Donald Trump Is Not Ideological
And his enemies fail by enacting their ideology against him
There is no ideology to Donald Trump, just id. He feels his politics in his gut. Reason and evidence are not interesting to Trump. To quote John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser, fascism is a “comprehensive ideology” while “Trump isn’t capable of philosophical thought.” Rumors of an ideological admiration for Adolf Hitler are therefore utterly ridiculous and tendentious.
His style is flamboyant, all gold and glamor. It has nothing in common with the national socialist aesthetic. Efforts to project ideology on Trump always fall apart under the slightest critical examination. His enemies are themselves ideological, so they imagine Trump as an ideological actor. Then they fail to understand him, let alone defeat him, using ideology.
“Mr. Trump has long expressed interest in the most notorious dictator of the past century, Adolf Hitler” according to Peter Baker at The New York Times. Reader, every third show on the History Channel is about Hitler because the whole world finds him fascinating. “In a 1990 interview, Mr. Trump said he had a copy of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ although his first wife Ivana Trump and the friend who gave him the book said it was actually ‘My New Order,’ a collection of Hitler speeches.”
Why has no one written a convincing article comparing the text of Trump’s public remarks with Hitler’s, then? Because the two orators do not resemble one another in the least. Trump denied the story entirely, and I believe him, because you cannot convince me that the man has actually read a book, much less such a boring book. Books are not his thing. Trump is a creature of television. Tens of millions of copies of books about Trump have so far failed to stop the creature of television, go figure.
This failing interpretation of Trump must stop if Democrats are to ever have a hope of winning elections again. It makes everyone standing oppositional to Trump seem insane. The term ‘Trump derangement syndrome’ is now commonplace, but still perfectly describes this problem. His enemies do not demonstrate self-awareness; they do not see themselves as others see them, and so they repel the ‘normie’ voter. Holding “No Kings” signs under a progress flag on the Capitol steps, as Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland did Saturday, may feel like successful #Resistance to him. To everyone who does not think the way he does, Raskin looks like a fruitcake.
Coming from a partisan whose party just lost a presidential election by putting forward a party nominee who had never passed a party primary, this “No Kings” stuff is rich. So rich that even a king like Croesus could not afford it. Democrats told Americans to vote for Kamala Harris because she was simply so awesome that she deserved to be queen (a “girlboss”). Voters gave Donald Trump a popular majority and a resounding Electoral College victory instead. Democrats need to knock this stupidity off before they make Trump an actual king.
I defy anyone to show me examples of Trump waxing rhapsodical about the lost glories of feudal monarchy. He admires strongmen, to be sure, and he is friends with monarchs like King Salman of Saudi Arabia, yes. To date Trump has never uttered a word about his pending coronation, however, let alone appointed an heir to the throne he has not claimed. If Democrats and their media surrogates told me that Trump had nefarious designs to build a professional wrestling ring on the White House lawn and hold a monster truck rally in Lafayette Park, I would find them a lot more believable than Trump-the-would-be-king.
Trump is drawn to strong political figures by their strength, not their ideology. His first-term flattery and glad-handing with Kim Jong Un was not an ideological surrender to juche communism, it was Trump shaking hands with a powerful person, someone who is feared and respected. We do not see him behaving this way with King Charles III. Trump simply feels attracted to powerful men. Likewise, Trump’s immigration policy is simply popular because it makes Americans feel safer, whereas riots and protests make Americans feel unsafe.
When Trump critics decry a US Army parade as fascism, they make me feel unsafe about their sanity. This past weekend was the Army’s 250th birthday. In the time before anti-Trump resistance, such an event would have been marked with a parade in any case, and while some people would have moaned about warmongering, most Americans would have agreed it was entirely normal and predictable. Trump detractors went out of their way to pretend something was abnormal about it.
“As both the appearance of the parade and reports from within the military suggest, neither the soldiers forced to trudge down Constitution Avenue nor their senior officers forced to organize the event seemed to have any enthusiasm for Trump’s spectacle,” Bill Kristol bloviates at The Bulwark. Kristol has never served a day in uniform, so here is news to him: the US Army has parades all the time, and not one common soldier is ever enthusiastic about them. Proud? Yes. Enthusiastic? Never. This is what the kids call my ‘lived experience’ of the Army.
