The making of Trumpism
Years before he became president, Donald Trump learned populist politics from talk radio and attention seekers like Newt Gingrich, said journalist Michael Kruse in Politico.com. His gift is in selling what he learned.
SOMETIME SOON, DONALD Trump, the third president in the history of the United States to be impeached, is expected to face a trial in the Senate, charged with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Traced back to its roots, this is a crisis entirely of his own creation: He came across a sketchy scrap of information, a debunked piece of Russian propaganda relating to Ukraine, and he saw it as something he could use, to help himself and to hurt an opponent. He latched onto it, pumped it up, and passed it along. Anyone wondering how the president could make this kind of mistake has missed something important about Trump’s rise. For as long as he has been in politics—in fact, for longer—he has been a ruthlessly effective practitioner of the art of parroting others’ most provocative, salacious ideas. “There are a lot of people that think....” “That’s what I heard....” “Some people even say....” His gossipy MO was a staple of his campaign, propelling his historic victory, but it also has driven the scandal that has consumed his presidency—“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike,” he said on the now well-known call last July with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. If what he was referencing sounded kind of like a dodgy talk radio rant, that’s not an accident. It’s a deliberate tactic, one that Trump was developing, and exploiting, from the moment he first seriously started to consider a run for the White House.
In the early to middle part of the previous decade, Trump’s proto-political operation was essentially a two-man team—there was Roger Stone, now a felon, and there was Stone’s protégé, Sam Nunberg. One of Nunberg’s self-appointed tasks was to help Trump understand what the masses on the Right really wanted. And one way he did that was by listening to Mark Levin’s increasingly popular radio show. The people who were tuning in most intently to Levin, Nunberg thought, were the people most likely to vote for Trump if he launched an actual bid. “Donald Trump,” Nunberg told me, meaning his candidacy, meaning his victory, “would never have happened without Mark Levin.”
Nunberg’s frequent emails to Trump, sent via an assistant in Trump’s office, were accounts of the many grievances that animated Levin and his listeners. Union members resented union leaders. The Republican rank and file loathed Republican elites. Amnesty for immigrants? An absolute no-go. Trump, Nunberg stressed when we talked, didn’t want to be told what to say, but Nunberg nonetheless made his pitch for him as an insurgent outsider: “This is all marketing and you’re a great product... in a new type of market,” he said he told Trump. “Help me help you sell gold to these people that normally buy gold.” Trump started listening to the show. “He would call me up sometimes,” Nunberg recalled. “‘Oh, did you just hear what
Levin said?’”
For the better part of the past half-century, Trump has extracted from an array of similar sources—from the New York Post’s dishy Page Six to the toxicity of Twitter to far-right websites and lowbrow TV— a knack for knowing what people want. Not all people but many people. And not what they say they want, but what they really want. Ostentatious and aspirational glitz. Plain talk to the point of crude talk. Conflict. “A creature of feel,” as the late strategist Pat Caddell described him to me in 2018, “a visceral-stimulus creature,” Trump could repackage what he took in and sell it back to the hoi polloi.
Which is another way of saying he’s not so much a leader as he is a follower. Perhaps the ultimate follower. Trump is the Follower of the Free World. “Donald was never a CEO. He was a brand manager—you know, how do I appeal to the masses?” former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me recently. “It’s like Elmer Gantry. It’s the carnival barker. It’s what every pitchman has always done. Tell the people what they want to hear.”
“Taking the information he wants or needs,” former Trump casino exec Jack O’Donnell said. “Whether it’s true or not,” former Trump Organization exec Barbara Res said. Taking it in. Sending it out. Over and over. Again and again.
SIn 2010, for example, he recognized a lightning-rod issue torquing emotions and jumped right in, gleaning buzz for himself with his offer to purchase the site of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque—which alerted him to the potency of anti-Obama birtherism, which paved the way for his anger-girded, fear-mongering presidential candidacy. Trump is in this way less a thinker and more a megaphone, an amplifier of the ideas of others, the value of those ideas in his mind based not on veracity so much as utility.
TARTING IN THE 1970s, Donald Trump learned how to fight dirty and win from his antagonistic attorney and mentor, Roy Cohn. In the ’80s, he learned from Stone, and from watching George Steinbrenner, Ed Koch, and Ronald Reagan too. Steinbrenner, the bombastic owner of the New York Yankees, led as a loner. His secretary frequently could be heard saying, “Mr. Steinbrenner, Trump on line 2.” Koch won three terms as the mayor of New York with an uncomplicated formula for success: Get attention to get votes. “And you can only do that,” he once said, “by being bigger than life. It’s theatrics.” Reagan spent the decade blurring the lines between politics and entertainment, wondering at times how anybody could be an effective president without having been an actor first.
In the ’90s, Trump learned from watch
New Hampshire. He talked to Pat Caddell about what he was picking up on the trail. “He would put forth his position or his feelings, and he would judge the level of the response to it, and that helped him organize, I suppose to whatever degree it was organized, his views about issues,” Caddell told me in 2018. “Things he said that didn’t go over disappeared. Things that did stayed.”
WITTER, TOO, INCREASINGLY served a similar purpose. “He glommed on to it like it was an oxygen source,” Caddell explained. “And he would tweet what he believed, and people would retweet or answer or whatever, and it was kind of his ongoing focus group.”
TJune 2018, “and getting the most [of the] zeitgeist, most attention on social media.” And then? The last and most important piece of this by now almost rote process? “He repeats it,” Bolling said.
For as long as he’s occupied the Oval Office, Trump’s been thinking about Ukraine. “Ukraine,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said a couple months back, “has always been problematic, from Day One. He’s heard a lot about Ukraine from a lot of people.” He’s heard about it, according to reports, from Rudy Giuliani, from his favored right-wing media outlets, from Vladimir Putin. He started spreading it almost immediately.
“I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian,” he said of CrowdStrike, incorrectly, in an interview with the Associated Press in April 2017. “That’s what I heard.” Officials have insisted to the president the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory is just that. He has not heeded their counsel. It’s what led to the call with Ukraine’s Zelensky that led to the series of events that led to his impeachment. “The server,” Trump said, “they say Ukraine has it.”
“It’s combustible because Trump’s only looking for news stories and information that suit his persona, that build his persona up,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told me last week. “And by doing that he is following the trolls down an ugly path.” If Trump began his political ascent as a follower, cannily co-opting ideas that resonated with a certain segment of the electorate, in doing so he clearly has proceeded to forge a following of his own. He has become a leader of those who are willing to be led in this way—solidifying lockstep support from the agenda-setting base of his party as well as its kingpins and figureheads, who parrot him the way he once did Levin. The result: a crescendoing feedback loop, in which followers are leaders and leaders are followers, perpetuating ideas based on what works rather than what’s real.
“One of the sacred principles in U.S. history has been that presidents are supposed to tell the public the truth,” Brinkley said. “So this is a new kind of Republican that refuses to ever admit culpability or a mistake and is willing to destroy not just institutions but fact-based thinking, empirical thinking.” Trump? “He doesn’t care whether it’s true or not true, whether it destroys somebody or not—there’s no morality in it. It’s just a strange, weird bit of information—‘and it helps me, and I’m going to propagate it.’”