What Is Trumperism?
Today's Trumperism Alert Level Is Orange
The birth of Trumperism -- From the pen of Pat Oliphant (2011)
Mark Kaufman, American Affairs Desk
(2015)
Why Should You Care?
If you haven't been paying too close attention to the news cycles, you might have missed the rise of Trumperism. You might think Trumpers are temporary, or that Trump's not so bad really, at least compared to that woman who kills - and lies - and bigots around - or whatever Trump, and your exterminator guy, are saying this week. You might live in the alternate reality that listens to friends who listen to Fox News - YOU don't really think that much about politics at all - and no politician has ever done anything for you, so why should you start to listen now.
Red, White & Blue Republican
Maybe you've been a Republican your whole life, and you just live alt-right adjacent. It's really too annoying to listen to the reports on the campaign directly, and the media is just a bunch of noise, right?
Really, those trying to ignore reports of what Donald J. Trump says daily can't be blamed. They're just waiting for all of this to blow over. They think, "This is all short-lived, and who cares after November anyway, right?" But we're here to tell you that the followers of Trump are just getting started. Trumpers, and their participation in the body politic, are now a thing. Donald says he's started a movement, and just like with the rise of the Tea Party in '08, we don't think it'll all be over come November.
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Trumpers
There is so very much to cover on the subject, we made this whole website just to house the info but in this article we'll just touch on a few elements. Let's start with Trumpers. Trumpers /trəmpərz/ refers to people who generally self-identify as 'supporters of Trump.' They like his candidacy for POTUS and enjoy imitating his tactics when interacting with others. The most common comment you'll hear when interviewing Trump supporters at a Trump Rally, those you can pin down, the ones not beating up protesters, is that they hate "Political Correctness." For them, correct is wrong, and hate is GREAT.
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Trumpers Get It
Cartoonists worldwide are skewering the candidate. They just don't understand him. Reporters and pundits, political experts and historians, college professors and security officials alike complain that the candidate has never held a public office job in his life. They just don't get it. That's all. But the Trumpers do. They get every thing he says. Even when the media doesn't. Especially when the media doesn't. Trump's policies, almost all down the line, are looney tunes and special interest based. Hell, Trump himself is a special interest. And by special we mean short bus special. His tax plan favors the rich, and his proposed excise tax of 35% on anything made out of the country is only going to hurt the middle class and the poor that, unlike Trump, have to count their blessings and monthly budgets carefully. We find almost nothing in his stated economic goals to be helpful, useful, or pioneering in any way.
Global Warming Is a Hoax
Trump believes that Global Warming is hoax cooked up by China to aide in their plan for world domination. We know that is hard to believe, but he's stated it publicly and repeatedly. His comments on wind turbines being "ugly" and "making people depressed from all the spinning" are absolutely insane, yet he's testified to that. That's right. Not that long ago he did it in front of Scottish Parliament for over two hours right alongside a bunch of Trumpers he got to show up and agree with him. In the real world, Scotland has been able to run their entire country on their wind turbine grid. In fact, on August 11, 2016, the country produced 106% of what they needed from solar for that day. Donald's knowledge on the subject seems to be stuck in the pre-internet 80s.
Let the Sun Shine In
Trump on the stump has announced the death of any viable clean-energy plan to support solar under his Administration as well. His comments on solar panels taking 30 years to pay for themselves is an exaggeration times 3. Most owners recoup their investment in 6 years, and even that number is going down quickly.
To Russia with Love
Donald J. Trump brings up Vladimir Putin consistently in conversations while running for office. His unexplainable affection for the most powerful and aggressive anti-American country in the world can only be explained by the more unexplainable $650 million-dollar debt he himself owes the Russians. And some people say the Russians don't like it when their debtors don't pay up.
At least 100 tunnels have been discovered networking Mexico to U.S. since 2001
(NY Times, 2015)
After All, It's Just Another Wall
Trump's views on building a wall on the U.S. southern border with Mexico also make no sense. Anyone with short term plans to destroy anything in the U.S. can fly in as a tourist. They certainly don't need to go through years of paperwork and meetings trying to emigrate here or become a citizen. (continued)
Families coming across to escape poverty & rampant gang violence,
usually don't have access to the illegal tunnel system. (From The Kitchen, 2016)
THERE ARE LOTS
OF
TUNNELS
I guess what we're trying to say is there are really a lot of existing tunnels between Mexico and the U.S. Would a wall really help stop criminals and rapists?
Step Right Up
Donald is fixated on what's south of the border, and has promised the building of one wall will solve everyone's problems. That seems odd though, because anyone anywhere can take a boat right up to any part of our 88,633 miles of coastline. Our border with Canada is 5,525 miles long so anyone at all can come through there. The border the U.S. shares with Mexico, the one he's so excited to build a wall on, is only 1,989 miles long.
Although we don't know exactly how many tunnels El Chapo has dug to get around Mexico, we do know that - since 2001 - US law enforcement has discovered more than 100 tunnels along the border with Mexico. Not sure how many tunnels you need, or if these tunnels have any sort of traffic jams, but it seems to us a wall is a rather foolish endeavor if people can literally just tunnel under it. Nonetheless, Trumpers love the one about the wall and how it will be tremendous, glorious, the most sophisticated wall money can buy, and how Mexico, of course, is going to pay for it. God help Mexico when they get to the negotiating table with Trump. (update: since the writing of this article, Trump did go to the negotiating table with the President of Mexico. He choked, and now Donald's in a twitter war with the guy.)
