What is Trumpism?

A Response

It’s interesting how the internet works. If you spend any time online in rightist spaces, you sooner or later (generally sooner) come into contact with the JQ folks. That’s “Jewish Question” for you normies (as a side note, I scored a 1 on Russell Walter’s Peter Pan Test, solely because of my use of that descriptor). I’ve learned over the years that the Jewish Question is really the Jewish Answer, as in, pretty much every problem on earth can be blamed on the trouble that certain people are he-brewing up. There is literally nothing else that matters for these sorts and they become wildly angry at any pushback on their central fixation, such that I sometimes wonder why ZOG even lets them post at all.

I’ve mentioned before that the combination of COVID lockdowns, Jeffery Epstein, and the War in Iran have broken a lot of brains; this is still more true for those whose minds are the neurological equivalent of Jenga towers. The recent contretemps over Thomas Massie- vocal proponent of restricting immigration so long as it requires no policing powers or state funding- and his defeat at the hands of Donald Trump (and the voters of Kentucky), has unleashed a torrent of abuse at His Saffron Serenity from various quarters. The cranksensus seems to be that Massie’s downfall was due to the machinations of the perfidious You-Know-Who, who, well, just keep getting away with it. Trump is owned, blackmailed, and controlled by the JOOOOOZ, QED.

BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️@mmpadellan

Holy sh*t. Thomas Massie says he’s going to start publicly naming billionaires implicated in the Epstein files because Trump’s DOJ refuses to convict. More courage than the rest of the GOP has combined.

4:40 PM · May 24, 2026 · 693K Views

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4.53K Replies · 14.2K Reposts · 66K Likes

One might think it would be a bit more courageous just to say the names right there on TV, rather than let what are purportedly some of the most evil criminals on earth remain anonymous until some unspecified time in the future.

It’s thus interesting to read on the subject of Trump from the perspective of actual wealthy liberal Jews, including the latest from David Roberts, himself a rich Jewish man. In that piece, Roberts references a previous essay where he records a conversation with his son:

Near the end of the conversation, I told Andrew that “if things got too bad,” I would consider, for the first time in my life, leaving the United States. Andrew was alarmed. He said, “Don’t leave us, we’re building a family for you.”

That was poignant and loving. I assured him that I was far from the point of seriously considering leaving.

Andrew probed me more about why I was fearful. I could point to many specific actions taken by Trump 2.0 but I found myself at a loss to fit those actions into a narrative, other than just Trump’s grab for more power.

After that conversation, I realized that if I was unable to articulate the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism to myself, I couldn’t adequately express why I was scared. And to dismiss the importance of intellectual influences places our comprehension at great peril.

On the one hand, you have Nazis claiming that Trump is the tool of Jews; on the other, you have Jews holding forth that Trump is an inscrutable figure of exile-inducing levels of concern. The notion that Trump is controlled by the Jews is, as a literature professor might say, problematized by the fact that the Jews sure don’t seem to think that’s the case, or even that there is such a thing as “the Jews” to begin with. Jews, wealthy or not (there are some poor ones, I assume) vote Democrat with a loyalty second only to black people but at the granular level have the same range of ideals and self interest that everyone else does. And while they are broadly supportive of Israel, Jews don’t actually rank Zionism as a major priority when voting. Roberts himself is more concerned at the prospect of “Christian nationalism” than the ascension of Zohran Mamdani- a man whose political base ranges from those who think Israel should be destroyed by a communist revolution to others who prefer jihad.

Don’t blame me, I voted for Hezbollah

Roberts is more worried by the distant specter of a vaguely defined Christian nationalism than he is about Mayor Intifada because for all Roberts’ misgivings about the latter, he is familiar in a way that the former are not. Mamdani is a New Yorker (from early childhood at least), a graduate of its public schools, shaped by the same Northeastern urban milieu. It’s telling that New York native Trump has himself sent mixed signals about Mamdani, correctly labeling him a “communist lunatic” before proclaiming him someone he could work with- Trump certainly seems to like Mamdani better than Thomas Massie. But it’s also significant that Trump is by now as much a Floridian as a Yankee. He knows his voters well. I would be surprised if Roberts was familiar even with the type of person who might vote MAGA. Such people are alien to him. Thus his fear about Trumpism are of the most basic type; he just doesn’t have any clear idea what the governing regime of his country is or who would ever consider supporting it.

There is a sign like this in a homeowner’s yard near my school.

