[ No matter what becomes of Donald Trump, the forces of
intolerance, racism, and belligerence he harnessed in American
politics will persist.]
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THE ENDURING POWER OF TRUMPISM  
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Jelani Cobb
November 15, 2022
The New Yorker
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_ No matter what becomes of Donald Trump, the forces of intolerance,
racism, and belligerence he harnessed in American politics will
persist. _

, Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty

 

In December, 1954, the United States Senate gathered for the purpose
of censuring the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy
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During the preceding months, McCarthy, whose anti-Communist bromides
had made him among the most feared and powerful figures in Congress,
had suffered a calamitous decline in fortunes. He had been thoroughly
humiliated in the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings and
endured lacerating criticism from the journalist Edward R. Murrow. The
once potent brand of innuendo, fearmongering, and outright lying that
brought the senator to prominence was now the central reason for his
rebuke. The traditional narrative of McCarthy’s demise centers on
the most visible and operatic moments, but there was also an
underlying political logic that facilitated them. In 1950, when it was
reported that McCarthy, a Republican, falsely claimed to have the
names of two hundred and five Communists employed by the State
Department, Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and the
White House. In 1954, when the Army-McCarthy hearings took place,
Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate (narrowly) and
the White House, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was one
thing to cast toxic conspiracies that made Democrats look bad, but
quite another to spread falsehoods that made his own party look inept.
In the end, twenty-two Republican senators voted in favor of censure.

Ever since Donald Trump
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Presidential candidate, observers have compared him to McCarthy, not
simply because of their demagogic commonalities and mutual ties to the
attorney Roy Cohn but also for the hostile symbiosis they forged with
the media outlets of their respective eras. The aftermath of last
week’s midterm elections
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an additional area of comparison: the narratives attached to their
political declines. The G.O.P. has abided all manner of corrupt,
dishonest, anti-democratic, and potentially illegal behavior from
Trump, including his incitement of an armed insurrection against the
United States Congress, but the lacklustre midterm performance of
Republicans seems to suggest that, like McCarthy sixty-eight years
ago, the former President has reached a point where his demagogy has
become a liability for his own party.

Few are the demagogues noted for their superior emotional-regulation
abilities, but even by that standard the reports that the former
President Trump is alternately enraged and defensive over the results
of the midterm elections are noteworthy. Not since his grudging exit
from the White House in January, 2021, has he inspired such levels of
Schadenfreude among his critics. This election—in which the
Republicans picked up far fewer congressional seats than expected, the
Senate remains in the hands of Democrats, and even those
Trump-affiliated candidates who prevailed seemed to have done so
against real political headwinds—is being read as a referendum on
the dwindling viability
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Republicanism, as well as on the former President’s prospects in
2024. Republicans are, tentatively, distancing themselves from the
Trump brand, and media observers have noted the stream of criticism
emanating from Rupert Murdoch-owned news properties. The cumulative
effect of these developments is a barely concealed hope that the
G.O.P. will jettison Trump like loose cargo on a storm-battered
freighter, and that the most volatile and dangerous elements of
American politics will sink along with him. But, for reasons that
should be more than familiar to us by now, the path
the _maga_ movement takes toward irrelevance is likely not so
simple—if, in fact, it is headed in that direction.

In the seven years since Trump took his ride down the gold-colored
escalator in Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for President of the
United States, the movement that coalesced around him has died a
thousand deaths, only to climb out of its shallow grave before the
first trowel of dirt hit the casket. The political landscape in front
of Trump is different and far more formidable than it was even in
2016, when he was a political novice. Notable Presidents—Ulysses S.
Grant and Eisenhower among them—had been elected without much
political experience. But, in 2024, a prospective Trump would be
attempting reëlection after having _lost_ a Presidential election,
a feat that only the Democrat Grover Cleveland achieved, in 1892, by
defeating Benjamin Harrison, who was himself hobbled by divisions
among Republicans. Moreover, in 2016, Trump sliced through a fairly
unimpressive field of G.O.P. competitors in the primaries. This time,
though, he could face a significant primary challenger, in the form of
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis
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points to the diminished viability of one of the most disruptive
political movements we’ve seen in modern American history. Yet
it’s worth thinking about what exactly Trumpism is and how it came
to be before penning another potentially premature eulogy on its
behalf.

