. S2CID 143555737.
• Hilditch, Cameron (December 18, 2020). "Christianity as Ideology: The Cautionary Tale of the Jericho March". National Review. Archived from the original on December 20, 2020. Retrieved January 19, 2021.
• Hopkin, Jonathan; Blyth, Mark (2020). "Global Trumpism: Understanding Anti-System Politics in Western Democracies". In Vormann, Boris; Weinman, Michael D. (eds.). The Emergence of Illiberalism. Routledge. ISBN 978-0367366247. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved October 11, 2020.
• Horton, Michael (December 16, 2020). "The Cult of Christian Trumpism". The Gospel Coalition. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
• Hovland, Ben (September 13, 2020). "Capitol rally targets Minnesota's COVID-19 state of emergency". Albert Lea Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021. Retrieved December 11, 2020.
• Hymes, Clare; McDonald, Cassidy; Watson, Elanor (April 16, 2021). "What we know about the "unprecedented" U.S. Capitol riot arrests". CBS News. Archived from the original on April 17, 2021. Retrieved April 17, 2021.
• Ibish, Hussain (April 12, 2020). "Is Donald Trump's US sliding towards illiberal democracy?". The National (Abu Dhabi) (Opinion). Archived from the original on June 29, 2021. Retrieved June 25, 2021.
• Illing, Sean (November 16, 2018). "What Machiavelli can teach us about Trump and the decline of liberal democracy". Vox. Archived from the original on February 3, 2021. Retrieved January 26, 2021.
• Ilyushina, Mary (December 15, 2020). "Putin, Bolsonaro and AMLO finally congratulate Biden on US election victory". CNN. Archived from the original on January 24, 2021. Retrieved February 22, 2021.
• Imhoff, Roland; Lamberty, Pia (2018). "How paranoid are conspiracy believers? Toward a more fine-grained understanding of the connect and disconnect between paranoia and belief in conspiracy theories". European Journal of Social Psychology. 48 (7): 909–926. doi:10.1002/ejsp.2494. S2CID 150284134. Archived from the original on April 14, 2021. Retrieved April 20, 2021.
• Isaac, Jeffrey (November 2017). "Making America Great Again?". Perspectives on Politics. 15 (3). Cambridge University Press: 625–631. doi:10.1017/S1537592717000871.
• Jacobs, Thomas (October 21, 2016). "Masculinity in the Time of Trump". Pacific Standard. Grist Magazine, Inc. Archived from the original on February 14, 2022. Retrieved April 17, 2021.
• Jacquemet, Marco (2020). "45 as a Bullshit Artist: Straining for Charisma". In McIntosh, Janet; Mendoza-Denton, Norma (eds.). Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108887410. ISBN 978-1108745031. S2CID 241149659. Archived from the original on April 20, 2021. Retrieved April 20, 2021.
• Jeffress, Robert; Fea, John (May 26, 2016). "The Evangelical Debate Over Trump" (audio). Interfaith Voices. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
• Jeffress, Robert; Wehner, Peter (July 12, 2016). "Dr. Robert Jeffress and Peter Wehner Join Mike for Important Debate over Evangelical Christian Support of Trump" (audio). The Mike Gallagher Show. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
• Jindal, Bobby; Castellanos, Alex (January 3, 2021). "Separating Trump from Trumpism is key to the GOP's future". Newsweek (Opinion). Archived from the original on April 16, 2021. Retrieved March 2, 2021.
• Johnson, Jessica (2018). "The Self-Radicalization of White Men". Communication, Culture & Critique. 11 (1). doi:10.1093/ccc/tcx014. Archived from the original on January 15, 2024. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
• Johnston, Rich (July 3, 2020). "Why Did Sean Hannity Lose His Punisher Skull Pin On Fox News?". Bleeding Cool. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved February 8, 2021.
• Jones, Karen (2019). "Trust, distrust, and affective looping". Philosophical Studies. 176 (4). Springer Nature: 955–968. doi:10.1007/s11098-018-1221-5. S2CID 171852867.
  • Partial reprint: Jones, Karen (November 14, 2019). "Understanding the emotions is key to breaking the cycle of distrust". ABC's Religion and Ethics. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Archived from the original on November 24, 2020. Retrieved April 10, 2021.
• Jones, Karen (2013). "Trusting Interpretations". In Mäkelä, Pekka; Townley, Cynthia (eds.). Trust: Analytic and Applied Perspectives. Value Inquiry Book Series. Vol. 263. Rodopi. ISBN 978-9401209410.