But like the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer character played by Phil Hartman in the classic SNL sketches of the same name, the #Resistance pretends not to understand what they see. ‘What is this mysterious military parade?’ They ask. ‘Could it be fascism?’ Wait, I have a meme for this.
It is a happy coincidence for Trump that he shares a birthday with the US Army, because it makes his partisan enemies talk like idiots. Trump never misses an opportunity to troll his political enemies this way. If the Army parade falls on his birthday, he will gladly make it a big one, just to own the libs.
When he talks about reopening Alcatraz, his enemies fall all over themselves to remind voters that Democrats are the party which defunds police departments, encourages lawlessness, and metes out two-tier, racialized injustice to Daniel Penny. The libs own themselves.
When Trump announces a 30-day surge of ICE deportations, his enemies trip over one another to remind voters that Democrats are the party which defends “due process” for undocumented aliens. The libs own themselves.
When Trump’s Department of Education cuts off federal Title IX funding for states that let boys cheat at girls’ sports, his enemies lose their minds and double-down on denial of human sex difference, a position that looks absolutely insane to a supermajority of voters. Libs are owned, again by an own goal.
When Trump supports Israel’s war against Iran and its IRGC proxies, the usual suspects go out of their way to remind observers that Democratic Party foreign policy embraces the world’s most unpopular pariah state, and that their street army is enthusiastic for pogroms. Libs self-owned again!
None of these issues resonate with a voting majority. All of them — defending crime, defending criminal aliens, transgender sports ‘inclusion,’ Palestine — are powerful issues within the Democratic Party coalition, but not among voters who swung to Trump last November. Trump has mastered the simple art of getting his enemies to remind Americans about the most annoying sides of themselves. His enemies keep falling for it because they cannot conceive of Trump’s policy choices as non-ideological populism. They cannot admit their own ideas are unpopular.
Trump’s non-ideological nature is manifest in his relationships with other people. He was not Elon Musk’s first choice during the 2024 primary, but the industrialist supported Trump to get as much of what he wanted as he could. Now that the two men have had a very public dust-up, with Musk making and withdrawing scurrilous accusations, actual Democrats have gone on the actual record saying that they can win Elon Musk and the techbros back now, surely?
Never mind the months-long campaign by their media proxies to keep Musk on loop doing the supposed Nazi salute that countless Democrats have also been recorded making without being called Nazis for it, for some reason. Once upon a time, Musk was a liberal, even a leftist. So why can’t Democrats have him back, and start clawing back the rest of Big Tech too? All he has to do is beg forgiveness for his sins.
“I’m a believer in redemption, and he is telling the truth about the legislation,” said Rep. RITCHIE TORRES (D-N.Y.). But, he added, Musk has “done an enormous amount of damage” and “there are Democrats who see his decimation of the federal workforce and the federal government as an unforgivable sin.”
Of course, plenty of Democrats are angry at Musk. The party told people to be angry at Musk instead of themselves, and most of the ideological left obediently did as they were told. But the progressive omnicause is always capable of forgetting what it thought five seconds ago — electric cars, anyone? — so the mob can turn on a dime. All they need is the signal from their elites that the sinners are temporarily forgiven.
Except that Musk would require the Democratic Party to apologize for several things, such as attacks on Teslas, attacks on Tesla stock, and the transgender cult recruitment of his son, Xavier Musk/Vivian Jenna Wilson, which is what got Musk talking about “the woke mind virus” in the first place. Democrats face this problem on a much larger scale: a small, but important slice of the electorate is utterly disenchanted with ideologies that Democrats reflexively defend.
For parents of children lured into the genderwoo self-harm cult, Americans in neighborhoods ‘taken over’ by Venezuelan gangs, small businesses affected by crime, crowds that boo when males dominate sporting events set aside for girls, and Jews wondering how their country and its campuses became so unsafe for them, Democratic Party virtue signals on these issues are noxious and repellent. What the party calls ‘the right side of history’ does not appeal to them. The result is that Democrats are on the wrong side of electoral history. They are on the wrong side of Elon Musk.
“I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying,” Trump told reporters at the G7 meeting in Canada on Monday. “Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.” This is a man who watches television, not a man who reads books, and he is not letting Carlson or anyone else call the shots based on their own idea of what ‘America First’ means. This is all being described as a ‘civil war in MAGA’ but no one is becoming a new Democrat, just yet. Trump simply doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, let alone what Hitler or Mussolini thought.
