Trumpism is Winding Down, But Complacency is Not an Option

Little by little, glimpse by flickering glimpse, there are signs that we are pushing our way through to the other side of this ten-year chronic societal illness.

 Last year there was the one-two punch of landslide federal elections in Australia and Canada that thoroughly rejected candidates who promised to be the Donald Trump of those countries. Australia’s Peter Dutton and Canada’s Pierre Poilievre were both trounced so thoroughly that they lost the parliamentary seats they already held and all but ended their political careers.

 In Brazil and South Korea, leaders who attempted to imitate Trump’s insurrection to retain power were both arrested and imprisoned. In Romania, a Trump-style candidate who attempted to rig the election was barred from running.

 Then, this week, Viktor Orban’s 16 year reign over Hungary came to an end. I don’t mean to induce complacency—just the opposite, as I’ll get to soon—but for your short term mental health you’re still allowed to celebrate the fact that dominoes are falling, and cracks are appearing in what I and many others feared was just the beginning of a protracted worldwide plunge into Meme Fascism.

The populist right’s unending assault of outrage has to have a time limit even among the people who voted for Trump for that very reason.

 I think that a big factor in the bulk of Trump’s supporters’ fondness for his first administration, to the point that they would commit violence to keep him in power for another four years, was that he had genuine friction, from within and without his own party. His supporters, for a time had their cake and could eat it too, as he ranted and raved and memed and tweeted and did what damage he was allowed to do within the constraints of the office, but was still just acting as a foil for the people who kept the government working—the people his supporters despised but nevertheless kept the ship on course. The so-called “deep state.”

 They didn’t realize they needed that foil. When Trump returned to the White House he brought with him dozens of mini-Trumps. He replaced his cabinet with Trumps, filled congress with Trumps, all of his social media is run by Trumps. Now Washington D.C. resembles the office building from Gremlins 2.

People are starting to get tired. Those who voted for him for genuinely political reasons have spent the last year and a quarter waiting for him to actually start getting some stuff done that he’d promised, like permanently returning America to the 1970s, a thing that’s totally possible. Instead, it’s just a barrage of the type of stupid, failed, seat-of-the-pants bullshit you expect from a government that fired everyone who knew what they were doing because knowing stuff is woke.

 A hell of a lot of people find nonstop trolling and unserious memeslop entertaining. That’s why they hang out on 4chan and X. But I think, when it becomes part of politics and thus literally inescapable, even the acolytes of that culture can overdose. There are only so many times you can watch a Rickroll before you want to sit Rick down and ask him if he actually has a plan to bring down the price of fuel.

 In the age of vibe coding, Trump and his administration are vibe presidenting. The rest of the world, those countries that flirted with this type of thing or considered doing so, are looking at the United States, screwing their faces up, and saying “no, thanks.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is that I don’t know that the right is actually weakening that much. It’s fracturing, no doubt. It’s Trumpism that’s weakening. The elements of his shtick that can become the most tiresome are doing just that. The more tiresome it gets, the more people see how naked a charlatan he is.

 Recently, Christian nationalists, who have been willing to overlook the fact that he’s very obviously an atheist, are gritting their teeth harder and harder, their smiles becoming ever more forced, as Trump and his administration repeatedly equate him with Jesus. The people who were actually serious about supporting Trump’s no-war policy are becoming increasingly frustrated by all the new wars he’s starting.

 Now, the Western left can’t afford to just ride this trend on vibes. It is very, very important to understand why it is happening and plan accordingly.

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See, the decline in Trumpism isn’t necessarily coinciding with a rise in the left. What we’re seeing is everyone, left and right, just getting more and more pissed off at these assholes, and they’re getting pissed off for different reasons. To understand why the far-right is getting pissed off, you have to look at how he’s failing them. A lot of these guys wanted him to do something about foreigners and nonwhite people, which he’s trying to do but not fast enough. Less conspicuously until recently, a lot of them wanted him to do something about Jews.

 Now, it’s unclear why folks like Nick Fuentes thought he was going to do something about the Jews. He’s probably antisemitic, yes, but on the scale of racial categories he hates, they’re way below Hispanics, Africans, and the non-Jewish populations of the Middle East. Maybe they were willing to overlook this in support of the grander project. In any case, Trump starting wars, seemingly at the behest of Israel (whether or not that’s true in reality), is the cause of a major schism among his most hardcore supporters. The rift has formed the newly anti-Trump Carlson/Fuentes/Owens/Kelly/Jones wing of the far-right. These were some of the most powerful people in Trump’s corner, and they have significant influence.