• Jutel, Olivier (2019). "Donald Trump, American Populism and Affective Media". In de la Torre, Carlos; Barr, Robert R.; Arato, Andrew; Cohen, Jean L.; Ruzza, Carlo (eds.). Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. Routledge International Handbooks. London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1315226446.
• Kagan, Robert (May 16, 2016). "This is how fascism comes to America". The Washington Post (Opinion). Archived from the original on February 13, 2021. Retrieved April 20, 2021.
• Kahan, Dan; Peters, Ellen; Dawson, Erica Cantrell; Slovic, Paul (2017). "Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government". Behavioural Public Policy. 1 (1). Cambridge University Press: 54–86. doi:10.1017/bpp.2016.2. hdl:1794/18962. S2CID 231735365.
• Kakissis, Joanna (May 13, 2019). "In Trump, Hungary's Viktor Orban Has A Rare Ally In The Oval Office". NPR. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved January 23, 2021.
• Katzenstein, Peter J. (March 20, 2019). "Trumpism is Us". WZB Mitteilungen. Berlin: Social Science Research Center. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved October 15, 2020.
• Kaul, Nitasha (June 17, 2021). "The Misogyny of Authoritarians in Contemporary Democracies" (PDF). International Studies Review. 23 (4): 1619–1645. doi:10.1093/isr/viab028.
• Kessler, Glenn; Kelly, Meg (January 10, 2018). "President Trump has made more than 2,000 false or misleading claims over 355 days". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
• Kimmel, Michael; Wade, Lisa (2018). "Ask a Feminist: Michael Kimmel and Lisa Wade Discuss Toxic Masculinity". Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 44 (1): 233–254. doi:10.1086/698284. S2CID 149487672.
• Kreiss, Daniel (2018). "The Media Are about Identity, Not Information". In Boczkowski, Pablo J.; Papacharissi, Zizi (eds.). Trump and the Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. pp. 93–99. doi:10.7551/mitpress/11464.003.0016. ISBN 978-0262037969.
• Kruse, Michael (October 13, 2017). "The Power of Trump's Positive Thinking". Politico. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved December 9, 2020.
• Kuhn, Johannes (September 2, 2017). "Who moved America to the right". Süddeutsche Zeitung. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved July 30, 2020.
• Kuhn, Johannes (July 17, 2018). "Trump und Putin: Republikaner üben leichte Kritik". Süddeutsche Zeitung (in German). Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
• Lange, Jason (January 17, 2024). "Trump's rise sparks isolationist worries abroad, but voters unfazed". Reuters. Retrieved January 17, 2024.
• Swan, Jonathan; Savage, Charlie; Haberman, Maggie (December 9, 2023). "Fears of a NATO Withdrawal Rise as Trump Seeks a Return to Power". New York Times. Archived from the original on December 10, 2023. Retrieved December 10, 2023.
• Lebow, David (May 13, 2019). "Trumpism and the Dialectic of Neoliberal Reason". Perspectives on Politics. 17 (2). Cambridge University Press: 380–398. doi:10.1017/S1537592719000434. S2CID 182013544.
• Lemann, Nicholas (November 2, 2020). "The Republican Identity Crisis After Trump". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2020.
• Leone, Luigi; Desimoni, Marta; Chirumbolo, Antonio (September 26, 2012). "Interest and expertise moderate the relationship between right-wing attitudes, ideological self-placement and voting". European Journal of Personality. 28 (1): 2–13. doi:10.1002/per.1880. S2CID 143037865.
• Lewis, Matt (December 12, 2020). "Bad News for Evangelicals – God Doesn't Need Donald Trump in the White House". The Daily Beast (Opinion). Archived from the original on March 9, 2021. Retrieved January 23, 2021 – via www.msn.com.
• Liu, William Ming (April 14, 2016). "How Trump's 'Toxic Masculinity' Is Bad for Other Men". Motto (Time). New York. Archived from the original on January 21, 2018. Retrieved January 21, 2018.
• Lowndes, Joseph (2019). "Populism and race in the United States from George Wallace to Donald Trump". In de la Torre, Carlos (ed.). Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. London & New York: Routledge. "Trumpism" section, pp. 197–200. ISBN 978-1315226446. Trump unabashedly employed the language of white supremacy and misogyny, rage and even violence at Trump rallies was like nothing seen in decades.
• Lowndes, Joseph (November 8, 2021). "Far-right extremism dominates the GOP. It didn't start — and won't end — with Trump". Washington Post. Archived from the original on November 23, 2021. Retrieved December 31, 2023.
