First of all, his is NOT a bag on Trump thread. God knows we have enough of those on the Dope and posters get their digs in even non-politic threads (You think the Fascist Cheetoe’s insurrection was bad? It is second place to the National League implementing the DH.)
In the 80’s, Trump was a moderate Republican. Not quite a Rockefeller or Anderson level of liberalism but often her talked more like a Democrat than a Pub. That’s why when he ran in 2016 I thought he was trolling the Religious Right / Tea Party Republican Caucus and that the more successful he was in the primaries the harder he trolled. Poe’s Law in action. right? And the bully he played on the Apprentice - that just a character for ratings.
As we all know, it was no acting. He believed in his rhetoric in the primaries and his bully persona is his true person. So what happened over the last 35 years to turn Donald Trump from the centrist he was then to the whatever he is today?
Yes, he’s a bully (or a wanna be bully). Any political opinion he adopts, however, is pure acting. He doesn’t care about NATO, abortion, religion, or even immigration.
At this point he is well beyond the wanna be stage. He perfected his ability to pit two sides together on his show the Apprentice and followed the metrics of the viewers to continue to divide the teams. While technically a RINO he is an opportunist agitator for his own gain.
I honestly don’t think that he’s ever had particularly strong political/social views, other than:
An interest in policies that would benefit his business interests, and him, personally
A certain level of bigotry
What happened is that he discovered that, by espousing (or, at least, saying that he espouses) certain conservative talking points, he could get a large number of people to like him a lot, and be very vocally supportive of him. Above all, he has a massive ego, and he tells his followers what they want to hear, so that they stroke his ego further.
That I’m inclined to agree with. Before the election he supported pro-LGBTQ rights in North Carolina bathroom laws. When that didn’t play well with his base he 180ed.
One theory I heard that would answer my own OP is mental illness. I heard secondhand that a doctor has traced mental illness in Trump’s family (mother’s side IIRC) and that a lot of mental illness manifests after middle age. Again from the second-hand source, Trump’s sister subscribes to this theory. Can anyone confirm or deny if they’ve heard the same thing?
because the Republican Party became a cult of grifters.
This is probably my favorite link ever, I haven’t posted it in a while - it’s a 2012 article about how the Republican Party turned into a grifter cult.
And it also makes you think about how far the party has come in the years since the article was written, given that the politician the author excoriates as the biggest liar in politics is Mitt Romney.
Modding: Keep this about Trump and not the Republican Party. Plenty of active threads to slam the Republicans Party. You could also start a new thread built around your post and link back to here.
This is just a guidance, not a warning. Nothing on your permanent record.
This. iMHO that’s why Trumpism as it stands today didn’t really get going until he lost the election. It was probably the first time in his whole life he’d ever lost at something / been told no. Before that he was taking the talk but he didn’t need to walk the walk. Since then he’s been backed into a corner and he’s using every tactic available to him.
Yeah; pretty much everything Trump does makes perfect sense if you keep in mind that his sole fixed principle is that whoever strokes his ego is good and whoever criticizes him is bad. He could have been manipulated into adopting virtually any position as long as enough people cheered and applauded him for it. Conversely, he has a tendency to quietly drop items from his repertoire if people don’t applaud them, or if he comes to associate those positions with people who do not like him. As it turned out, right-wing nuts were willing to praise him when nobody else would, and therefore he became a right-wing nut.
Everything I’ve seen about him suggests he’s always been authoritarian. I don’t think his moderate aspects were ever real. Most of the stuff he claimed to believe, he didn’t really care about. As such, he was easily able to change them to be able to win the Republican primary. And, once he did that, he stuck with those views.
For instance, I’m rather sure he never cared one way or the other about abortion. He cared more about being the opposite of Barrack Obama, who he saw as his rival ever since he started with the birther nonsense.