 What’s upsetting the far-right isn’t really that important because they’re never going to vote left. Nick Fuentes is threatening that he and his fans are going to vote Democrat but I don’t think they will, or certainly not long term. What they believe and what they want is only important as a warning about why it’s critical they don’t get near power.

What is important is understanding what most people want and finding a more effective way to deliver that promise to people than the right does.

 I’m not a fan of James Carville—I think he should have started keeping his opinions to himself a couple of decades ago—but what he said to help Clinton get elected seems to hold up pretty well now: It’s the economy, stupid.

People in general are upset about the war but they’re more upset about how it, and what everything else Trump is doing, is affecting the price of stuff. The price of stuff has been a critical issue since Covid (well, since forever, really) and it was a key issue that helped get Trump over the line in 2024 after Democrats failed to focus enough on it.

 General anti-immigration sentiment is rising, but popular media seems to be too often under the impression that this is due to a rise in racism. In actual fact, most people just tend to believe that immigration is a net negative for the economy (even though it’s generally a net positive). The right can drive this misconception as a Trojan horse to slip genuinely racist policies into fruition.

 Unfortunately, most people seem to think that lowering the price of eggs is worth breaking a few. What should have become clear in the past months is that what most people don’t want is a paramilitary occupying force descending upon American cities, tackling anyone who looks Hispanic, and shooting people multiple times in the face and back. That’s what the MAGA people wanted, though, and successfully sneaked it in.

 The serious task that Western liberal parties need to focus on in the decline of Trumpism is how to prevent a more mature and more competent far-right alternative from delivering a more palatable message on the issues that actually matter the most to people.

 Unfortunately people like me aren’t as powerful a force in politics as career operatives like Matt Yglesias who spend a lot of time trying to decide which minorities need to be thrown under the bus and to what extent. I’m certainly not going toe to toe with Yglesias or Carville or even, fuckin’, I don’t know, Will Stancil on matters of political strategy. You can argue that my thoughts on this stuff are too simplistic and they probably are. But can we please agree that what we probably don’t want is this:

Many people are saying that California governor Gavin Newsom is going to run for president in 2028 and he’s the frontrunner to win the Democratic primaries and man do I not like this guy. He looks and sounds like Matthew McConaughey playing a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman from the 1960s.

 But sure, whatever, he’s a Democrat. The important thing here is that his campaign tactic, which many in the media are celebrating as smart, is to directly copy Trump’s posting and campaigning style. And guys, I say yikes.

 Look, people are always like “hey buddy, keep your nose out of American politics,” but sorry-not-sorry, I’m not going to be quiet about the fact that I badly want a Democrat to win the next American election. I certainly don’t want to marginalize the people the GOP are literally killing right now, but even aside from that, the tariffs thing, and now the pointless closure of the Strait of Hormuz, are fucking people all over the world, personally.

 What everyone needs the Democratic party to do is think very carefully about whether what people are going to want in 2028 is to look down the barrel of four more years of Trumpian memeslop. And maybe he’ll shut the hell up with this type of thing after he’s elected. I don’t think he will, and I don’t think most people think he will.

This goes for the entire rest of the Western world who live, like it or not, downstream of American culture. People need to understand that, for want of a better term, obnoxiousmaxxing is a fad that worked tremendously for Donald Trump but not necessarily for everyone in every local culture and it certainly has an end-of-life date. And this needs to be understood as far-right parties are still quietly ascending in the polls in several countries.

 The UK is facing down a surge in popularity of Reform UK, who utilize meme culture in their campaigns, but it’s unclear whether their popularity is due to or in spite of the world’s least charismatic racist dork, Nigel Farage, saying “big chungus” a whole bunch. In any case, Labour’s meme-using counter-strategy looks pretty damn cringe and it’s especially worrying that their strategists are telling them how smart it is.

 In Australia, the white nationalist One Nation party is the most popular that it’s ever been. They have been using Trumpian meme tactics as well, and in fact, recently produced a South Park-esque animated feature film, bragging about how politically incorrect it is and how cinemas are refusing to show it. Kind of like a Daily Mail movie but even stupider and Australian.

 But who knows whether that’s still going to be effective come the next election? The last thing we need is for the left wing opposition to come blazing in at the tail end of a fad and trying to resurrect it for their own purposes only to have it backfire.

 The left has the upper hand in politics now, but they trail behind in culture. If we’re going to recover from the winding down of Trumpism we need to be smart about it. We’re counting on sane politicians to read the room right now if we never want to see this: 

I'm writing a book about how this very meme culture came about in the first place. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. If you're unsure, the good news is I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here!

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