• Lubbers, Marcel; Scheepers, Peer (December 7, 2010). "French Front National voting: A micro and macro perspective" (PDF). Ethnic and Racial Studies. 25 (1): 120–149. doi:10.1080/01419870120112085. hdl:11370/a3226cec-30ee-4c69-bd24-ba49cbbb17cf. S2CID 59362467. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved October 29, 2020.
• Lyall, Sarah (January 23, 2021). "The Trump Presidency Is Now History. So How Will It Rank?". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved January 23, 2021.
• MacWilliams, Matthew (January 17, 2016). "The one weird trait that predicts whether you're a Trump supporter". Politico. Archived from the original on January 29, 2021. Retrieved October 13, 2020.
• MacWilliams, Matthew C. (September 23, 2020). "Trump Is an Authoritarian. So Are Millions of Americans". Politico. Archived from the original on February 9, 2021. Retrieved February 9, 2021.
• Marietta, Morgan; Farley, Tyler; Cote, Tyler; Murphy, Paul (2017). "The Rhetorical Psychology of Trumpism". The Forum. 15 (2). De Gruyter: 313–312. doi:10.1515/for-2017-0019. S2CID 148986197.
• Mason, Liliana; Wronski, Julie; Kane, John V. (2021). "Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support". American Political Science Review. 115 (4). Cambridge University Press: 1508–1516. doi:10.1017/S0003055421000563. S2CID 237860170. Trump's support is thus uniquely tied to animus toward minority groups. Our findings provide insights into the social divisions underlying American politics and the role of elite rhetoric in translating animus into political support.
• Massachs, Joan; Monti, Corrado; Morales, Gianmarco De Francisci; Bonchi, Francesco (2020). "Roots of Trumpism: Homophily and Social Feedback in Donald Trump Support on Reddit". 12th ACM Conference on Web Science. 12th ACM Conference on Web Science. pp. 49–58. arXiv:2005.01790. doi:10.1145/3394231.3397894. ISBN 978-1450379892. S2CID 218502169.
• Matthews, Dylan (January 14, 2021). "The F Word". Vox. Archived from the original on January 24, 2021. Retrieved January 26, 2021.
• Matthews, Dylan (October 23, 2020). "Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in". Vox. Archived from the original on January 4, 2022. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
• McFadden, Robert D.; Grynbaum, Michael M. (February 18, 2021). "Rush Limbaugh Dies at 70; Turned Talk Radio Into a Right-Wing Attack Machine". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 9, 2021. Retrieved February 17, 2021.
• McCarthy, Tom; Ho, Vivian; Greve, Joan E. (January 7, 2021). "Schumer calls pro-Trump mob 'domestic terrorists' as Senate resumes election certification – live". The Guardian. Archived from the original on January 6, 2021. Retrieved January 6, 2021.
• McGaughey, Ewan (2018). "Fascism-Lite in America (or the Social Ideal of Donald Trump)". British Journal of American Legal Studies. 7 (2): 291–315. doi:10.2478/bjals-2018-0012. S2CID 195842347. SSRN 2773217.
• Moore, Johnnie (August 24, 2017). "Evangelical Trump Adviser: Why I Won't Bail on the White House". Religion News Service. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
• Morris, Edwin Kent (2019). "Inversion, Paradox, and Liberal Disintegration: Towards a Conceptual Framework of Trumpism". New Political Science. 41 (1): 17–35. doi:10.1080/07393148.2018.1558037. S2CID 149978398. Trumpian fascism is a different kind of fascism. It is better understood as an inverted, American kind of fascism, distinct from European fascism, but not entirely dissimilar from it. Inverted American-style fascism differs from European fascist in one crucial way: the role of corporate power in the politics of the state.
• Mullen, Lincoln (June 16, 2018). "The Fight to Define Romans 13". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
• Platt, Brian (June 5, 2018). "Ontario Proud, the right-wing Facebook giant in Ontario's election, eyes federal election involvement". National Post. Archived from the original on August 18, 2019. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Nessen, Stephen (April 30, 2016). "4 Ways Donald Trump's Pro Wrestling Experience Is Like His Campaign Today". National Public Radio. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved November 17, 2020.
• Newkirk, Vann R. (March 15, 2016). "Donald Trump, Wrestling Heel". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on December 1, 2020. Retrieved October 18, 2020.
• "6 Books to Help Understand Trump's Win". The New York Times. November 9, 2016. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved January 31, 2021.
