Trumpism is America's Worst Export
The world over, populists are trying to emulate the Trump phenomenon. But how much staying power does this movement actually have?
Last week Liz Truss, the former British Prime Minister with a legacy even smaller than her lower jaw, spoke at the American Conservative Political Action Conference for some reason. Truss is Britain’s shortest serving Prime Minister but also arguably its most accomplished—having managed to kill both the economy and the monarch of Great Britain during her mere 49 days in office.
But according to Truss, it wasn’t her catastrophic budget plan that ended her run as chief of Normal Island, but sabotage from the Deep State who were terrified of her promise to cut taxes and reduce the size of government.
If you’ve heard the term “Deep State” a zillion times but only have a rough idea at best of what that actually refers to, it’s basically what happens to the villains of a conspiracy narrative after the conspiracists have won.
For many decades the various governments of the world have been considered part of a grand network of evil cabals—the New World Order, usually, or the Illuminati. The Reptilians or the Annunaki if you lean more toward the Icke side of things—who control everything, even the stuff they pretend not to control, like 9/11, or earthquakes and the weather.
But then in 2016 the dog caught the car. Donald Trump, long an idol of American conspiracists of the Alex Jones variety, became president. Now the government were the good guys, so how do we explain all the evil shit that continues to happen? Oh, that’s easy, it’s the secret government that still controls everything. The deep state. Under this cosmology, Barack Obama was still president even when Trump was president.
Only ten years ago—ten, if you can believe it—you would be laughed out of the room if you predicted “Trumpism” as a name for a political ideology. What, you mean the guy from The Apprentice? The guy who makes filmmakers give him little cameos if they set the movie in New York, that guy? But it’s here, it’s just as dumb as anyone would have imagined, and it’s spreading worldwide as a One Weird Trick to elect populist alt-right figures, entrench their old boy oligarch allies in the halls of power, and then thoroughly and permanently excuse their inability, when not total unwillingness, to enact any of the promises that got them there. It’s a free ticket to incompetence and failure.
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Liz Truss didn’t fuck up, she was betrayed by the Deep State. This crucial statement is the difference between being the most breathtakingly incompetent leader in the very long history of England and being a heroic martyr for other rising stars of the new Right with weak chins and weaker political strategies.
“But wait,” you say, “The Deep State is supposed to be made up of Obama loyalists in the FBI or somesuch. What does any of this have to do with Liz Truss?” Well, like any good conspiracy villain, the Deep State has gone worldwide. Now the combined administrative apparatus of every nation has joined together in a Kafkaesque Voltron specializing in making populist right wing leaders look very bad at their job when actually they are very good at their job. They promise.
The ousting of far-right serial whale harasser Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil was supposedly the deep state’s handiwork. There are references to it in Indian political discourse under Narendra Modi.
Trumpism as a political fashion is just generally annoying and I would say embarrassing if not for the fact that you’d kind of have to look past how legitimately terrifying it is for the already marginalised. It’s kind of easy to see why it’s a hit, especially among lazy political aspirants, and why it started with a game show host. Here’s the playbook as I understand it:
1. Play a character and establish a brand. You must dial up your personality, be outrageous and bombastic. Don’t be afraid to adopt mannerisms that are even a little silly if it can become a brand characteristic. Dress strangely or wear an unusual hairstyle.
2. Propose simple solutions to complex problems. Even impossibly simple if you can get away with it. The gambit is that your target audience mostly doesn’t understand the complex problem or is fed up with it, but they will embrace a solution that they can understand. Experienced politicians and experts are at a disadvantage here because they will propose complex solutions to complex problems, which is frustrating. Stop drugs and immigration by building a giant wall—boom. Abolish taxes. Just get rid of the IRS. Get rid of all the government departments. Boom.
3. Once in power, don’t really do anything. (I mean you can’t—the promises were impossible. Attempting them in good faith might collapse the country in a week. This is where Liz Truss went wrong). Instead, spend all of your “politics” budget on raging against the imagined Skeletor plotting against you from high on Snake Mountain.
Because it’s so important to keep talking points simple, the Trumpists are largely unconcerned with issues of hard governance and instead slum around in the quagmire of the so-called Culture War. Is Taylor Swift promoting the kind of womanly behaviour we’re comfortable raising our girls to admire? Can we pass laws restricting how much woke is permitted in video games? We need to think about skin tone regulations on pilots. We can sacrifice our children’s literacy as long as we know they’re not turning gay. We can’t fix the potholes in the freeway because of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The export of Trump’s brand of loud bloviating inaction might have given rise to the most annoying political phase in modern history. Argentina’s Javier Milei clowns around with a performative chainsaw as he closes soup kitchens and homeless shelters. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders holds Mohammad drawing contests for literally no reason than to do the “problem?” trollface meme he uncannily resembles.
Not every nation takes the bait, though.
