In defence of Trumpism

I wasn’t always a fan of Donald Trump — mainly because served as a living embodiment of all the trashiest aspects of American low-culture. When he first came down that golden escalator in 2015, it was like watching an episode of The Jerry Springer Show, minus the joyous hit of guilty pleasure. With time, however, Trump has earned my respect — not because he is admirable, but because he’s effective and deserves to be remembered as one of the most consequential politicians of the post-1945 era.

Trump has clearly not governed especially well or achieved anything near what he promised. But he has successfully driven a stake through the heart of the kumbaya politics of the Clinton-Obama-Kamala era, which had become as spiritually exhausted as Soviet communism in the 1980s. Trump has not only presented a viable alternative to that, he’s cancelled our holiday from history and reminded us that politics is a blood sport rather than a seminar in moral philosophy. By calling horseshit on the liberal vanities of the so-called “rules-based international order”, he reminded all the non-powers of the West that brutal realism is the historical norm.

Yes, he is crude, impulsive, undisciplined, and frequently self-sabotaging; but nobody is perfect — least of all politicians. Besides, all of these flaws have served a political purpose, however — Trump is like an Arctic icebreaker. He tore through a barren political landscape where change apparently looked like Mitt Romney. For decades, Western politics had been managed rather than contested. Across the Western world, this took the form of alternating managerial regimes that differed on tax rates and spending priorities but agreed on mass immigration, deindustrialisation, financialisation, and the steady erosion of national sovereignty. International treaties locked this model into a system of elections without change, democracy without demos, and politics without accountability.

Trump has laid siege to this settlement. In less than ten years, he transformed what could be said and what could be attempted in politics. Borders suddenly meant something again. Trade was re-politicised. National interest — a phrase treated as a vulgarity by the political establishment — returned to the centre of debate. Europeans and their descendents in the former colonies could once again proudly refuse to apologise for inventing the modern world.

Jordan Bardella can now openly advocate for a system of “national preference” that prioritises citizens for public jobs and welfare rather than newly-arrived migrants who have never even paid into the system. This is a vital first step towards sanity, where natives might one day be prioritised over illegal aliens — as should be our birthright. The EU has begun to unpick the absurdities of established refugee policy. Even a concept as radical as remigration is subject to serious discussion among rightwing parties.

I never thought I’d live to see the Overton window shift so far in my direction. The speed with which this has happened almost gives me whiplash — and none of this would have been possible without Trump.

Just a few short years ago, the liberal order appeared immovable. The EU was expanding, NATO was moralised as a humanitarian project, and dissent was pathologised as extremism. Trump’s ascent made it clear that this order was neither inevitable nor stable. It endured only because it was unchallenged by a personality strong enough to not give a fuck about the blowback. Trump exposed the progressive establishment as paper tigers: if you simply refused to apologise and accept cancellation, they couldn’t cancel you. Pearl-clutching and finger-wagging are completely powerless against total unapologetic shamelessness.

One of Trump’s most important achievements was exposing international law for what it often is: a legitimising language for power rather than a constraint upon it. European elites speak of “norms” with the blinkered devotion of a centrist Taliban, yet abandon them whenever enforcement becomes inconvenient. Trump’s refusal to pretend otherwise scandalised a moralising political establishment that depended on that fiction so they could falsely claim to be on “The Right Side of History.” This is unadulterated realism in its purest form. The postwar order survived by insisting that power had been domesticated. Trump reminded everyone that it had not.

None of this absolves Trump of responsibility for excesses. He went too far — visibly and damagingly — in Minnesota. Political movements that treat disorder as collateral damage inevitably discredit themselves. But European populists need to remain calm. They cannot risk alienating Trump or the MAGA GOP by denouncing their actions. This will only embolden the progressive fringe. Instead of panicking about temporary shifts in polling numbers, they need to keep cool and think strategically.

Yes, the populist right needs to project a more statesmanly image. Our continent remains institutionally captured by a liberal consensus that spans the European Commission, Whitehall, the judiciary, the media, the NGO lobby, and much of the corporate sector. Opinion polls have consistently shown that Trump is deeply unpopular among European voters, so they cannot afford to offer him their blind loyalty. 

But at the same time, there is a balance to be struck and the right needs to respond pragmatically rather than foolishly burning bridges by throwing Trumpism out with the Trump water. Instead, they need to present a more moderate side to populism by stating that they politely disagree with Trump’s methods, even though they support his principles. This when they should show some backbone and confidently remind frightened voters that Europe is not America, with sky-high firearm ownership and lax gun laws. Unlike the US, we don’t live in trigger happy societies where law enforcement is understandably jumpy about getting shot in the neck by an armed populace. Just because certain things happen over there, it doesn’t mean that they will repeat themselves over here.

Let’s be real for a second: America is a heavily armed nation with deep social fragmentation that has consistently produced violence regardless of which administration occupies the White House. Europopulists should be vocal about this and stress that they will do things differently because they are not Trump, nor do they aspire to be because American methods cannot simply be copied and pasted into a European context. The message should be: Trump is doing what he thinks is right for his country and we respect that, but we will do what’s right for ours by diverging when we need to.

This crisis can be turned into an opportunity if Europopulists play their cards right. Trump’s European allies can use his unvarnished, all-American excess to contrast themselves as unthreatening and sophisticated by comparison. Trumpism was never the end-point for this new strain of rightwing politics — far from it. MAGA is simply the big bang moment for a new era where methods still need to be perfected and refined.

Trump is also now effectively a lame duck. He cannot run again. That makes him more useful, not less. Trumpism can now be studied without illusion as a stress test for populism itself. It reveals how far pressure can be applied before legitimacy erodes, where confrontation becomes counter-productive, and how institutional resistance hardens when threatened too directly. Trumpism is raw material, like Venezuelan crude. It must be processed before it can be poured into your Volvo.

By shattering political taboos he has set new norms that cannot be so easily undone

The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev once described democracy as the management of tolerable dissatisfaction. This sort of cynicism is sorely missing in the West. In legacy democracies, the right is as prone to wallowing in moralistic, West Wing-esque bullshit as the left is. There are only a handful of politicians in all of history that deserve to be lionised. Most of them are slimy and false people that should be treated with the same reverence that’s afforded to real estate agents. This childish talk about values, the common good, and “the right side of history” needs to end. Trump deserves appreciation because his boorishness is an antidote to pretense.

Materially, it’s difficult to say whether Trumpism has achieved anything beyond the realm of rhetoric and communication. But by shattering political taboos he has set new norms that cannot be so easily undone. This has created new possibilities that didn’t exist before. It is now up to Trump’s ideological successors to build upon the foundations laid by this most imperfect of prototypes and guide our civilisation towards a better future.