• Nwachukwu, John Owen (May 1, 2018). "Biafra: IPOB reacts to Trump's warning to Buhari on killing of Christians". Daily Post. Archived from the original on September 5, 2022. Retrieved September 30, 2022.
• Nwaubani, Adaobi Tricia (February 7, 2020). "Trump trashes Nigeria and bans its immigrants. Nigerians love him for it". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on February 24, 2021. Retrieved September 30, 2022.
• O'Callaghan, Patrick (2020). "Reflections on the Root Causes of Outrage Discourse on Social Media". In Navin, Mark Christopher; Nunan, Richard (eds.). Democracy, Populism, and Truth. AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice. Vol. 9. Springer. pp. 115–126. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-43424-3_9. ISBN 978-3030434243. S2CID 226512444.
• O'Connor, Brendon (October 29, 2020). "Who exactly is Trump's 'base'? Why white, working-class voters could be key to the US election". The Conversation. Archived from the original on January 29, 2021. Retrieved March 2, 2021.
• Oduah, Chika (November 14, 2016). "Nigeria's Biafra Separatists See Hope in Trump". VOA. Archived from the original on August 29, 2022. Retrieved September 30, 2022.
• Ophir, Adi (2020). "The Political". In Stoler, Ann Laura; Gourgouris, Stathis; Lezra, Jacques (eds.). Thinking With Balibar A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice. Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 158–182. doi:10.1515/9780823288502-012. ISBN 978-0823288489. S2CID 150814728.
• Ott, Brian L. (2017). "The age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the politics of debasement". Critical Studies in Media Communication. 34 (1): 59–68. doi:10.1080/15295036.2016.1266686. S2CID 152133074.
• Pape, Robert A. (April 6, 2021). "Understanding American Domestic Terrorism-Mobilization Potential and Risk Factors of a New Threat Trajectory" (PDF). Chicago Project on Security and Threats. University of Chicago. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 17, 2021. Retrieved April 17, 2021.
• Parker, Ashley (November 16, 2020). "The ending of Trump's presidency echoes the beginning – with a lie". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved November 22, 2020.
• Paxton, Robert O. (January 11, 2021). "I've Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now". Newsweek. Archived from the original on February 4, 2021. Retrieved February 3, 2021.
• Paravati, Elaine; Naidu, Esha; Gabriel, Shira; Wiedemann, Carl (December 23, 2019). "More than just a tweet: The unconscious impact of forming parasocial relationships through social media". Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice. 7 (4): 388–403. doi:10.1037/cns0000214. S2CID 212834936.
• Partington, Richard (July 7, 2018). "Trump's trade war: What is it and which products are affected?". The Guardian. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved July 19, 2020.
• Peters, Jeremy W. (November 9, 2020). "Trump Lost the Race. But Republicans Know It's Still His Party". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2020.
• Peters, Jeremy W. (February 17, 2021). "Rush Limbaugh's Legacy of Venom: As Trump Rose, 'It All Sounded Familiar'". The New York Times. The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 9, 2021. Retrieved February 18, 2021.
• Pettigrew, Thomas F. (March 2, 2017). "Social Psychological Perspectives on Trump Supporters". Journal of Social and Political Psychology. 5 (1): 107–116. doi:10.5964/jspp.v5i1.750. S2CID 56388590.
• Smith, Gregory A. (April 26, 2017). "Among white evangelicals, regular churchgoers are the most supportive of Trump". Pew Research Center. Archived from the original on March 12, 2021. Retrieved March 6, 2021.
• Phillips, Dom; Phillips, Tom (December 20, 2019). "Brazil: Bolsonaro in homophobic outburst as corruption scandal swirls". The Guardian. Archived from the original on February 2, 2021. Retrieved February 22, 2021.
• Pillar, Paul R. (September 17, 2020). "The Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu Alliance: Simply Bad News". The National Interest. Archived from the original on March 1, 2021. Retrieved May 10, 2021.
• Plasser, Fritz; Ulram, Peter A. (2003). "Striking a Responsive Chord: Mass Media and. Right-Wing Populism in Austria". In Mazzoleni, Gianpietro; Stewart, Julianne; Horsfield, Bruce (eds.). The Media and Neo-Populism. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. ISBN 978-0275974923.
• Plott, Elaina (October 27, 2020). "Win or Lose, It's Donald Trump's Republican Party". The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 29, 2020. Retrieved October 29, 2020.
• Power, Samantha (2018). "Beyond Elections: Foreign Interference with American Democracy". In Sunstein, Cass R. (ed.). Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America (ePub ed.). New York: Dey Street Books. pp. 69–80. ISBN 978-0062696212.