Hola
For the record, when Donald talks about "The Hispanics," he is referring to over 55 million people who live in the United States and - with one brilliant erection idea - Trump pissed off all of them. "What are you gonna build?" Trump asks, puts his hand to his ear and waits for the response from the audience. "A Wall! A Wall! A Wall!" Hispanics are our nation's largest ethnic minority - constituting around 17% of the population - and most people are saying that his hurtful comments have already terrorized millions and millions of citizens. #TacoTrucksOnEveryCorner
As-salamu 'Alaykum
Muslims, who currently make up approximately 0.9% of the U.S. adult population have been the object of ridicule, attacks, and actual murder in the United States and reports of hate crimes across the board have escalated since Trump began his reign of Trumperism. There are generally speaking around 30 - 40 accounts of hate crime incidents reported nationwide in a normal year which is up from American standards of 20 – 30 hate crimes per year before 9/11. According to Slate Magazine, there’s been a bit of a spike in those numbers starting when Trump was given the power of the bully pulpit. Southern Poverty Law Center confirms a total of 174 reported "hate" incidents in 2015, including 12 murders. When police caught up with the perpetrators - in most cases – these nutcases said they did what they did in honor of Donald Trump. #AllWordsMatter
We know a percentage number like .9 doesn't sound like much. But that percentage represents 1.8 million Muslim adults currently living in the United States. If children are included, you can count 2.75 million Muslims amongst your friends and neighbors. That's about a million children who hear every day they should be banned, deported, rounded up, or tested on their religion since Trump started terrorizing them in the most un-American way possible. Of those almost 3 million residents, the majority (63%) are also immigrants.
The Trump Brand
Trump's spent his life building a brand synonymous with what he refers to as "class." What Trump is pedaling nowadays is fear. But isn't it really the same kind of fear Republican dogma has always approved of? Tracking Donald J. Trump's campaign donations to politicians through the decades, it's obvious that Donald has never been a true conservative. And he hasn't really started being a Republican now. VOX did a great piece on the rise of Trumperism, and some of its implications, which they refer to as Paleoconservatism.
Trump is running for President. The man harnessed the Tea Party, wrangled Breitbart and Ailes to his side, and started a movement: Trumperism.
Why not take a look in his closet for clues of shades to come.
(Image: Bryan Dumas, 2012)
I Know You Are, But What Am I?
Trump, and his dog-whistling surrogates, are early adopters of the Rove/Atwater school of hard knocks. The rules there are simple.
Step One: Create a list of your opponent's strengths. Then - one by one - you attack the concept that any of those strengths are strengths at all.
Step Two: Make a list of your own candidate's failings. Then one by one you accuse your candidate's opponent of having those exact weaknesses. As a result, you will hear Trump's surrogates - in between fending off questions from the media about the candidate's regular outbursts - accusing Hillary of being feeble-minded, medically questionable, and looney tunes. Because Trump and his family have a history of refusing to rent to black tenants, when surrogates are asked to explain what the candidate meant when he said, “I don’t know anything about any David Duke, or anything about White Supremacy or White Supremacists,” his staff tweets out that Hillary is a bigot and a racist. It's called projection. It's a real thing. It's the art of attributing one's own ideas, feelings, or attitudes to other people or to objects; especially the externalization of blame, guilt, or responsibility as a defense against anxiety. He's basically constantly saying, "You know there are no droids here."
Just Put A Little Trump On It
Now Trumperism takes that all up a notch, with the following:
Step Three: Do a lot of name calling. Give everyone a nickname. Labeling people ‘tiny, crooked, slobs, weak, a choker, a fool, a loser, clueless, dumb as a rock, grubby, little, unattractive, kooky, a dope, a lightweight, ugly, a pig, a clown, a disaster, and really pathetic.’
Step Four: Hate on everything everyone else does. Claim absolutely everything in your path is ‘terrible, atrocious, garbage, a disaster, horrible, overrated, deceptive, failed, an embarrassment, sad, in a shambles folks, and just plain over.’
Step Five: Collect conspiracy theories and tweets from Neo-Nazi White Supremacists and add all of their rhetoric into your stump speeches.
Step Six: Defend all of that – and have your surrogates defend all of that - by claiming that 'political correctness' is the true enemy of the state.
Step Seven: Hang your surrogates out to dry days later by claiming that everything you just said was not what you meant.
Step Eight: Vilify the media for “twisting” your words.
Step Nine: Embrace the media completely. Hire Roger Ailes - the disgraced former head of FOX News - to aide in your campaign by prepping you for the debates for President of the United States and then bring on Alt-right fringe hero Steve Bannon - of Breitbart fame - to be the CEO of your presidential run. Literally allow the lunatics to run the asylum.
Step Ten: When you sabotage your campaign so badly that your polling numbers plummet, claim the elections are rigged. #Trumperism
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Vacationing in The Fever Swamp
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