Trumpism Didn’t End With Trump
Trump was not an aberration, he was as much a symptom as he was a cause and the Republican Party will not simply return to sanity because he’s gone
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When Donald Trump left the White House on January 20th, it was easy to take a sigh of relief and feel like, for the first time in four years, that everything was going to be alright. As Biden got on stage at the inauguration to give a refreshingly vanilla speech and Trump stood silenced in Mar-A-Lago — having been banned from all large social media sites, it felt like we had finally escaped the fever dream of the last four years. Yet, beneath this hue of hope was the reality that not just were the problems that had created Trump still unresolved, but that they had also been exponentially worsened by the 45th President himself. Trump’s silence, while refreshing, became increasingly eerie; it felt as though we were living it that quintessential horror-movie moment where the villain lies seemingly incapacitated, only to rise up as soon as everyone’s backs are turned. Throughout the Trump administration, there had been an entire media industry made out of perpetuating the President’s lies. As long as there are millions of Americans who will eagerly tune into these networks, they will continue to spread dangerous disinformation — regardless of who the President is.
Back in August, I wrote a piece entitled ‘Trumpism won’t end with Trump’ which argued that politicians like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene would ensure the long term survival of Trumpism as an ideology. My prediction turned out to be painfully prescient, but even I couldn’t have imagined things would end up like *this*. Even I couldn’t imagine that within a month of becoming Congress-people, Boebert would be live tweeting the location of the House Speaker during an insurrection, Madison Cawthorn would be calling in the plainest of terms to “threaten” anti-Trump politicians and, Marjorie Taylor Greene would make us all familiar with the term “Jewish space lasers”. Greene, Boebert and co are walking caricatures of Trumpism. At first glance, politicians like Boebert and Cawthorn may seem relatively unremarkable in a party filled with Trump-lackies. But unlike opportunists like Ted Cruz or Lindsay Graham; who have transparently adopted the rhetoric of Trumpism without believing in it’s substance, the new Q-anon crew genuinely believe in the crazy lies of Trump, Q-Anon, Dominion and basically any other conspiracy theory you care to think of. They are the inevitable result of the frequently-warned-about, but oft-ignored culture of hyper-partisanship, politics-for-sports and misinformation. Given the last decade — which saw Alex Jones gain a viewership in the millions, inequality rise to record levels and unrest grow on the streets — it’s almost surprising this didn’t happen sooner.
Too few a Democrat fully grasp the power Trumpism continues to hold over America — even as the forty-fifth President himself is out of office. Trump was not an aberration, he was as much a symptom as he was a cause and the Republican Party is not and will not simply return to sanity because he’s gone. One of the biggest two parties in America has remade it’s entire identity around conspiracism and personality cults — yet it can still rely on over 40% of voters to support it in any given election. Without reckoning, accountability and systematic change, America is lining itself up for the emergence of Trump 2.0. — or maybe even the re-emergence of Trump 1.0.. The worst thing we could do now is simply return to normal.