• Pulido, Lauro; Bruno, Tianna; Faiver-Serna, Cristina; Galentine, Cassandra (2019). "Environmental Deregulation, Spectacular Racism, and White Nationalism in the Trump Era". Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 109 (2): 520–532. Bibcode:2019AAAG..109..520P. doi:10.1080/24694452.2018.1549473. S2CID 159402163.
• Raupp, Eric (December 12, 2020). "Will Bolsonaro Leave Trumpism Behind to Embrace a Biden-led US?". Fair Observer. Archived from the original on December 18, 2020. Retrieved February 22, 2021.
• Reicher, Stephen; Haslam, S. Alexander (November 19, 2016). "The politics of hope: Donald Trump as an entrepreneur of identity". Scientific American. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved October 15, 2020.
• Reicher, Stephen (May 4, 2017). "La beauté est dans la rue: Four reasons (or perhaps five) to study crowds". Group and Intergroup Relations. 20 (5): 593–605. doi:10.1177/1368430217712835. S2CID 148743518.
• Robertson, Derek (May 16, 2020). "What Liberals Don't Get About Trump Supporters and Pop Culture". Politico. Archived from the original on January 30, 2021. Retrieved January 26, 2021.
• Richardson, Michael (2017). "The Disgust of Donald Trump". Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. 31 (6): 747–756. doi:10.1080/10304312.2017.1370077. hdl:1959.4/unsworks_56318. S2CID 148803267.
• Robison, Wade L. (2020). "#ConstitutionalStability". In Navin, Mark Christopher; Nunan, Richard (eds.). Democracy, Populism, and Truth. AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice. Vol. 9. Springer. pp. 179–191. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-43424-3_13. ISBN 978-3030434243. S2CID 243147537. Archived from the original on January 15, 2024. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
• Roper, Willern (January 8, 2021). "Nearly Half of Republicans Approve of Capitol Riot". Statista. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021. Retrieved February 8, 2021.
• Rosenfeld, Steven (August 9, 2019). "Leading Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Copying Hitler's Early Rhetoric and Policies". Common Dreams. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved November 21, 2020.
• Rosenberg, Matthew; Rutenberg, Jim (February 1, 2021). "Key Takeaways From Trump's Effort to Overturn the Election – A Times examination of the 77 days between election and inauguration shows how a lie the former president had been grooming for years overwhelmed the Republican Party and stoked the assault on the Capitol". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 1, 2021. Retrieved February 1, 2021.
• Ross, Alex (December 5, 2016). "The Frankfurt school knew Trump was coming". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on December 13, 2020. Retrieved February 18, 2021.
• Rudolf, Peter (2017). "The US under Trump: Potential consequences for transatlantic relations". In Heinemann-Grüder, Andreas (ed.). Peace Report 2017 (PDF). Vol. 29. Berlin/Münster/Zürich: LIT-Verlag, International Politics. ISBN 978-3643909329. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved October 15, 2020.
• Rutenberg, Jim; Becker, Jo; Lipton, Eric; Haberman, Maggie; Martin, Jonathan; Rosenberg, Matthew; Schmidt, Michael S. (January 31, 2021). "77 Days: Trump's Campaign to Subvert the Election Hours after the United States voted, the president declared the election a fraud – a lie that unleashed a movement that would shatter democratic norms and upend the peaceful transfer of power". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 1, 2021. Retrieved February 1, 2021.
• Samphir, Harrison (July 23, 2019). "The Post Millennial joins Conservative party's online booster club". NOW Magazine. Archived from the original on July 24, 2019. Retrieved February 22, 2021.
• Schneider, Mac (April 21, 2017). "Marine Le Pen: France's Trump is on the rise". Vox. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021. Retrieved January 23, 2021.
• Schneiker, Andrea (2018). "Telling the Story of the Superhero and the Anti-Politician as President: Donald Trump's Branding on Twitter". Political Studies Association. 1 (14): 210–223. doi:10.1177/1478929918807712. S2CID 150145298.
• Seeßlen, Georg (February 2, 2017). "Trompeten des Trumpismus" [Language attack of the right-wing populists: Trumpets of Trumpism]. Der Spiegel (in German). Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved October 15, 2020.
• Serhan, Yasmeen (February 16, 2021). "What History Tells Us Will Happen to Trumpism". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on February 17, 2021. Retrieved February 17, 2021.
• Serwer, Adam (November 20, 2017). "The Nationalist's Delusion". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved July 30, 2020.
