By José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez on May 24, 2021
Some events that have taken place in recent days in the United States raise new questions about the existence or not of a movement called Trumpism, its chances of continuity, and its likely impact on the US and foreign reality.
The House Republican leadership decided in mid-May to replace the party’s third-ranking so-called conference chair, Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wy). The reasons were basically twofold: she voted in favor of impeachment in Congress against Trump (2020) and has refused to support the former president’s claims of alleged massive fraud in the last presidential election.
Ms. Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is a former government official with broad conservative credentials. She was replaced by a young member of the House, who after her election (2014) showed no preference for the pre-candidate Donald Trump and even under his presidency voted against his proposed tax reform (2017), which was the golden project of his term in office. She also vehemently opposed the US exit from the Climate Change Agreement. Ms Elise Stefanik (R-NY), however, saw her fortunes change when she defended the then President in the so-called impeachment and, above all, when she unequivocally supported his claim that the 2020 elections were “rigged”.
Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who participated in and led this palace coup, announced three days later that he would not vote in favor of the Democratic proposal to establish an independent commission to investigate the events of January 6, when groups and individuals associated with “domestic terrorism”, as the current federal authorities put it, attacked the Capitol, the main seat of the federal Congress. McCarthy’s argument is that the proposal is not “balanced”, since it makes no mention of other social groups that during 2020 led a series of demonstrations protesting against police violence. A few hours later, a similar action took place in the Senate.
Prior to these events, Donald Trump had already publicly criticized his former vice president, Mike Pence, for certifying the result of the presidential election and the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), for having established a certain relationship of responsibility between the former president and the assault on the Capitol. Trump has also continued to issue statements about the alleged election “fraud” and has even called it the “crime of the century” above the events of January 6, which US political observers have called “the greatest attack on American democracy since the Civil War”.
In this way, the figure of Donald Trump has continued to exert influence at least on the leaders of the political formation that today is called the Republican Party and on a not inconsiderable mass of followers who almost unthinkingly consume his messages and act accordingly. To this day his personal endorsement, or lack thereof, means among Republicans winning or losing office and privilege, the essence of what they call among themselves “democracy”.
It is worth noting that at least a small group of congressmen such as Adam Kizinger (R-IL) and Fred Upton (R-MI), as well as senators, Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Susan Collins (R-ME), have shown some rejection of Trump’s actions, but above all as an attachment to what they call “the traditional values of American democracy”. The lieutenant governor of Georgia, Geoff Duncan, one of the states with the highest Republican questioning the outcome of the vote, has recently announced that he will not run for office and that he will run on a platform called GOP 2.0, with the intention of renewing the party outside of Trump’s influence.
A phenomenon of larger and longer-term proportions is that as of March 2021, 361 bills to limit citizens’ voting rights had been introduced in 47 states, almost half of them in the last month. Some of the proposals have already been passed and range from prohibiting the provision of water or food to people waiting in lines to vote (singling out those with the lowest incomes, of course), new restrictions on ex-offenders, to what votes can and cannot be cast by mail and where to locate voting areas, depending on how many Democratic or Republican members live in the vicinity of polling places.
After what the United States experienced between 2016 and 2020, the American sociologist Arlie Russell Horchschild, of the University of California at Berkeley, has called Trumpism an “emotional planet orbiting the Trump star”. But in the wake of the latest developments mentioned above, the Financial Times editorial board on May 7 deemed that the United States is divided into “a country of irreconcilable tribes”.
Donald Trump, who once had 88 million followers on Twitter, 32 million on Facebook and 24 million on Instagram, has more recently seen his possibilities of disseminating his messages limited by the decision of some platforms to no longer share his content. The former president created a new virtual space called “From Donald Trump’s office”, which, at least in its beginnings, has not managed to replace the previous tools. He has also announced the beginning of his participation in political rallies to support candidates for the “mid-term” elections planned for November 2022.
Although top Republican leaders are rallying around him and consider him essential to continue gaining power, key party advisers and donors have said that Trump’s exclusionary attitude alienates potential supporters, rather than bringing in new ones.
And here the question of how Trump came to power in 2016 and whether there is a chance that he or a close supporter could repeat the result could be asked again.
The answer begins by separating the businessman/politician figure from the social-economic phenomenon he helped catalyze with his candidacy.
At various points in his life Trump considered entering federal politics since the late 1990s. He considered being a Republican pre-candidate, registered as a Reform Party aspirant, but kept for a long time donating heavily to Democratic candidates.
This suggests that in addition to not having a strong Republican tradition, he is not a politician who wishes to serve a party line-up, but rather the other way around. This conclusion may shed some light on whether or not at some point in the future, if the current Republican leadership’s support for him changes, Trump would seek to channel his interests through another political formation.
