“What is Trumpism?” is a question that has bedeviled political analysts for a decade now. Ever since he came down that escalator in 2015 and reshaped all of American politics forever, friends and foes alike have had trouble describing exactly what to make of his political program. There are the obvious things to say about Trump the man; his clownish appearance, his poor temperament, his peculiar speech patterns, but how do we assess him in terms of what his policies actually mean? How does one categorize him? Is he a populist? Bush 2.0? A dictator in waiting? The best theory out there on what Trumpism is in practice is a fusion of all of the above in service of a deception. A synthesis of a GOP leader as a Jacksonian populist, a staunch conservative, and an egoist. The Trump equation in effect, is that he uses a Jacksonian facade, to facilitate a hard-nosed conservatism, and what ultimately drives him as a person is base narcissism.

Kellyanne Conway, his 2016 campaign manager, once described Trump as a complicated person with simple ideas, while describing his peers as the opposite. I think she’s getting at something here, but there’s no way one could seriously describe Trump as “complicated” in any sense. I think there’s more complexity to his “craft” than most give credit, but the man himself is probably the most shallow person to ever hold office. His every thought and grievance is constantly made known to us through his social media, and it’s clear to the public, and especially his staff, that the key to his heart is sycophancy.

All that however, is the end Trump has in mind, endless salves to his ego and a bottomless desire for praise and adulation, the means he uses to get there are policy and governance. Something many people seemed to have forgotten in the 2024 election was that Trump was President before, and many of these same people are surprised at how he’s running the country. The best way to understand all this is to understand the GOP, and what Trump offers it.

What is the GOP?

The Republican Party in America can best be understood in terms related to the video game series, Megami Tensei. This series encompasses a myriad of games and spin-offs, but a throughline is the eternal conflict between the forces of Order and Chaos. The forces of Order represent a faction that seeks to create a tightly controlled world with a godlike authority enforcing equality and peace. The forces of Chaos on the other hand, reject that and want a world with no predefined authority, but rather one dominated by the strong enforcing their will freely.

For adherents of Chaos, society should be structured to allow the strong to succeed as much as possible, and the only role any government should play is as a mechanism for removing these barriers, no matter how evil that may seem. For them, it is actually immoral to get in the way of the natural hierarchies that arise when humanity is given true freedom.

This is, without exaggeration, exactly how the GOP in America sees the world. They credit America’s success to this thinking, and it’s the best way to understand why the supposedly populist Trump administration does things like destroying the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, organizations that exist purely to protect the average person from corporate fraud, because it is a moral imperative to serious conservatives that powerful companies have as much freedom to siphon cash from vulnerable people as possible. Anything that gets in the way of that is evil in their view, because it disrupts the natural order of how societies should operate.

For most people, all that seems pretty disgusting. Just a self-aggrandizing ethos the rich have created to continue exploiting others and justify it to themselves. For American voters, they basically find it impossible to stomach, and whenever the reality of what the GOP is makes itself obvious, as it did at the end of the second Bush presidency, they reject it harshly. This dynamic also manifests itself in how the GOP campaigns, focusing on culture issues far more than what their policies are actually doing. What Trumpism is, ultimately, is using perhaps the greatest con man in the history of the world to disguise the GOP as a populist party for long enough to win elections.

The Missing Piece

Trump turned out to be exactly what the Republican Party needed. Although this was not obvious at the time of his rise, it became clear after his victories, even if people have trouble articulating why. Any look into Trump’s past reveals not a shrewd businessman or an idiot who just happened to luck his way into success, but a relentless self-promoter who exploits anyone and anything to get ahead. From a corrupt slumlord, to a builder who stiffs his contractors, to a disciple of Roy Cohn who wielded the law as a cudgel to escape accountability for his scams. At his core, Trump is a con artist, and for a party that sees exploitation as not just acceptable, but a moral imperative, Trump turned out to be the perfect fit.

Like any good con artist, Trump is very good at forming a personal connection with his marks. He creates grand narratives, heroes, villains, a vast conspiracy trying to bring him down. QAnon is both an insane conspiracy about his political enemies being demonic beings, and an unfalsifiable explanation for why his governance has not made your life better. It’s the deep state you see. Trump is the man that will set it all right, but he’s also one of us. He cares about the little guy, he’ll fight greed corporations and bring manufacturing back to America, and make inroads with unions, and do better with non-white voters than any GOP candidate in modern history. That’s the image he successfully sold.

While intellectuals like Ben Shapiro will decry him for flat out lying about Kamala Harris only recently “deciding” she’s black for political gain (the truth is Kamala Harris has leaned on her black identity in elections from the earliest points in her career), celebrities like Janet Jackson and black voters will echo these thoughts, and maybe that’s part of the explanation for why Kamala Harris performed so poorly with black voters in comparison to Biden and Clinton.

There’s something elemental Trump understands about the art of the con, that people want to be fooled by things that “sound” true, but also titillate their imagination. But what is this in service to? Legislation like the “Big Beautiful Bill”, which is essentially just a giant wealth transfer from the poorest in America to the richest. How could Trump’s supposedly populist GOP do this? By being what it always was, a masked effort to continue fighting the GOP’s holy war on what they call “entitlements”.

A bill that blows out the deficit on tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy doesn’t contradict anything they stand for if you understand the only real principle they have is that the powerful should be given as much money and resources as they can get away with.

Even the tariff regime Trump implemented that initially seemed to be at odds with Republican thinking makes sense if you understand it this way. In fact, the tariffs are perfectly representative of Trumpism as a whole. They flatter his ego because they allow him to push around smaller countries, they seem populist because they supposedly contribute to reshoring American manufacturing, but they’re deeply conservative in actuality because they’re actually a regressive flat tax that hurts the poorest and creates more runway for the richest Americans to cut further taxes for themselves.

The Mask is Slipping, But it’s Too Late

We’re at the stage now where a lot of people are starting to understand they’ve been had. Youth support and support among low-propensity voters for Trump has collapsed, partially due to his deep connection with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The fact that Trump was successfully able to position himself in opposition to the forces Epstein represented despite their decades-long friendship and Epstein’s suspicious death happening during his first term, is a testament to the determination Americans had to be fooled by this man.

Even his signature issue, immigration, isn’t entirely what he sold it as, with policy being oriented away from punishing businesses using cheap foreign labour, and more targeted towards terrorizing random communities throughout the country.

His supposed economic brilliance that so many business leaders were eager to reintroduce into our lives is also being revealed for the fraud that it is with his job reports being revised downward significantly in recent days. It doesn’t seem like American manufacturing will be making a comeback any time soon, but Trump got to intimidate many smaller countries and squeeze even more money out of the poorest Americans. Trump, of course, won’t make any changes to his policy, but he will fire the people who record this economic data because to the con artist, appearances are the only thing that matters.

Trumpism in the End

In the end Trumpism is the perfect synthesis of a rapacious ideology that sees exploitation and domination as a moral right, and a con artist who is willing to do anything if it leads to his own self-aggrandizement. The GOP and what it stands for is a moral abomination to most Americans, but with Trump, they allowed a man to come to embody that party and political movement, and use his prodigious skills as a con artist to sell a fake version of that vision to the American people.

To come back to Kellyanne Conway’s Trump analysis, Trump is certainly not a complicated man, but he absolutely selling a simple idea, just not the one he’s actually implementing.

Quote of the Day:

Memory, all alone in the moonlight

I can smile at the old days

I was beautiful then

I remember the time I knew what happiness was

Let the memory live again

– Cats: The Musical