• Shabad, Rebecca; Bennett, Geoff; Alba, Monica; Pettypiece, Shannon (June 2, 2020). "'The Bible is not a prop': Religious leaders, lawmakers outraged over Trump church visit". NBC News. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved January 13, 2021.
• Shellnutt, Kate (September 6, 2017). "Should Christians Keep Advising a President They Disagree With?". Christianity Today. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
• Shenk, Timothy (August 16, 2016). "The dark history of Donald Trump's rightwing revolt". The Guardian. Archived from the original on April 14, 2019. Retrieved January 26, 2021.
• Smith, Julianne; Townsend, Jim (July 9, 2018). "NATO in the Age of Trump:What it Can't and Can't Accomplish Absent U.S. Leadership". Foreign Affairs. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
• Sobieraj, Sarah; Berry, Jeffrey M. (2011). "From Incivility to Outrage: Political Discourse in Blogs, Talk Radio, and Cable News". Political Communication. 28 (1): 19–41. doi:10.1080/10584609.2010.542360. S2CID 143739086.
• Solon, Olivia (November 10, 2016). "Facebook's failure: Did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?". The Guardian. Archived from the original on January 14, 2017. Retrieved March 5, 2021.
• Stenner, Karen; Haidt, Jonathan (2018). "Authoritarianism is not a momentary madness, but an eternal dynamic within liberal democracies". In Sunstein, Cass R. (ed.). Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America (ePub ed.). New York: Dey Street Books. ISBN 978-0062696212.
• Stoler, Ann Laura (2020). "Interior Frontiers". In Stoler, Ann Laura; Gourgouris, Stathis; Lezra, Jacques (eds.). Thinking With Balibar A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice. Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 117–139. doi:10.1515/9780823288502-010. ISBN 978-0823288489. S2CID 243377812.
• Stoller, Paul (April 27, 2017). "More on the Anthropology of Trump". Anthropology Now. 9 (1): 58–60. doi:10.1080/19428200.2017.1291135. S2CID 149440462. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved December 9, 2020.
• Suessenbach, Felix; Moore, Adam B. (2020). "Dominance desires predicting conspiracy beliefs and Trump support in the 2016 U.S. Election" (PDF). Motivation Science. 6 (2): 171–176. doi:10.1037/mot0000146. hdl:20.500.11820/044b23e6-d62f-471c-8be4-4ad69e28a14e. S2CID 189448130. Retrieved December 9, 2020.
• Sundahl, Anne-Mette Holmgård (May 4, 2022). "Personality Cult or a Mere Matter of Popularity?". International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. 36 (4): 431–458. doi:10.1007/s10767-022-09423-0. PMC 9066393. PMID 35528318. Trump, Putin and Ardern are used as examples of the model's ability to distinguish between cult and non-cult phenomena. The comparison shows that only Trump and Putin have a cult on both dimensions ... This paper introduced a model for distinguishing between popularity and personality cults based on three parameters covering a representational and social practice dimension. Putin, Trump and Ardern were used to illustrate the model's ability to categorise phenomena with different degrees of charisma. The analysis shows that while Trump and Putin belong in the domain of personality cults, Ardern's alleged cult does not have a social practice dimension, as the few cultlike tendencies are strictly representational.
• "What Brazil's President, Jair Bolsonaro, has said about Brazil's Indigenous Peoples". survivalinternational.org. 2020. Archived from the original on April 8, 2021. Retrieved February 22, 2021.
• Swyngedouw, Marc; Ivaldi, Giles (December 2007). "The extreme right utopia in Belgium and France: The ideology of the Flemish Vlaams Blok and the French front national". West European Politics. 24 (3): 1–22. doi:10.1080/01402380108425450. S2CID 144383766.
• Tabatabai, Ariane (July 15, 2020). "QAnon Goes to Iran". Foreign Policy. Archived from the original on May 23, 2022. Retrieved February 5, 2022.
• Tarnoff, Ben (November 9, 2016). "The triumph of Trumpism: the new politics that is here to stay". The Guardian. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved November 24, 2016.
• Tashman, Brian (October 8, 2011). "Jeffress Says Satan Is Behind Roman Catholicism". Right Wing Watch. Archived from the original on September 19, 2016. Retrieved April 15, 2021.
• Tharoor, Ishaan (July 11, 2018). "Trump's NATO trip shows 'America First' is 'America Alone'". The Washington Post. Washington D.C. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved November 28, 2020.