To his credit, he is willing to learn, and he picked a good place to start, N.S. Lyons. Lyons can certainly give a better accounting of policy and the inner workings of the administration than I can. But (as far as I can tell) Lyons lives and works in Washington DC, where actual Trump voters are few on the ground. I think I can allay some of Roberts’ concerns by giving a perspective from someone who both writes about such things and lives among the sort of people for whom supporting Trump is a cultural given. Trumpism is a lot of things, and it’s worth looking at it from a number of angles.

It’s important to begin with what Trumpism isn’t. Trumpism is not a cohesive political program backed by a coherent ideological framework. There is no Lee Atwater of Trumpism, no David Frum, no Newt Gingrich, no Ben Rhodes nor any Podesta. The sole mastermind- such as he is- of this is Trump himself, though with some qualifications. Trumpism is something simpler and yet more profound in its implications than any set of policies.

Fundamentally, Trumpism should be understood as the political manifestation of a broader restorationist tendency, a reactionary rather than conservative inclination. The last great transformational Republican president gave us morning in America, the dawn of a new stage of liberalism. Trump wants to make America great again, to at once return to something by abandoning the current thing. Trump represents, as his enemies intuit but can’t quite process, something post-liberal, which nonetheless hearkens back to earlier forms of rule.

Sums it up better than a hundred Claremont position papers.

In terms of politics, this means the use of state power to advance rightist goals. Culturally, this tendency instantiates as a militant refusal to accept normative liberalism on the part of a significant part of the population, as the comments section of any normie politician will show. Economically and socially, the inclination manifests as an assertive Americanism both at home and abroad, over and against globalism and its commitments. Religiously, it appears as a longing for more traditional spirituality. It’s important to note that despite Trump being at the center of this, he does not embody all of the qualities noted all the time. Like the religious impulses awakened by Muad’Dib, Trumpism is fast escaping the control of its founder.

"The other day, there was a cowardly Harkonnen attempt on my life. They sent a hunter-seeker drone but I miraculously survived, like no one has ever done before.

And now many Fremen are saying 'Donald, you're the one. You're the Lisan al-Ghaib.'

They see it, I see it, the whole galaxy sees it. They want me to lead them to victory, and you know what? I think I just might.

Our enemies are all around us, folks, and in so many futures they prevail. But there is a narrow way through—very, very narrow—but we're going to walk it, and once we do, the spice is going to flow like never before.

We're going to make Arrakis great again, believe me."

credit to Patrick Blumenthal

Of course, this begs several questions, the most significant of which is how and by whom are these rightist goals and notions of Americanism and traditionalism being defined? The answer is, at the moment, no one in particular. I called Trumpism part of a tendency for a reason; it’s part of the direction the nation is moving in the present age rather than a distinct body of thought. Things are only gradually taking shape. Why it’s moving the way it is has both temporal and cosmic aspects, both of which relate to the exhaustion of liberalism as a ruling ideology.

The people who voted for Reagan did so for two reasons- impatience with the social upheavals and new political norms instantiated during the Civil Rights Movement era and a desire to return to the prominence and prosperity America had enjoyed in the post-WWII period. Reagan probably wanted to give them those things, but was hampered by the fact that he essentially agreed with the fundamental premises of the people who opposed him- they were, all of them liberals of one sort or another. He was the American Gorbachev in the end, tinkering at the edges of a schlerotic system committed to a militant ideology, characterized by a (more-or-less) Burnhamite managerialism, though with neoliberalism as the philosophical structure and progressivism as the moral base. The result was the fire sale of America’s industrial base to benefit globalist elites and the importation of tens of millions of people to provide the voting base for further dispossession of the natives. The Democrats abandoned the white working class in favor of the new order under Clinton and the Republican Party survived by not being Democrats.

With a gentleman’s agreement to share power like good sports, the ruling elites- those of the professional managerial class and the politicians who served them, lost all incentive and ability to actually manage things competently. The result was a series of disasters- the War on Terror, the 2008 Financial Crisis, Covid lockdowns, and, most impactfully, the rise of Trump. That latter point is important; as with all the other things noted, the elites never saw Trump coming, were blind to the significance of his arrival, and shocked by the effect he had- traumatized, even. They shouldn’t have been. Large numbers of people who’d voted for neoliberal-in-DEI-professor’s-clothing Obama voted for Trump for the same reason, that he wasn’t one of them.

Almost ten years later and it’s still one of the best meltdowns ever recorded.

