Concept
Trumpism is the political ideologies, social emotions, style of governance, political movement, and set of mechanisms for acquiring and keeping control of power associated with Donald Trump and his political base. Trumpists and Trumpian are terms used to refer to those exhibiting characteristics of Trumpism. The precise composition of Trumpism is contentious and is sufficiently complex to overwhelm any single framework of analysis; it has been referred to as an American political variant of the far right and the national-populist and neo-nationalist sentiment seen in multiple nations worldwide from the late 2010s to the early 2020s. Though not strictly limited to any one party, Trump supporters became the largest faction of the Republican Party in the United States, with the remainder often characterized as "the elite" or "the establishment" in contrast. Some Republicans became members of the Never Trump movement, with several leaving the party in protest of Trump's ascendancy. Some commentators have rejected the populist designation for Trumpism and view it instead as part of a trend towards a new form of fascism or neo-fascism, with some referring to it as explicitly fascist and others as authoritarian and illiberal. Others have more mildly identified it as a specific lite version of fascism in the United States. Some historians, including many of those using a new fascism classification, write of the hazards of direct comparisons with European fascist regimes of the 1930s, stating that while there are parallels, there are also important dissimilarities. The label Trumpism has been applied to national-conservative and national-populist movements in other democracies, and many politicians outside of the United States have been labeled as staunch allies of Trump or Trumpism, or even as their country's equivalent to Trump, by various news agencies; among them are Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Jacob Zuma, Shinzo Abe, and Yoon Suk-yeol. Trumpism started its development predominantly during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
