Trumpismas an enduring ideology? Don’t count on it

In the aftermath of President Trump’s 2016 victory, many of his supporters wanted to construct an ideological worldview that would, they hoped, not only supplant traditional conservatism but redefine American politics.

As an intellectual project, it was pretty much a bust. For instance, Julius Krein started a journal, American Affairs, with the goal of providing an intellectual framework for Trumpism. Six months later, Krein, to his credit, withdrew his support of Trump and said he regretted voting for him.

Other outlets tried the same thing and ended up simply becoming cheerleaders and “Trumpsplainers” who start with the conclusion Trump is right and then work backward to prove it.

Now, in the wake of Trump’s defeat, the project to create Trumpism-without-Trump has been reborn as electoral analysis. Trump supporters claim he bequeathed the makings of a new, multiethnic workers party.

It’s a convenient conclusion for those who’ve argued that “Republican elites” were too “stubbornly moored to laissez-faire fundamentalism and limited government as an end in itself,” in the words of Newsweek’s Josh Hammer, a leading proponent of this theory. Hammer contends “it is the Republican Party that disproportionately represents a multiethnic, non-college-educated working class.”

There’s obviously some truth to this. The erosion of the old Franklin D. Roosevelt coalition, with the white working class migrating toward Republicans and college-educated suburbanites inching toward Democrats, has been a trend for decades. Trump accelerated these trends. What was new — and surprising — was how Democrats lost ground with people of color, particularly Latino people.

But this theory, which has already received endorsements from presidential wannabes such as Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), seems like another case of starting with the conclusion and reasoning backward.

First, contrary to the hype, Trump’s performance with Black voters and even Latino voters wasn’t so earth-shattering.

Trump received 12% of the Black vote, 32% of the Latino vote and 34% of the Asian American vote.

In 2004, George W. Bush received 11% of the Black vote and 44% of both the Latino and Asian American votes. An increase of 1% among Black voters and a double-digit decrease among Latino and Asian voters isn’t exactly a seismic event. More important, unlike Trump, Bush not only won reelection but also the popular vote.

As for this new working-class party, whatever that means, it’s worth noting that the average showing among union households — admittedly an imprecise measure of worker support — for GOP presidential candidates since 2000 is about 41%. Trump got 40% in 2020, down 7 points from 2016.

Moreover, there’s little in Trump’s record to suggest his support among voters had much to do with pro-worker policies. In short, the problem with seeing the Trump coalition as the foundation of Trumpism-without-Trump assumes there’s more to Trumpism than his entertainment value, his thumb-in-the-eye attacks on the media and his stoking of resentment.

That’s a hard model to replicate. Who among the current 2024 GOP hopefuls could fill one of his rallies? I mean,

Mike Pence could repeat Trump’s lines — just as I could sing Beyonce’s songs — but that doesn’t mean people will show up to listen.