Ten years of Trump and Trumpism

It’s been ten years since Trump came down the golden escalator and announced his 2016 bid for president. It would take me three months to bring myself to blog about Trump in any concentrated way – the main political science view was that the party would eventually decide, or the voters would move on, and Trump would go the way of Herman Cain, Ross Perot (who did have some staying power, I guess) or other outsider candidates who seemed fascinating initially but held little lasting appeal. I assured friends who were alarmed by Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants that his candidacy wouldn’t get very far.

And a decade later, here we are. Not only is Trump serving his second term as president, he’s been the focal point of our politics for most of that decade. This is pretty astounding for a politician who has never been very popular or represented a lot of popular issue positions.

In the course of the 2016 election, Trump emerged as a distinct figure, set against the GOP establishment. But by now, the MAGA movement (or ideas I’ll refer to as “Trumpism”) reaches beyond a single individual, and largely animates the Republican Party. There are specific people who have built their careers in this movement, from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to vice president and former Trump critic JD Vance. Its core tenets are opposition to immigrants and immigration, populist appeals against those deemed elite, and the undermining of pluralism and the rule of law. The political strength of the movement without Trump is also unclear – it didn’t fare terribly well in the 2022 elections, and potential successors to Trump in 2024 were unable to wrangle much support away from him. And as we look back at the ten years since he came on the political scene, it makes sense to think about what’s been driven by Trump the individual and what’s the MAGA/Trumpist movement, and what it might look like when Trump exits the political stage one day.

While the political rise of a reality TV star with a murky political past may have been unique in American politics, the ideas of the Trump movement have been linked to a number of past movements. Most recently, there’s the Tea Party, which combined anti-establishment tropes with cultural conservatism and distrust of “others.” That the Tea Party began in opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency is highly relevant: it produced movement rhetoric that connected the presidency to struggles over race and power, arguing (often unsubtly) that the nation’s first Black president represented the interests of minorities over those of white Americans. Putting this distinction out there also lent itself to undermining the whole idea of legitimate opposition. A key idea for the Tea Party was that there was a single way to interpret the Constitution and that those who disagreed with them had no place in politics. The phenomenon of “primarying” lawmakers over their fealty to movement principles didn’t just change the makeup of the party. It also shifted the balance of power from party – an entity concerned with governing and building a winning coalition (at least in theory) – to movement. Movements, in contrast, tend to be more ideological and goal-oriented.

What’s interesting about MAGA and Trumpism is that they build on these ideas but put their own spin on them. And this is linked to Trump as a figure – someone who is willing, and, crucially, able, to promise that popular government programs won’t be cut. Research on Trump support in 2016 has suggested that Trump won over Republicans with more moderate economic views, and that in the general election he was perceived as more moderate. Yet, of course, Trumpism has not delivered on this – in the first term, there was the 2017 tax cut. In the second, there’s been DOGE and Elon Musk and cuts that are both ideological and unpopular. But these developments were able to happen because Trump, as the central figure of the movement, has been able to convince people that these particular far-right edges will be softened. This is a particularly disturbing element of the last decade, but it’s also one that may not last beyond Trump’s own presence as the leader of the movement.

Checks on executive power have been eroding for some time, as I’ve written here before. But one thing that has made the MAGA movement distinct is its dedication to, and success at, consolidating power. This has been most obvious in the way that Congressional Republicans have abandoned their own institutional prerogatives to throw their support behind the president. It’s also changed the dynamics between state and federal power. This tug-of-war has long defined American politics, and major historical junctures often feature a reshuffling – the Civil War and the New Deal expanded the role of the federal government; the Reagan revolution talked about pulling it back. Trumpism has done something else: it’s flattened the distinction. This was especially evident in the claims made by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last week, stating that the federal government had, in effect, declared war on the elected officials of California and Los Angeles, after Marines and federalized National Guard troops were sent in over the objections of the governor. The MAGA movement doesn’t rely on arguments about states’ rights or national unity under the Constitution; there are Trump-aligned entities, and dissenting entities that are treated as fair game to crush. This development can be traced to the extraordinary expansion of executive control under Trump, but it also may represent a shift in thinking on the right that will outlast the Trump presidency.

In addition to the demonization of “others” and the consolidation of power, the MAGA movement also depends on an ability to frame issues and direct public attention. Trump’s demagogic turns of phrase have been especially important for this part of the movement. And even then, there are some limits. Trump’s claims about COVID-19 back in 2020 succeeded in making the response to the pandemic deeply polarized, but his response also almost certainly hurt him politically. This is similar to his heavy-handed response to the George Floyd protests in 2020, though subsequent actions by the MAGA movement, especially at the state level during the Biden presidency, may have stoked a longer backlash to the reckoning promised that spring. Now that Trump, and Trump-style Republicans, dominate the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, they once again come up against real-world crises that may not so easily be rhetorically redefined. There’s persistent high prices, the job losses and uncertainty caused by gutting federal programs, and a volatile situation in the Middle East. Many of the administration’s specific immigration actions are unpopular, even as their frames for immigration remain compelling to many Americans. Neither Trump himself nor the MAGA movement have been completely able to reconcile their rhetoric with the complex realities of governance. This might well outlast Trump’s role as the movement’s dominant figure, and the increasingly complex problems of the country and the world certainly will.