It would be easy at this point to saddle Trump with all the ills and
the disastrous implications of what we’ve come to refer to as
“Trumpism.” But the most significant parallel between Trump’s
careers in business and in politics is his lack of standing as a
creator. His talent lies not in organizational leadership or in
shepherding a novel concept from its inception to a place of
prominence but, rather, in marketing. Trump emerged as a political
force in the middle of the first Black Presidency and adroitly played
to racist and xenophobic fears that attended Barack Obama’s
election. He lied prolifically about Obama’s birth certificate. In
early 2011, Trump claimed to have people looking into the matter,
“and they cannot believe what they’re finding.” As with
Trump’s other canards, he never actually said what these people—if
they existed at all—were finding.

It should be recalled, however, that Trump did not invent birtherism;
he simply recognized the broader political potential of a ridiculous
lie and ran with it. Similarly, the phenomenon known as
“McCarthyism” had roots that preceded the 1946 election that sent
McCarthy to the Senate. Notably, the House Un-American Activities
Committee, chaired by Representative Martin Dies, Jr., the Democrat of
Texas, was formed a full decade earlier, and its combative use of
Red-baiting innuendo against the subjects of its inquiries provided a
template for McCarthy’s approach. Yet the disparate elements of
intolerance for dissent, including the suppression of First Amendment
rights, and the broader currents of social paranoia might have
remained just that but for McCarthy’s ability to synthesize them
into a cohesive whole.

The persecution associated with anti-Communism survived McCarthy. It
took a series of Supreme Court decisions in 1957 and 1958—most
notably the Yates v. United States ruling, which overturned the
convictions of several Communists prosecuted under the Smith Act—to
curtail the most egregious excesses committed in the name of
patriotism. Trump did not single-handedly inject the strains of
intolerance, racism, nativism, belligerence, and a durable sympathy
for anti-democratic behavior into the Republican Party, and there is
no reason to believe that his absence would cause them to evaporate.
Immigrants make up just under fourteen per cent of the population of
the United States—almost triple their proportion in 1970. The
age-old fears about racial and ethnic replacement that Trump so deftly
manipulated in 2016 remain ambient. Moreover, the drive to curate the
electorate via voter suppression has lost none of its resonance on the
right. In fact, the razor-thin margins in last week’s elections
point to the outsized effect that suppressing even a sliver of
specific electorates can yield. And, paradoxically, the emerging
audacity among right-wing media to criticize Trump points to how
little has changed. Part of what has driven the Republican Party so
far to the right has been the influence of these same conservative
outlets, whose criticism can spark a primary challenge for Republicans
deemed too moderate. They helped foster the environment in which
Trumpism could not only emerge but thrive. If they play a role in
undermining Trump, this serves to reinforce their role as the rudders
of the G.O.P.

For critical observers, it has always been apparent that everything
Trump offered the public came slathered in snake oil. That is either a
statement about the willful blindness of the American public or a
barometer of how many Americans view those dangerous liabilities as
assets. In either case, the McCarthy example provides at least one
other insight: fixating on the salesman misses the point. The problem
is, and always has been, the size of the audience rushing to buy what
he’s been selling.

_Jelani Cobb has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2012, and
became a staff writer in 2015. He writes frequently about race,
politics, history, and culture. His most recent book is “The
Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress
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He won the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis
Journalism, for his columns on race, the police, and injustice. He is
the dean of the Columbia Journalism School._

 

 

* Trumpism
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* intolerance
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* Racism
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