Some Disturbing Puzzle Pieces
Thinking about ideology in the Trump era.
One of the arguments that has been made against calling Trump a fascist is that there is a perceived lack of ideological framework. Trump, despite his best-selling books, is not a writer. I will readily allow that the ghostwritten Art of the Deal is no Mein Kampf nor Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. But I think it is a mistake to assume that the leader has to also be the chief ideologist. Trump himself clearly has beliefs about national power, race/ethnicity, gender roles, and power that form a sort of nascent ideological position.
Yes, a lot of it is incoherent, and he is hardly a deep thinker.* And while I think that age is catching up with him, I continue to think dementia is less explanatory than is the simple fact that he is an undisciplined, vain, and visceral person. I think it should be taken into account that he was born into privilege and often has failed upward. His ego means that he can pretend whatever he says matters and there is now no one who can tell him he has no clothes. He is, after all, President of the United States, and he is constantly praised by adoring fans on television, online, and whenever he wants, crowds of fans. He gets praise from world leaders. Look! A worthless, but cleverly fawning Nobel Peace Prize nomination!
I think that his ramblings and stupid statements are as much the consequences of a shallow intellect, an undisciplined mind, and an atmosphere of constant adulation as it is age.
But I digress.
Trump, again, is not going to produce the kinds of ideological clarity that Hitler and Lenin did, for example. But that does not mean we aren’t seeing significant ideological developments in this administration.
One clear example is the question of citizenship. Trump’s Executive Order that attempts to redefine birthright citizenship is part of a broad attempt to redefine who an American is. In that vein, we have Trump’s Vice President, JD Vance, who is making speeches that cleave to a culture and ethnicity-based vision of what it means to be American.
Via TPM: JD Vance: Some Americans Are More American Than Others.
“Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence — that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,” Vance said.
He explained that such a definition “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree” with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, dubbing it “the logic of America as a purely creedal nation.”
By the opposite token, Vance said, conceiving of American citizenship “purely as an idea” would “reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,” he said, referencing the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that was founded to combat antisemitism and that, among other activities, tracks far-right groups.
“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he concluded.
If one rejects the notion that we are a creedal nation (i.e., one based on ideas rather than ethnicity and bloodline), then one has to pick another basis, hence the reference to “ancestors.” Once one starts down this road, we will find ourselves talking about people groups (race/ethnicity) and “culture” rather than creedal statements like “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…,” “e plubibus unum,” and “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” among others.
And for anyone who thinks this is some new concern, I have cooked up out of TDS, please note this post from 2007 (that’s getting on to decades ago, in case that fact escapes notice): Buchanan and “White America.”
The “Who is American?” puzzle piece is a major one.
A related puzzle piece is the expansion of ICE and immigration enforcement noted in today’s tab-clearing post. As TPM reported:
All in all, the bill directs around $170 billion through 2029 to various forms of immigration enforcement, according to an analysis by the American Immigration Council and TPM’s own read of the legislation. ICE, responsible for enforcement, detentions, and removals, will oversee much of the spending.
The picture is not so much of an expanded immigration enforcement system, but of an entirely new one.
Note that the gutting of USAID resulted in spending cuts of around $60 billion. And with this consequence, as per NPR: Study: 14 million lives could be lost due to Trump aid cuts.
It is a plain ideological choice to determine that saving lives globally is not worth spending these dollars, but spending far more than that amount on arresting middle-aged women, gardeners, and day laborers.
They can tell us that they are just rounding up violent criminals and enhancing public safety, and many Americans will believe them. But what they are plainly doing is applying a specific ideological framework to immigrants (with exceptions made to those of a certain hue) and in an attempt to redefine what a “real” American is. I would note, too, that removing Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of persons is just a means to make it easier to round them up and send them to places like Alligator Alcatraz via the security apparatus that Congress just funded.
Empowering masked agents who target ethnic groups using fear as a tactic so that they can be sent to camps with diminished or absent due process–what does that sound like to you, dear reader?
Speaking of ideological puzzle pieces, the accusations that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats, as propagated by Trump and Vance, were part of a white nationalist ideology. Lying about immigrants to make them sound weird, if not fully outside the norms of a host country, is classic fascism.
On the subject of race and our past, there was this story from a few weeks ago. The NYT reported, A White Nationalist Wrote a Law School Paper Promoting Racist Views. It Won Him an Award.
Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.
In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.”
Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”
At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades.
[…]
But the question of how officials should respond to Mr. Damsky — who, in an interview, said that referring to him as a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong” — is not merely academic.
It is worth noting that the professor for the course, John L. Badalamenti, is a sitting federal judge.
There is a lot that could be said about this story, but this post is already quite long. But while yes, tolerance and intelectual diversity are important values, but this is not just tolerance, it is extolling white supremacy, especially at this elite of a level. It is an unhealthy, concerning puzzle piece.
To add another puzzle piece, we are starting to get weird rumblings about labor.
For example, as noted in the Open Forum the other day.
Granted, it is unclear what she is suggesting, but it has a definitively ominous undertone. Not only is that number almost certainly wrong, even if it is, are we suggesting that the federal government is going to force specific persons into specific jobs? This raises a host of moral and logistical issues.
