Trump May Be Gone, But Trumpism Isn’t

On his first full day as an ex-President, Donald Trump didn’t make any headlines, not even in his new local newspaper. On Thursday evening, the main headline on the home page of the Palm Beach Post declared that the number of coronavirus cases in Palm Beach County has topped a hundred thousand. In Washington, Joe Biden was revelling in his role as the antithesis of Trump, revoking some of his predecessor’s most controversial policies, appealing for unity, and unveiling a new plan to tackle the pandemic.

Having written critically about Trump on a regular basis over the past five years, I’d be as pleased as anyone to relegate him to the history books and concentrate on the challenges facing the new Chief Executive. But, of course, the country has unfinished business with its forty-fifth President: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to transmit an article of impeachment against Trump to the Senate on Monday, triggering a trial. Earlier in the week, Mitch McConnell, now the Senate Minority Leader, indicated that he would delay the start of Trump’s impeachment trial until February. Trump, for his part, insists that he, too, has unfinished business. “I want you to know that the movement we started is only just beginning,” he said, in his farewell address. On the final full day of Trump’s Presidency, his aide Jason Miller posted a picture of the White House on Twitter with the caption “Until 2025 . . .”

That was just bluster. Right now, another Trump Presidency seems unlikely. If he had accepted gracefully the result of the November election, in which he garnered the support of more than seventy-four million Americans and came within forty-three thousand votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin of eking out another victory in the Electoral College, he would still be in a formidable position politically, despite his catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic. But Trump’s behavior since the election, particularly his incitement of the deadly January 6th riot on Capitol Hill, has done him a lot of political damage.

Getting himself impeached for the second time is only the start of Trump’s troubles. His attempted self-coup prompted some Republican leaders in Washington to finally break with him, and it sent corporate America fleeing from anything connected with the Trump brand. As I noted last week, he’s now such a pariah that many Trump businesses are facing vast challenges. Even if he were to try and branch out in a new direction, such as by starting a television network, it’s far from clear that he could find the necessary partners and raise the necessary funds. He also seems to have alienated some of his foot soldiers, including some of the alt-right thugs who took part in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. In their case, they were angered by how he backed away from them in the days after the violence. On Wednesday, the Times published a fascinating piece about how members of the Proud Boys and other right-wing groups were calling him “extraordinarily weak” and “a total failure” on social media.

Politically, the biggest blow to Trump is that he has permanently lost his premier social-media platform—Twitter—and it isn’t clear whether his secondary platform—Facebook—will eventually allow him back. On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg’s company said that it had referred to an outside oversight board the decision of whether to make the platform’s suspension of Trump permanent. Given the significance of the decision to bar Trump, “we think it is important for the board to review it and reach an independent judgment on whether it should be upheld,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s director of communications and policy, wrote in a post.

It’s hard to exaggerate the significance of Trump losing his online presence, which was central to his political rise and Presidency. In broad terms, Trump never had anything very new to say. His success was based on exploiting a number of phenomena that have long bedevilled American society: anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, class divisions, resentment of coastal élites, opposition to liberal value systems, a belief in conspiracy theories, and genuine economic grievances. Trump’s adroit use of the Internet separated him from previous Republican rabble-rousers, such as Pat Buchanan and Sarah Palin. His Twitter account enabled him to disintermediate the media and speak directly to his supporters. Once he was in power, it also allowed him to dictate the daily news agenda, float conspiracy theories, punish people who crossed him, and keep himself constantly in the public eye. Without his vast social-media following, it will be far more difficult for him to make a comeback. A Trump without a Twitter account is a centurion without a sword.

Which isn’t to say he should be written off, a mistake that politicians and commentators have often made before. Even though he has done himself great harm since November, the right-wing populist movement that he spearheaded, and the underlying forces that it fed on, are still very much present, and great swaths of the Republican Party are still in thrall to them—as evidenced by the fact that, just hours after the January 6th assault on the Capitol, more than half of the House G.O.P. caucus voted to challenge the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. It has been widely reported that McConnell and other Republican leaders in the Senate are now flirting with the idea of using the upcoming impeachment trial to wrest control of the G.O.P. back from Trump. But, until that happens, reports of the Party breaking with him should be treated with extreme skepticism. Trump, as he sits in Palm Beach, may well be justified in asking of McConnell the question that Stalin reputedly asked of Pope Pius XII: How many legions has he?

Even without the Proud Boys, who could still come back around to Trump’s side, the former President still has many legions, unfortunately. In the days immediately after January 6th, a series of opinion polls showed his job-approval rating plunging from the low forties, where it was for much of his Presidency, to the low thirties; one survey, from Pew Research, even put the rating in the high twenties. That dive reflected the widespread revulsion at Trump’s seditious behavior, but, during his final week in office, his numbers rebounded somewhat. According to the FiveThirtyEight poll average, he left the White House with an approval rating of 38.6 per cent. The Real Clear Politics poll, which tallies the data differently, put the figure at 41.1 per cent. In both poll averages, Trump’s ratings were slightly above the lows that they reached in late 2017.

Many readers may find that information hard to fathom, but it reflects the enormous gulf in attitudes to Trump that has been evident from the moment he rode down the escalator in Trump Tower in June, 2015. He’s never had the support of a majority of the country, or even come particularly close to gaining it. To the disgraceful end of his Presidency, though, he retained a large enough base of support to persuade other conservative opportunists that Trumpism (albeit without Trump) represents the future of the G.O.P. With their eyes on 2024, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley voted to reject some of the Electoral College results. Other Presidential hopefuls, such as Tom Cotton and Rand Paul, didn’t go that far, but they have adopted much of Trump’s divisive playbook. And the new Congress contains some true Trump fanatics. One of the first official acts of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a new member of Congress who has in the past expressed a belief in Qanon, was to file articles of impeachment against Biden. On this, the first weekend of the new Presidency, Trumpism is still alive and kicking.