The Agitator Supplies What the Base Demands: Trumpism Before and After Donald Trump

Abstract

The fierce loyalty of Donald Trump’s base has long mystified his critics. For 8 years now, they have expressed puzzlement that his followers support him ‘despite everything’—despite his incendiary rhetoric, his misogyny, his racial prejudices, and his authoritarianism. In this paper, I argue that, in fact, Trump’s hectic agitation is precisely what his base wants. My reading of the data—including data I gathered with my collaborator, Eric Hanley, in 2016—is that Trump owes his demagogic success to the fact that he says what his followers want him to say and acts accordingly. Donald Trump, today’s agitator par excellence, supplies what his base demands. Trump, in short, is less an architect of Trumpism than its reflex. However effectively he performs in the public arena, he remains an emissary, personifying a social movement that preceded him and will survive him. And that movement, I will argue, is authoritarian in a very specific sense—driven by a wish for a domineering leader who is loyal to his partisans and hostile to their adversaries. Analytic insight into this phenomenon is drawn, below, from a range of authors, including marketing professionals and critical theorists including Erich Fromm and Theodor W. Adorno.