• Teague, Matthew (June 3, 2020). "'He wears the armor of God': evangelicals hail Trump's church photo op". The Guardian. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved February 8, 2021.
• Matt Galloway (Host), Allan Rock (Guest) (November 6, 2020). "Allan Rock on what the presidential election means for U.S.-Canada relations". The Current. CBC. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Theidon, Kimberly (November 11, 2020). "A forecasted failure: Intersectionality, COVID-19, and the perfect storm". Journal of Human Rights. 95 (5): 528–536. doi:10.1080/14754835.2020.1822156. S2CID 226308311.
• Thompson, Derek (December 30, 2020). "The Deep Story of Trumpism- Thinking about the Republican Party like a political psychiatrist". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on April 14, 2021. Retrieved April 9, 2021.
• Thompson, Jack (June 12, 2017). "Understanding Trumpism: The foreign policy of the new American president" (PDF). Sirius: Journal of Strategic Analysis. 1 (2). De Gruyter: 109–115. doi:10.1515/sirius-2017-0052. S2CID 157683957. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved October 15, 2020.
• Todd, Chuck; Murray, Mike; Dann, Carrie (April 28, 2021). "After 100 days out of office, Trump's support softens in NBC News poll". NBC News. Archived from the original on April 30, 2021. Retrieved May 1, 2021.
• Tollefson, Jeff (February 4, 2021). "Tracking QAnon: how Trump turned conspiracy-theory research upside down" (PDF). Nature. Vol. 590. Nature Research. pp. 192–193. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-00257-y. ISSN 1476-4687. LCCN 12037118. PMID 33542489. S2CID 231818589. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 27, 2021. Retrieved January 31, 2024.
• Trump, Donald J. (September 25, 2019). "Remarks of President Trump at the 74th Session of the United Nations General Assembly". whitehouse.gov. Archived from the original on March 9, 2021. Retrieved December 6, 2020 – via National Archives. In everything we do, we are focused on empowering the dreams and aspirations of our citizens ... we will cast off the enemies of liberty and overcome the oppressors of dignity.
• Tucker, Erika (2018). "Hope, Hate and Indignation: Spinoza and Political Emotion in the Trump Era". In Sable, Marc Benjamin; Torres, Angel Jaramillo (eds.). Trump and Political Philosophy. London: Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 131–157. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-74427-8_8. ISBN 978-3319744278. S2CID 149997363.
• Urbinati, Nadia (May 26, 2020). "On Trumpism, or the End of American Exceptionalism". Teoria Politica, Nuova Serie Annali. 9: 209–226. Archived from the original on January 31, 2021. Retrieved January 25, 2021.
• Vallejo, Justin (February 28, 2021). "Donald Trump CPAC speech". The Independent. Archived from the original on March 1, 2021. Retrieved February 28, 2021.
• Van Assche, Jasper; Dhont, Kristof; Pettigrew, Thomas F. (April 2019). "The social-psychological bases of far-right support in Europe and the United States". Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology. 29 (5): 385–401. doi:10.1002/casp.2407. hdl:1854/LU-8639899. S2CID 155558324. Archived from the original on May 23, 2022. Retrieved October 13, 2020 – via ResearchGate.
• Van Hiel, Alain (March 2012). "A psycho-political profile of party activists and left-wing and right-wing extremists". European Journal of Political Research. 51 (2): 166–203. doi:10.1111/j.1475-6765.2011.01991.x. hdl:1854/LU-2109499. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved October 29, 2020.
• Van Hiel, Alain; Mervielde, Ivan (July 2006). "Explaining conservative beliefs and political preferences: A comparison of social dominance orientation and authoritarianism". Journal of Applied Social Psychology. 32 (5): 965–976. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.2002.tb00250.x.
• Vescio, Theresa K.; Schermerhorn, Nathaniel E. (2021). "Hegemonic masculinity predicts 2016 and 2020 voting and candidate evaluations". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 118 (2): e2020589118. Bibcode:2021PNAS..11820589V. doi:10.1073/pnas.2020589118. PMC 7812802. PMID 33397724.
• Waisbord, Silvio; Tucker, Tina; Lichtenheld, Zoey (2018). "Trump and the Great Disruption in Public Communication". In Boczkowski, Pablo; Papacharissi, Zizi (eds.). Trump and the Media (e-book ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262037969.
• Weber, Thomas (January 24, 2021). "Trump is not a fascist. But that didn't make him any less dangerous to our democracy". CNN (Opinion). Archived from the original on February 20, 2021. Retrieved March 13, 2021.