Everything in politics since 2016 has been a massive realignment on one side and a desperate clinging to old norms on the other. Trumpism as an electoral coalition is basically three things- people who support economic nationalism, traditionalism in a quasi-rightist sense, and technological futurism, some or all of them. The people who back Trump do so because he has promised to act in the interest of Americans to create a new age of prosperity, but more so because he represents the turning of a page to something beyond the stale consensus of the age of Boomer domination, past the regime that came into being during the Civil Rights and Reagan revolutions. It’s a vision of America that is unapologetically proud and assertive, one which rejects the notion of the proposition nation in favor of a sense of identity rooted in a shared historical experience. In one sense, Trumpism is a kind of ethnogenesis, where the disparate strains of contemporary Americans are melded together over and against demographic replacement.

It’s important to recognize that all parties (in every sense) understand on some level that liberalism is dying, and that appealing to “democratic norms” means essentially nothing. The few who plausibly claim to believe in such nostrums simply fail to realize that that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and is covered in shark crap. The left simply ignores election results it disapproves of, sending mobs into the streets to fight police executing laws enacted by duly elected legislators. Donald Trump was subject to a lawfare campaign explicitly designed to prevent him from holding office again, to the full approval of liberals and leftists of both major parties. The Democrat Party, rather than evolve, has decided that they can simply wait out Trump and undo his work when he’s gone or if the lunatics they encourage finally succeed in killing him. They remain trapped in a paradigm wherein history operates according to a kind of “Law of Progress” in which they are destined to rule indefinitely; in their hubris, they have yet to realize that they and their works are mortal.

Those whom the gods would destroy they first troll the s*** out of.

Trump seems to have largely learned the lesson, and rather than attempt to work with these people as he did in his first term, is busily dismantling the vast edifice of graft, kickbacks, featherbedding, and outright fraud that keeps his enemies going. He understands that without a large base of naturalized foreigners and various gerrymanders his opponents would be deeply disadvantaged, and so he is destroying that support as well. His ongoing, systematic destruction of the material base of managerial power has the additional salutary effect of creating an economy that works in the interest of Americans, rather than global corporations. By deporting huge numbers of unskilled workers, government dependents, and tech industry coolies Trump breaks the power of big business to undercut native workers, gums up liberal urban political machines, reduces demand for housing to lower the astronomical price increases of the past few decades, and puts a stop to the cycles of cultural anomie that huge numbers of foreigners in our midst creates. It’s what people have voted for for many years, but until now were ignored.

Trumpism, as I’ve noted, is restorative and reactionary. The huge waves of immigration since 1965 and the cultural demonization of white men were beneficial in a sense, in that they prompted the average white American to seriously consider questions of identity for perhaps the first time. The past few years only coalesced long-standing trends from within the managerial class. From the universities came the notion of “whiteness” as a kind of ancestral marker of evil; from the managerial class came the impetus to dismantle any form of identity apart from fungible consumer. Trumpism represents the recognition that it’s OK to be white. That that simple statement can make the entire ruling elite wince is a testament to how far we’ve fallen. With customary paths to corporate America, the professions, academia, and the arts severely curtailed by DEI mandates, energetic and talented young white men learned to look beyond them, turning to the internet to learn, collaborate, and build status outside the system. Despite the tech-heavy milieu, this can have a decidedly traditionalist bent, as men rebelling against the system instinctively make heroes of Professor Globohomo’s demons. One sees the crusader edits, but there’s also a distinctively American character to the aesthetic. It’s not full-on throne and alter European capital-T Traditionalism, but rather a trend in its infancy that will develop as events unfold.

Somewhere in America, as I write this, some dimbulb English teacher is receiving an email to be on the lookout for anyone using this phrase. She will duly report the kid she overhears to the principal for thoughtcrime. That boy, when he begins voting, will consider Trump entirely too moderate.

Roberts notes and makes much of the support Elon Musk has given Trump, and characterizes this as based on a shared impulse to greed. I’m a bit surprised by this, as Roberts himself is a wealthy man and surely must understand that once a rich guy reaches a certain point, its not about the money. If all either of them cared about was wealth, they could have sat back quietly, manipulated things behind the scenes, and continued to gain ad infinitum. Like many others at that level, the grand motive (and besetting sin) is not cupidity but pride. Trump was already rich when he ran for president, still rich when he was arrested, rich when he was shot, and remains rich despite ongoing efforts to murder him and in full expectation that his enemies will imprison him in his old age if they ever get the chance. As for Musk, it’s been memory-holed now, but liberals and leftists used to love him. Musk was the EV guy, the California techno-optimist. But like many of his peers, he had bigger dreams than wealth. Like Trump, he wants a legacy, in his case to go to Mars. As Charles Haywood and others have noted, Musk has lately realized that liberalism is anathema to excellence, and like so many of his peers, understands that the current system, which enriched him, is now only holding him back. Roberts correctly notes that Trump is supported by a number of billionaires, but doesn’t appreciate the significance of the fact that they tend to be tech-bros fed up with the drag represented by the bloated, decadent, parasitic bulk of the managerial state.