I really don’t think you can separate these two things. The path the Republican party has taken leading up to Trump was integral to understand the situation that allowed him to come into power. He essentially hijacked the hatred that republicans/fox news/facebook disinformation/etc. used to try to stir up. They were trying to keep it at least somewhat hidden with dog whistles and he said the quiet part out loud. That’s how he became popular and took over their own movement. Without over a decade of work from that propaganda, there wouldn’t have been the train ready to hijack to full on crazytown.
Trump is a narcissistic opportunist who has few politics other than “whatever benefits me” - he doesn’t care about the republican party or politics outside of that. The tactics, platform, and propaganda of the republican party set the stage for someone like him to rise and played into his capabilities.
Trump didn’t really change, other than getting less coherent in his old age, the situation created by the republican party and their tools changed the country to something that would support a childish, stupid, narcissistic bully. As other posters have more or less stated, Trump adopted the politics from the only people who were dumb enough to think he’s actually a smart, strong, competent person. He would’ve supported a different set of politics if there were some other group giving him the adulation he needed, but no other group was ignorant or hateful enough to take a pathetic, childish, hateful con man seriously; there was no way he would have the adulation or support he had from any other group.
I agree that he’s always been an authoritarian. The distinguishing factor is that he was never an ideological authoritarian. He’s not a Stalin or Hitler. He’s more like Eric Cartman from South Park. He wants people to respect his authority. He thus molded his positions to mirror those of his most loyal supporters. He doesn’t so much care about any of their particular ideologies, he just wants their loyalty.
Trump says the thing that he thinks will make the crowd cheer and make more people support him.
And he admits as much, on camera – see the “two Corinthians” clip, or his comments on “drain the swamp”. There’s no secret that he’s an opportunist.
In terms of actual ideology, I don’t think he has much of any principles. But white supremacy works well because he believes in the Trumps being superior, so it fits to think of his race as being the best one. That’s about it.
This is a fallacy. What is true that a large segment of the people who achieved success post WWII owed that success to the coattails of leftist wins but believed that the world was a zero sum game, and no longer required solidarity of all. Their core beliefs were formed by the total domination of the U.S. after the war, without having any part in the everybody shares ethic that was the official mythology of those years.
It turned out that the core belief of those winners was that if anyone else won, then that made you a loser. Over time this revealed the underlying hatred of Others who were striving just for equality. The prejudices worked equally strongly against Others in America and against all other countries who couldn’t be good because they weren’t America.
Trump is the paragon of such thinking. If anyone else wins at anything - if anyone else is perceived as doing better than him - he goes nuts. He must always be first, be the arbiter, be the supreme flaunter of wealth. In addition he must screw over subordinates and competitors, battle the government, flout regulations, norms, and social niceties, and force all within range to be toadies and kowtow to him.
Many people have tried to ascribe various disorders in the DSM to him; I don’t know which applies best. Clearly he is an extreme case no matter what one calls it.
Remember that he didn’t expect to win in 2016. He ran in order to hype his brand. Yet in countries that don’t have actual autocracies, there is no position in the world that feeds into such behavior as being President of the United States of America, the Most Powerful Man in the World. It worked like a heroin drip. He instantly felt better than even he ever had, but needed more and more of a dose daily as the addiction consumed all parts of him that required any downplaying. Of course, that means that once the drip went away, which was back on November 8, 2020, all his focus was on the single goal of reviving those feelings.
Trump never changed in the normal meaning of the term. He essentially cast away any other pieces of his personality - small though they were - when the world around him turned up the adoration to 11. Politics as such had nothing to do with it then and have nothing to do with it now. Politics merely turned out to be better than reality television for feeding his addiction.
Exactly. “Build the Wall” became one of the primary mantras of his campaign, and one of the goals of his administration, not because he particularly cared about it, but because when he started saying it at campaign rallies, it drew huge applause and enthusiasm.
Then he’s one of the best actors in the world. On multiple subjects – the judiciary, Israel & Jerusalem, regulatory rollbacks, etc. – he’s “out-conservatived” the previous three Republican presidents.