ten years of him
[This is an excerpt of a column by the Marquette University political science professor Julia Azari in the Substack GoodPolitics/BadPolitics.]
It’s been ten years since Trump came down the golden escalator and announced his 2016 bid for president. It would take me three months to bring myself to blog about Trump in any concentrated way—the main political science view was that the party would eventually decide, or the voters would move on, and Trump would go the way of Herman Cain, Ross Perot (who did have some staying power, I guess) or other outsider candidates who seemed fascinating initially but held little lasting appeal. I assured friends who were alarmed by Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants that his candidacy wouldn’t get very far.
And a decade later, here we are. Not only is Trump serving his second term as president, he’s been the focal point of our politics for most of that decade. This is pretty astounding for a politician who has never been very popular or represented a lot of popular issue positions.
In the course of the 2016 election, Trump emerged as a distinct figure, set against the GOP establishment. But by now, the MAGA movement (or ideas I’ll refer to as “Trumpism”) reaches beyond a single individual, and largely animates the Republican Party.
There are specific people who have built their careers in this movement, from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to vice president and former Trump critic JD Vance. Its core tenets are opposition to immigrants and immigration, populist appeals against those deemed elite and the undermining of pluralism and the rule of law. The political strength of the movement without Trump is also unclear—it didn’t fare terribly well in the 2022 elections, and potential successors to Trump in 2024 were unable to wrangle much support away from him.
And as we look back at the ten years since he came on the political scene, it makes sense to think about what’s been driven by Trump the individual and what’s the MAGA/Trumpist movement, and what it might look like when Trump exits the political stage one day.
While the political rise of a reality TV star with a murky political past may have been unique in American politics, the ideas of the Trump movement have been linked to a number of past movements. Most recently, there’s the Tea Party, which combined anti-establishment tropes with cultural conservatism and distrust of “others.”
That the Tea Party began in opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency is highly relevant: it produced movement rhetoric that connected the presidency to struggles over race and power, arguing (often unsubtly) that the nation’s first Black president represented the interests of minorities over those of white Americans.