Musk is just one of the ‘industrialists’ now being coordinated on graphs by students of political theory in reference to Trump, showing who is in and who is out. This kremlinology has settled on one man for the time being: Stephen Miran, the chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors. Miran is himself not ideological. His theory of tariffs as the means to equalize trade deficits while maintaining the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is based on numbers, not the metaphysics of his moral values or some antedeluvian goldbuggery.
As politics, Miran’s theory appeals to Donald Trump’s gut instinct for what the working class actually values as opposed to what progressive scolds tell the working class to value. He takes this oppositional approach to cleave the union rank-and-file from the Democrats — tariffs are a wedge issue, and Democrats are still in denial that the wedge affects them at all. Workers think of tariffs as a good thing, so does Trump, and Miran offers an economic theory in which they tariffs are a good thing. That’s the entire ideology.
Miran’s ideas challenge the consensus of economists that tariffs are inherently inflationary. They are however not ideological, that is, driven by some predicate ideas about the way the economy ought to work. Miran has studied how the economy actually works. He wants to replace the old world trading order with a new world trading order, one that alleviates the costs of global order falling on American taxpayers. This would preserve American hegemony, not destroy it.
Will it work? I don’t know, and neither do you, dear reader, and neither do the Democrats, who are counting on Trump’s tariff adventures to fail. Trump has in fact pursued the China-centric, bilateral trade agreement strategy outlined by Miran. Hiring was robust in May. We will not have real information on how much inflation was passed on to the American consumer by Trump’s tariff rollouts, but their rapid transformation into “policy wins” — and the markets’ acceptance of the ‘new normal’ in trade relations — suggest that recession fears could ease by the fall. Because the market disturbances took place during the first quarter, businesses will have time to adjust their orders by Christmas. It may all smooth over, just as Miran predicted.
The key metric by which to judge Stephen Miran’s economic ideas is the value of the dollar. Miran says that a weaker dollar will signal American companies to bring manufacturing onshore again and reduce the trade deficits that have beaten down American workers for decades. At the time of this writing, the value of the dollar has weakened versus foreign currency accounts by about six percent since Trump rolled out his global tariffs.
Trump supports Israel because it is popular. He likes Benjamin Netanyahu because he is a strongman. In his first term, Trump championed bans on Muslim entry in the United States, but on his recent Middle East trip, Trump embraced the new Syrian strongman and endorsed his regime. In 2016, Americans felt unsafe from ISIS, so Trump went against his instinctive desire to withdraw from Syria in order to make Americans feel safer. We can see Trump thinking, and his thinking is not shaped by ideological hatred of Muslims. He would not accept an airplane from the Qataris if he was fundamentally opposed to Islam.
Trump is transactional. He consistently says that he wants a deal, and pursues a deal, though he does not always sign the resulting deal, as in the case of North Korea. His consistent view of Syria is that he would rather stay out of Syria, let Turkey and Israel haggle over who protects what interest, and stop paying the expense of protecting Kurds, Druze, Alawites, Turkomans, or any other ethnic group or religious sect. Not because Trump hates Nestorians, or Yazidis, but because the United States expends too many resources protecting them. Trump wants the American world order to cost taxpayers less. Like any good capitalist, he is happy to outsource security, but that is as far as his ideology goes.
Donald Trump is also kayfabe. Like a professional wrestler, he understands political grandstanding as inherently presentational and authentically fake. Truth be told, Democrats have a public-facing opposition with Republicans and a congenial relationship in private. They simply don’t extend this same cordial relationship to Trump because they think oppositional politics will somehow win the news cycle and then the midterms and then the presidency. This is not going to happen.
If Democrats were smart, they would offer Trump a deal on immigration. They would try to protect DACA recipients at the expense of criminal aliens. They would agree to simplify the “due process” needed for a gang member, human trafficker, and wife-abuser to be deported, and stop squealing about human rights in El Salvador prisons. If Democrats were capable of compromising their precious principles long enough to share the ‘win’ with Trump, they would see their own poll numbers improve and remove one of his biggest political cudgels. But they are not that party, right now.
Trump's Tariff Guru Explains It All For You
Stephen Miran held his opinions about tariffs and trade deficits long before he became Donald Trump’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. His 41-page paper on the topic, “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System,” drew a fair bit of attention from econ geeks when he published it last November following Trump’s election victory. However, his face has only become familiar to average Americans in recent days as he has been called upon to explain the administration’s tariff policy.