Above: Elon Musk pointing out where Mars is.

I mention “bros” and men with specific intent. Trumpism is, in academic parlance, a gendered phenomenon, a masculine impulse that serves as a necessary and really inevitable corrective to the dominance of feminine norms within managerialism. The women who realize that the HRcracy over everything is making them lonely and miserable are yet few in number, and it falls to men at all levels and ages to be the motive force behind the reaction. This is because, as noted, it is men and masculinity that is the prime target for the managerial regime, as their inherent competitiveness, drive, sense of hierarchy, and energy make for a destabilizing force in a system meant to run on homogeneity and consensus. MAHA is not an incidental part of MAGA; Trumpism is a full-spectrum response to the sickness within the system in every sense, and it’s no accident that physical fitness has become a marker of rightist sentiments. This coincides with the increasing prominence of traditional, patriarchal religious sensibilities; the only Jews who support Trump in overwhelming numbers are the Orthodox.

You heard it from the commissar lady at Time, exercise is racist.

Lyons posits that Trump’s biggest stumbling block is his desire for the approval of elites, which is true, but as noted, more a symptom of his pride than his greed. He and Roberts, to that extent, are correct in this. But more fundamentally, Trump is most hindered by being a man of his time. Trump is, after all, someone who still reads the New York Times, born in a world where things worked. He’s Moses (well, maybe Aaron), not Joshua. He made it possible to move past liberalism, but he himself will never get there. Roberts looks in vain for the intellectual framework of Trumpism because it is yet to be laid out systematically, at which point it will no longer be Trumpism.

So with all that said, who are the people who support Trump and Trumpism? Roberts is a wealthy and well-traveled man; I am neither. I can’t compete with him in worldliness in that sense. But being wealthy gives him the choice to sequester himself from people who live very different lives and have very different folkways than himself. I, and people like me, enjoy no such luxury. In short, I’ve dealt with liberals and leftists all my life, and the consequences of the policies and social norms they enact. Roberts is at a loss as to why Trumpism even exists.

TL:DR, it’s this. Violent disgust at this is Trumpism.

The people in my community and those around me in the suburban-to-rural South are gregarious if a bit insular, committed culturally if not wholly spiritually to a generic, low-church Protestantism, tradition-minded, patriotic, and independent. In ways that would probably surprise outsiders, they are broadly tolerant of things they theoretically despise- like homosexuality- and while preferring to live with people culturally similar to them, practically speaking they will accept a significant amount of diversity before they take action to curtail further change. I’m far more radical than anyone else I know in person. None of them have any idea what “Christian nationalism” is or why Roberts would be apprehensive of it. They like Trump because he’s funny and because, blowhard Yankee billionaire that he is, they intuit that he takes them seriously and treats them with respect. That’s really all they want in the end, dignified lives in the country of their ancestors.

I grew up near where this show was set, and this remains my basic approach to driving and dealing with law enforcement to this day.

I suspect such norms prevail in most places of similar demographics in other parts of the country as well, those places that voted heavily for Trump. They have problems like anywhere else, and like everyone who participates in politics, they look to leaders to solve them. Some are simply the inevitable consequences of being fallen people in a fallen world, but others are the result of specific policy decisions on the part of distant others. At its best, the impulse behind Trumpism centers on addressing those solvable issues- mass immigration, crime, a financialized economy, etc. At its worst, it degenerates into conspiracism and inert doomerism.

Does it work? Will it work? It’s too early to say definitively, though, as noted, there’s really no going back; its Trumpism or something more robust. Much depends on the character of the people behind it and the citizenry more broadly. It’s easy to say, and true on some level, that Trump supporters miss the ways in which the culture around them leads to the problems they have more so than the political decisions of leaders of either party, but then, the well-off liberal Jews of the Big Apple haven’t yet put it together that the policies they’ve supported for decades are what produced an electorate broadly supportive of Hamas, so I suppose we’re all blind in ways we don’t quite grasp.

There is a lot more I could say; the subject is fit for a dozen more specific essays. But I’ll end on this note. I hope that this essay inspires Roberts to look more closely into what Trump and Trumpism represent and to be a bit more forbearing with the cultural others who live beyond Manhattan (Staten Island seems to like Trump). There’s no need to flee the country; indeed, with all the deportations, there will actually be quite a bit more space to live apart from each other if we so prefer. You’re welcome.