Nigel Farage might have won a major victory with Brexit but they never let anyone as bonkers as him actually lead the United Kingdom. Quivering international media is always in a state of near panic about Trump in Heels Marine Le Pen’s proximity to the French presidency but she’s a three for three loser. In Australia, I’m immensely grateful that these people can barely get traction outside of the Sky News back pages.
No matter how hard they fall, though, they all know they’re welcome to lick their wounds at CPAC.
I’m always kind of amused at how CPAC in particular, but the American conservative scene in general, has become such a losers’ club for internationally disgraced far right dipshits. Only at CPAC could you imagine someone like Liz “outlasted by lettuce” Truss being welcomed as somebody to aspire to. When Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, lost his bid for re-election he took his next move from Trump directly—he refused to concede, and when that failed, incited an insurrection. When that failed, he moved to Florida and spoke at CPAC.
Indeed, of all the countries that have tried their hand at throwing up a—God, I’m sorry, I have to say it—a Trump card (ugh), the United States seems to be the only country that’s embraced the idea with full zeal, and even then only barely. Trumpism at times doesn’t even seem as much political as it does pop cultural. Political rallies like concerts. It’s Taylor Swift for boring assholes. And let me tell you, given the choice I will take Swifties 120% of the time.
Fads burn out fast, though. And outside America I think people in general have just been quicker to see behind the curtain and realise how hollow and worthless it is as a movement. Despite the cliché, people, by and large, aren’t that stupid. It’s a great relief for many to think that most of their problems will go away if you build a big wall to keep the browns out, and the rest of the problems will dissolve if you yell at them and call them a cuck, but there are only so many times that can fail. More and more, quicker and quicker, Trumpians around the world are getting tossed out of positions of power and joining the conga line of losers marching up onto the CPAC stage.
More than even the hollowness and short-sightedness of the ideology, there are cultural reasons why Trumpism doesn’t translate uniformly across every culture, even every western culture. I can’t speak for every country about its experiments with Trumpism but I can speak for my country, Australia.
We’re a country that has taken very strongly to American culture, at least as much if not moreso than British culture. We’re also colonial and conservative. You’d think that the recipe is all there, then, but there’s a very key ingredient that we’re missing that makes us largely immune to Trumpist fervour: We don’t feel like we’ve lost anything.
The slogan that really carried Trump’s message was “Make America Great Again.” He made appeals to the decaying factories in the Rust Belt, industries in decline, a recent history of lost and stalemated wars. Since the end of the Cold War an empire that has started looking less like Rome and more like the realm of Ozymandias. American conservatism has morphed into Trumpism because it’s no longer conserving, it’s struggling to reclaim something.
Australian conservatism is a different beast because, broadly, we already feel like we’re great and never stopped being great. I mean I don’t want to blow my own horn here. That can lay fertile ground for other annoying political ideas, but Trumpism specifically just doesn’t take off. The closest thing we have, aesthetically and behaviourally, to a Donald Trump is the goofy billionaire Clive Palmer who owns a dinosaur resort and ran his own election campaign that he shamelessly ripped wholesale off his American counterpart. But the “Make Australia Great” campaign (he couldn’t even get away with the ‘Again!’) just didn’t ring true to anyone here. It was the same campaign, run by basically the same guy, but instead of packing stadiums with strobe lights, Australians were just left puzzled and wondering, who is this fat wanker?
Conservative prime ministers in Australia have always tried to find comradery with American Republicans, but their style is just different. Of the last three conservative prime ministers we’ve had, two of them came out of seminary school and wound up in politics after getting lost on their way to becoming Catholic priests. Ideologically they’re just as invested in the culture wars but they have the temperament of an inner city accounting firm and the personality of that stuff that falls out of your shoe when the inner sole starts wearing away.
We do have a populist far right. The white nationalist senator Pauline Hanson rode on a wave of ultranationalist racial resentment in the 90s and early 2000s that could even, plausibly, have resulted in something very similar to a Donald Trump style rise to president—if we had a presidency. But our flirtation with an independence movement away from Britain sank, and with it, any real hope of Hanson ever having actual power. Her contemporary flirtations with Trumpism in a desperate attempt to claw back her shitty racist grievance campaign just aren’t hitting the same chords anymore.
I wouldn’t be too surprised if you see Pauline Hanson at CPAC USA one year, seeking warm bodies to reaffirm that her life project was never in vain—but then, even our bigotries aren’t easily compatible. The sword of white nationalism in Australia is largely directed against Asians, who are hardly the standard target of Trumpism except when he’s ranting against “Jina.”
The American election this year is of course the biggest test of how much steam Trumpism still has. With similar movements falling apart abroad, it might be time to take a trip to the grocery store so we can play a game of what lasts longer: Trumpism, or Lettuce?
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I still resent that Hanson has had a long, lucrative, and pointless career in Australian politics. Her personal financial benefit irks me.
I'm gonna read the whole piece when I have more time but your graphic of populists in Trump wigs is just ::chef's kiss::