Have you accepted Donald Trump into your heart?

A couple of days ago I started getting emails from Donald Trump, although I suspect he may not actually be writing them himself. Here’s a typical representative of the half dozen I’ve received so far (one was actually from Lara Trump):

It’s sobering to contemplate that apparently this kind of thing works to the tune of raking in more than two hundred million dollars in just the first four weeks after the election.

One of the less charming aspects of the Internet is that it has created a 24/7/365 griftathon, in which there are endless opportunities to separate naive, dumb, and/or desperate people from their money. Having any scruples or basic human decency becomes more expensive every day; and I confess these emails trigger a yearning in me to rip off people who are just begging to be fleeced.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about Donald Trump lately, specifically what he might represent beyond standard issue noxious GOP ideology. I think it’s important to separate out any features of Trumpism that are not only a continuation of where movement conservatism has been going for the past 50+ years, although clearly it is very much that too.

I mean are there any such features? To the extent Trumpism represents:

White ethno-nationalist backlash

Worship of unrestrained capitalism

Anti-intellectualism

Revanchist nationalism

Reactionary culture war politics

Protestant evangelical and right wing Catholic theocratic longings

I would say no, Trumpism is just Goldwater/Nixon/Reagan/Gingrich etc. in a cruder less filtered form.

Trumpism does, I think, add one important ingredient to this toxic brew, however: It represents the triumph of celebrity culture in the context of national politics. Trump got elected president in large part because he played a wildly successful businessman on a very popular network television program. That’s who Trump was when he ran for president: A reality TV star.

That in my view is the one aspect of Trumpism that represents something very evil in American culture more generally, that can be separated out from the evils of movement conservatism per se. (This is why if Trump doesn’t win the 2024 nomination there’s a good chance some other celebrity-type will, whether from Trump’s own family or from elsewhere in the right wing media ecosystem).

Is it possible to imagine, in this particular respect, a liberal/progressive/left version of Trump? I think it is. An obverse version of Trump would be somebody like Marianne Williamson, that is, someone pitching pseudo-intellectual woo while presenting herself as a contrarian outsider, who isn’t in thrall to liberal/progressive/left politics as usual.

Williamson herself was just drumming up publicity for her books when she preposterously enough got onto the Democratic presidential debate stage with a bunch of actual politicians, but of course that’s probably not much different from what Trump was up to back in the summer of 2015, and we all know how that turned out.

On a related note, I think there’s an important distinction to be fleshed out between anti-intellectualism and pseudo-intellectualism in American culture, and that the former is much more common on the right, while the latter is more prevalent on the leftward spectrum of our politics, but that will have to wait for another post.