• Wehner, Peter (July 5, 2016). "The Theology of Donald Trump". The New York Times (Opinion). New York. Archived from the original on January 14, 2021. Retrieved April 18, 2021.
• Wehner, Peter (January 21, 2017). "Why I Cannot Fall in Line Behind Trump". The New York Times (Opinion). Archived from the original on February 13, 2021. Retrieved March 25, 2021.
• Wehner, Peter (July 5, 2019). "The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on April 23, 2021. Retrieved April 18, 2021.
• Wehner, Peter (December 7, 2020). "Trump's Most Malicious Legacy". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on May 14, 2021. Retrieved April 18, 2021.
• Weisbrot, Mark (October 20, 2017). "Brazil's Donald Trump?". U.S. News & World Report (Opinion). Archived from the original on March 2, 2018. Retrieved February 22, 2021.
• West, Cornel (November 17, 2016). "American Neoliberalism: A New Neo-Fascist Era Is Here". The Guardian (Opinion). Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved December 20, 2020.
• Livesey, Bruce (October 8, 2020). "All the elements are in place for American-style fascism, says Cornel West". National Observer (Canada) (interview). Archived from the original on January 18, 2021. Retrieved June 24, 2021.
• Whitebook, Joel (March 20, 2017). "Opinion: Trump's Method, Our Madness". The New York Times. Archived from the original on May 15, 2021. Retrieved May 14, 2021.
• Whitehead, Andrew L.; Perry, Samuel L.; Baker, Joseph O. (January 25, 2018). "Make America Christian Again: Christian Nationalism and Voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election" (PDF). Sociology of Religion. 79 (2): 147–171. doi:10.1093/socrel/srx070. Why did Americans vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election? Social scientists have proposed a variety of explanations, including economic dissatisfaction, sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. The current study establishes that, independent of these influences, voting for Trump was, at least for many Americans, a symbolic defense of the United States' perceived Christian heritage. Data from a national probability sample of Americans surveyed soon after the 2016 election shows that greater adherence to Christian nationalist ideology was a robust predictor of voting for Trump, even after controlling for economic dissatisfaction, sexism, anti-black prejudice, anti-Muslim refugee attitudes, and anti-immigrant sentiment, as well as measures of religion, sociodemographics, and political identity more generally.
• Will, George F. (July 10, 2020). "The difference between Trumpism and fascism" (Opinion). The Washington Post. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved December 17, 2020.
• Wintour, Patrick (September 21, 2020). "US announces new Iran sanctions and claims it is enforcing UN arms embargo". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved November 17, 2020.
• Wolf, Zachary B. (November 9, 2020). "Election 2020: How the Trump administration's roadblocks could cause problems for Biden". CNN. Archived from the original on November 30, 2020. Retrieved February 16, 2021. Update November 10, 2020.
• Woods, Mel (June 11, 2020). "Erin O'Toole's 'Take Back Canada' Slogan Prompts Plenty Of Questions". HuffPost. Archived from the original on June 8, 2021. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
• Womick, Jake; Rothmund, Tobias; Azevedo, Flavio; King, Laura A.; Jost, John T. (June 20, 2018). "Group-Based Dominance and Authoritarian Aggression Predict Support for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election" (PDF). Social Psychological and Personality Science. 10 (5): 643–652. doi:10.1177/1948550618778290. S2CID 55503314. Archived (PDF) from the original on December 24, 2021. Retrieved December 16, 2020.
• Yang, Mimi (September 25, 2018). "Trumpism: a disfigured Americanism". Palgrave Communications. 4: 1–13. doi:10.1057/s41599-018-0170-0. Trump's "America First" is not exactly original but from a culturally genetic and historic make-up that builds the vertical America. The xenophobic and anti-immigration rhetoric has its origin in nativism that harbors white nationalism, populism, protectionism and isolationism ... Trumpism is not Americanism, but a masqueraded white supremacism and nativism; it is a disfigured Americanism in its vertical form.
• Zaretsky, Robert (July 7, 2016). "Donald Trump and the myth of mobocracy". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on February 7, 2021. Retrieved October 15, 2020.
• Zengerle, Patricia (February 2, 2019). "With eye on Afghanistan talks, Trump vows to stop 'endless wars'". Reuters.com. Archived from the original on November 7, 2020. Retrieved November 17, 2020.
• Zurcher, Anthony (August 26, 2020). "RNC 2020: The Republican Party Now the Party of Trump". BBC News. Archived from the original on November 1, 2020. Retrieved November 10, 2020.