Of course, like with a lot of the immigration rhetoric, this is about trying to forge a specific unreality that gives the administration even more power (such as taking away medical insurance from millions).
And we get reactionary “intellectuals” (who have influence over Vance) tweeting things like this.
All of this makes an essay like this from Timothy Snyder sound ominous and concerning, when in a vacuum it might sound hyperbolic: Concentration Camp Labor.
Let me conclude with an observation about symbols. I continue to note that Trump and often cabinet members/administration types appear at official events wearing Trump-branded merch. This is essentially free advertising for Trump’s business, which is not only gross but almost certainly unconstitutional** (not that anyone cares). On an arguably more important level, he is continually branding the American Presidency as Trump, not as the United States. Symbols matter, and it is not only an example of personalization of the office, which is the hallmark of dictatorships, but it fits into the broader enterprise noted above that determines what a “real” American is. And from Trump’s own behavior, symbolism, and rhetoric,*** it is identification with him, not with America itself.
I would remind everyone that a key element of fascist politics is the division of the world into “us” and “them.”
*Yes, my gift for understatement rears its ugly head once more.
**Article II, Section 1, paragraph 7: “he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” Free advertising by US government officials is clearly an emolument.
***He recently said he “hate[s]” Democrats (and that they “hate our country”), and let’s not forget that he called J6 a “day of love” because the protestors were on his side.
Regardless of Damsky’s personal views on white supremacy, it seems to be his paper is a damning indictment of “originalism” by taking the logic of it to its heinous conclusions.
Boy, howdy has that boat sailed.
If that story were written today, the child who points it out would be beaten to death for revealing state secrets and for being an illegal immigrant or a DEI something seeking gender affirming care.
As to:
He’s wrong. The People in the preamble mean the wealthy land owners, plus select scruffy merchants, who were the ones who had a voice in drafting and ratifying both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Not to mention who could afford to run for office and serve a few terms.
Stated like this, Washington and the Continental Congress might have been lucky to find ten volunteers for their army. So they had to pretend it meant others as well. their problem is those others took it literally and seriously, and have been asserting their rights ever since.
@Scott: I find it fascinating that people like Damsky seem to believe the Founders’ words in the Constitution are perfect, even sacred, but also claim they didn’t really mean what they said.
Let’s take the current regime’s claims at face value. Now that ICE will be, not 25% of the size of the FBI, but 400% the size, and it will vastly increase the number of jails, the machinery of mass deportation will be more credibly there. Once that engine goes into high gear, mass deportations happen. The country is emptied of illegal immigrants, and a lot of legal immigrants, too.
What then will happen with all the paramilitary ICE agents, and all the jails?
The ideology lies with in the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.
He is essentially executing the Project 2025 Playbook in spite of his claims otherwise during the campaign.
I know someone who has last their mind on Israel, and the craziness has now spread past Israel into everything. Last year, they were telling me that Hezbollah was going to stage at attack before the election in order to help Harris. I try to avoid conversations like this, but on that one I asked them, very nicely, to walk me through the logic of the plan. A moment of sanity occurred and they were like, oh yeah that doesn’t make any sense.
But now everything is a lie. I had a conversation which spiraled into politics last week and the craziness was everywhere. Palestinian civilians being killed while waiting for food, Jewish people voting for Mamdani, ICE doing raids in LA in military gear and grabbing gardeners, how bad the consequences of the budget will be. Everything is a lie, and the defense for this worldview is a weepy and condescending story about needing to be safe.
I don’t think it’s only Us versus Them. It’s the creation of a Them by an Us who seems to lack the ability to have experiences. That’s why MAGA is all unreal cliches about the open border or criminals or whatever. The people who respond to these are like Germans responding to anti-semitic tropes about Judaism.
Given that agricultural products are grown throughout the world, one has to assume that there are infinite numbers of capable domestic populations. American experiments in substituting experienced and conditioned labor forces with ad hoc labor have proven inefficient in the past. Still in all, this s*** show is what the voters selected. Proceed. By all means.
ETA: “He’s wrong. The People in the preamble mean the wealthy land owners, plus select scruffy merchants, who were the ones who had a voice in drafting and ratifying both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Not to mention who could afford to run for office and serve a few terms.”
I seems some of us are channeling our inner Marxists today. 😉
@Kingdaddy:
Arbeit macht frei
@Modulo Myself: This sounds like the predictable endstate of Information Warfare conducted through social media: Everything is a lie. Nothing makes any sense. I just need to feel ok, but I never do feel ok.
I suppose this is why I fight so hard to determine actual facts. They are not so easy to come by these days.
Of course, the MAGA assertions get more and more outlandish and anti-American every day.
Just quoting the Declaration of Independence seems like an accusation to some.
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury”
And so on…
From the OP:
I’m not enough of an historian to say definitively, but I surmise that it was NOT the ideological clarity of The Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf that brought control of the state to Lenin or Hitler. Rather it was the offering of simple, magical solutions and someone else to blame to populations that felt they were losing out somehow. And Trump can do grift and blame-shifting like nobody’s business.