Trump was “elected” in 2016 thanks to the existence of the institution called the Electoral College. This was created by the “founding fathers” of the nascent American Union, to achieve a “fair” representation that would make it attractive for the Southern states to remain in the Union, in the face of the doubt as to whether slaves should be counted as settlers or not.
Trump only had the support of 62.9 million Americans that year, almost 3 million fewer than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, which constituted 46.1% of the votes cast, but only 27% of the eligible voting population.
And this last piece of information brings us closer to explaining why Trump won the White House against all odds.
In February 2009, coinciding with a serious economic crisis in the United States, the so-called Tea Party emerged within the Republican ranks as an extremist subgroup that launched, among other messages, hatred of immigrants and concern about the loss of space for the “white majority”. The movement came to have significant congressional representation.
However, this political sect failed to articulate a coherent platform to attract support on a national scale, nor did it identify a leader who could unite them, but above all who was willing to stop being “politically correct” and abandon the traditional formula of accessing power by trying to woo each and every population group in the country.
The application of neoliberal precepts in the US economy since the 1990s, although more limited than the recipe that the US sold and imposed on third parties, over time generated important impacts on traditional domestic productive sectors such as steel and automobiles, textile manufacturing, some agriculture and fossil fuels, among others, which migrated their capital to geographical regions where there were better comparative advantages.
While globally the US economy prospered, the stock market grew and more wealth was seen to be created in several urban centers, areas of poverty were generated in the American geography that approached the conditions of certain Third World countries. This situation lasted for years and incidentally overlapped with the economic and social costs of the so-called war on terror, which in 20 years diverted federal funds to the tune of 6 trillion USD, affecting everything from social security to the country’s infrastructure and access to education.
The United States became an even more unequal country, but this time the impact was not only on the traditional underprivileged, or lower income classes, but affected a non-negligible percentage of the white male majority. Demographic and census scholars estimate that mass to be between 30 and 33 per cent of the country’s total population today.
As of 2016, this group was larger in percentage terms than almost all of the groups into which voting segments in the United States are divided and studied, be they of African descent, Latinos, women, or religious groupings.
The businessman and reality TV producer Donald Trump, a total stranger to traditional political life, set himself up as the representative of those, the “forgotten”, the “unrepresented”. He appealed to the phrase of the Reaganite New Right of the 1980s to “make America (USA) great again” and above all he had the opportunity to fight against a Democratic candidate with many vulnerabilities.
Various theories have been woven about Donald Trump’s purposes in running in the 2016 election, as to whether his goal was actually to get elected, or to achieve a national pre-eminence that would allow him to spend the next four years attacking a Democratic administration, increase his capital, promote the family brand and above all distract attention from his various legal problems.
While it may seem obvious, when one candidate wins it is because the other loses. In this case, with Hillary Clinton as his opponent, Trump was also able to capitalize on the message of attacking the “deep state” (in reference to the traditional bureaucracy) and “drying up the swamp” (ending corruption in Washington DC) by referring to the established power groups, which do not change status with one administration or another, well represented by the image of the former senator for a state where she did not reside and wife of a former governor and former president beset by several scandals.
The Democratic camp was also negatively affected by other factors at the time: internal subdivisions were already being accentuated by the emergence of new tendencies, particularly to the left, which did not see themselves represented in the candidate elected at the convention, which did not mobilize, nor mobilize others to vote, and which detracted from the party’s support on the ballot in the face of the 33% advance of white suburban men resentful of the changes described above, who now had a leader (supposed or real) with messages (rather than a platform) to align themselves with.
When Trump first participated in the Republican pre-candidate debates, he did not yet have the favor of parts of the electorate, nor of the billionaire donors who make the difference during elections. This reality changed as the former president promised the wealthy a strong reform of the tax system, which became a reality shortly after he took office in 2017 and which is one of his main calling cards for the eventuality of future contests.
After the election in which he lost re-election, Trump raised more than $200 million, due to his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
If a shared understanding of how Trump came to power is understood and can be constructed, then we will be in a better position to answer the question of whether Trumpism and Trump (or an heir) can come to power again.
It will be necessary to calculate how the electoral base, messages, funding, candidates and how the same equation will work on the Democratic side in the future, should no new political alternatives emerge.
Part of the answer will also lie in the performance of the current Democratic administration, in the success or otherwise of its proposals, in the concession of its agenda and ultimately in the development of the economy.
The Democrats in power should see their majorities in both Houses of Congress shrink, according to historical trends, and they will not be able to deal with all the social problems accumulated in a short time, even if they inject huge amounts of liquidity into circulation that endanger the dollar value of the country’s entire economic structure.
For now, some Republicans have already set out to try to build a party 2.0; we will have to wait and see if new generations of Democrats will join forces for a similar purpose.
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez is the former Ambassador of the Cuban Embassy in Washington DC
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English