I would posit that one doesn’t need an ideology to be a fascist. Trump has proven that you don’t have to believe in something in order to deploy the tactics.
Say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, at least it’s an ethos!!!
@Kingdaddy:
They’ll move down the line to round up the next cohort deemed unAmerican, of course. According to the Vice President!…
…this means anyone who disparages the progeny of Confederate soldiers who won’t let go of their bigoted heritage.
@Scott:
Damsky is oversimplifying this. “We The People” meant white men of means. They used the language of the Enlightenment, but only applied it to themselves. And even there, the democratic elements of the Constitution are held in check by the power of the states — the Senate existing, and senators being selected by state legislatures, the Electoral College. Even the “People’s House” is only the People’s House if you apply that very narrow definition of people.
The founders were terrified of democracy.
Even the Bill of Rights only constrained the Federal Government, and not the States. That would only really change in the Reconstruction Era, a period that the Originalists tend to skip over.
Originalism, in practice, usually means favoring the views of the 1780s founders, in opposition to the Reconstruction, when the Reconstruction was a restructuring of America as significant as the founding, and beginning to interpret “We The People” as everyone (except women, of course)
The problem with Mr. Damsky’s analysis isn’t that he gets the ideas of the founders of the 1780s wrong, but that he doesn’t consider the founders of the 1860s-1870s.
Also, he is a fucking racist.
@Kingdaddy:
In a just world, we would stick the ICE agents in those camps. But, in this world, I think it will be homeless people — with the government pursuing policies of economic warfare on its enemies to make them homeless, perhaps bringing back the McCarthy era black lists.
People don’t like to see homeless people, and people can’t see what goes on in the concentration camps — seems like a match made in
heavenhell.(I also don’t like seeing homeless people. It’s why I donate to a food bank with really good homeless outreach… one neighborhood over)
Certainly Trump has not laid out a coherent MAGA ideology. I have not read Mein Kampf, but I have read some expert commentary on Nazi ideology. I don’t recall anyone claiming it was coherent. In fact, I recall quite the opposite. Inconsistency and incompleteness don’t seem to matter much to the followers.
I do recall a claim Ivana or one of the exes said Trump kept a copy of Hitler in his nightstand. Not Mein Kampf but a book of his speeches. Trump was probably studying speaking technique, not ideology. He already knew how to be a racist.
@gVOR10:
If so, it may be the only book Trump ever read.
White male supremacy, unlike socialism or fascism proper, doesn’t need a manifesto or creedal ideology. You don’t need to have study sessions to drill the fine points into the unwashed masses.
It is part of the warp and woof of American culture, latent even in the periods of liberalism like cancerous cells just waiting for the moment to metastasize.
The only time people try to write it down, is when they are trying to bullshit their way past people’s instinctive disgust sensors; That’s why they always use code words and sly linguistic structures to hide the naked truth.
We are entering Trumpism’s second decade; It isn’t some puzzle to work out and it isn’t a simple variant on a normal political philosophy which can be reasoned with or compromised with because it rejects the entire premise of liberal democracy.
It can only be opposed and defeated.
@Chip Daniels:
I suspect you are right about that. No reasoning is going to work if the core reason is this, which I suspect it is, and so did LBJ.
IMO Barack Obama was elected at least a few generations before this country was ready for a black POTUS. The reactionary wave Trump is surfing started with the Tea Party, which could not openly articulate the real reason for their anger. The only difference between that and the sudden resurgence of the Klan in the early 20th century is back then they could openly say what they were mad about.
@Scott F.:
I think that fascism is more a way of doing politics as it is a coherent ideological approach, so I agree with your statement on balance. However, I do think there are some beliefs that matter. I do think Trump holds a number of them. And he amplifies others, whether he really believes them or not.
@gVOR10:
I have never read the whole book. But there is a clear theory of race, culture, and politics in it.
It is a very bad one, but there is one.
@Chip Daniels:
Just using a framing metaphor.
And while I agree that this isn’t hard to see, there are still a lot of people who aren’t seeing it all for what it is, to include some readers of this site.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Whether it is generally true of demagogues historically, I can’t say, but Trump tapped into something engrained in American culture since the beginning. He isn’t some unique historical figure—in America or otherwise.
So if we look at Trump’s 2024 totals, it can be divided into true believers and egg voters.*
The former category won’t see “it”, because they want “it”. This is @DK’s dead horse. The latter category is more diverse. But the non-apocalyptic, non-financial class likely puts their trust in the resilience of the American system. They think, the doomsaying from 2016 didn’t come true. The American system survived existential threats throughout history, and will do it again.
Wrt to coherence: all of us would be incoherent on most things, if we were to answer every possible question. This is the danger of ideology. Ideology presents itself as an algorithm to find the correct answer to every possible question, whether or not the question has been asked. The ideology may be religious or secular in its nature, but that is a description of the source—sacred book or founding document—not the philosophy.
*I would place someone like Connor into the latter category, as I would someone who takes Revelation literally, because they both see Trump as a means to an end of paramount importance.