Joe Scum is clueless - says Trumpism has no ideology and is a personality cult

[malaise]

Wrong - it is all about the superiority of the white male and a full blown lawless kakistocracy .

[underpants]

1. Pinning them in

I just heard that. I get your point but it literally skips to a loyalty test - Are you FULLY blindly following this one person?

I like it as a strategy, it gives Repubs an out to vote against their party. It turns the binary choice around on them.

[malaise]

2. They aren't blindly following him

They love his worldview and we’d better understand that

[captain queeg]

3. Trumpism definitely had some common threads. Trump himself

Only cares about himself. He’s pushing ideas that his adoring fans applaud. If the crowd changed he would change. Not that it’ll happen, he certainly tapped in to the worst of Americans and he’s swept up in it. The crowds will continue and so will he.

[SergeStorms]

5. I don't know if Trump is capable of change.

It's always been about himself and his way or the highway. When has he ever changed his viewpoint on anything?

Christ, he even took his autographed model Sharpie to a weather map, rather than accepting the fact that a hurricane didn't go where he said it would.

The petulant child just screams more loudly, throws things and breaks them until he gets his way. He wants to rehire people just so he can exact more revenge on them.

He's not right in the head. 🤪

[Vinca]

4. I don't know. I kind of agree with the personality cult thing. Trump isn't after white people

especially. He's after dumb, gullible people - preferably with money to send him. It's a whole lot like the Jim Jones cult IMO. The fools would slurp their poison drinks down in a nanosecond if Dear Leader told them they must to prove their loyalty. After making out wills giving all monies and property of value to "the cause" of course.

[quickesst]

6. Might be the first time..

,... I've seen a someone here dismiss what is obviously the truth, and replace with a symptom of that truth. Like stripping the meat from a t-bone steak and offering someone the bone.
Someone's a little clueless, but it's not Joe Scarborough. I did notice no one on his guest panel including Democratic strategist Adrian Elrod thought he should be enlightened as suggested by the op.

[Tommy Carcetti]

7. But it is a personality cult, very clearly.

Hence the boat parades and truck parades and hats and flags and golden calf statues.

I mean, a lot of white supremacists buy into it, and there’s a sort of symbiosis of the two, but that says something more about their gullibility than anything else.

[TwilightZone]

17. Agreed.

Frankly, it's so obvious that I'm not sure how some people can't see it. It's a textbook definition of a personality cult.

[Raster]

8. Trump* and his "policies" were a direct descendant of RonnieRaygun...

... and as we know, #MorningJoe is the ULTIMATE #RayGunFanBoy

[KarenS]

9. ohhh I agree with you and

learned a new word in the process,,,, Thank you for that

[raging moderate]

10. Joe is partly right. Trumpers do worship Trump's personality.

I remember when some of these people briefly liked Bernie Sanders. It was after a speech in which Bernie Sanders gruffly bellowed some angry words about "the People. " Then they managed to figure out what he was saying, and their support dwindled. I remember living in a small town in Illinois when Trump started his campaign. Several people loved him right away. They loved his angry bluster. To them, he seemed to be speaking truth to power. And they thought he was one of them, one of the "real hardworking Americans" a very smart strong man who had started with nothing and worked very hard and amassed a fortune on his own (they thought).

But you are right, Malaise. These are the white Americans who feel that the country (and really the world) rightfully are theirs to bully, to plunder, and to swagger around in, bellowing orders and insults at all the "inferior" beings. They love John Wayne precisely because of his swagger and his bellowing and his smirk as he condemned the Liberals for "giving Africa back to the Africans." Their women feel that a "real man" yells and swaggers and blusters and attacks and makes crude remarks all the time. Both sexes feel that a man who does not do these things is "weak." I read that book by J.D. Vance. In it, he described how his family behaved on a trip to town. While his mother and father were shopping for groceries, they let him go to the nearby toy store to look around. While he was there, he behaved badly and broke a toy, so the storekeeper made him leave. He ran crying to Daddy, and Daddy stormed back into the toystore, yelling insults and pounding his fist on the counter, and then Daddy deliberately smashed two toys and stormed out. My husband (from a poor white country family) and I (from a poor white city family) agreed that our parents would have used that moment to instruct us to behave better in stores, and led us back to model good behavior, to apologize and pay for the damage. But then our mothers also were less racist than most whites, descended from Abolitionist sympathizers.

Actually, I have to say that Joe has a point about these people. Their "ideology" is their mindless worship of white skin, and their belief that we white people are the only "real people." It certainly is an extremely primitive ideology, with almost no real ideas behind it. Having majored in anthropology in college, I know that this is what extremely isolated primitive tribes often believed. I also know that the ancient Romans reported that white tribes in Europe were extremely isolated and extremely primitive when they found them. Whenever these yahoos start their ranting, I always cringe and wish I could warn them , "Shhh! You're blowing our cover!"

[malaise]

11. Fascinating post but isn't their belief system

all about the superiority of the white man?

[raging moderate]

22. Yes, as I said, it certainly is.

Last edited Sat May 14, 2022, 11:39 PM - Edit history (2)

And it probably stems from the history I mentioned, with ancestors who were extremely isolated and extremely primitive.
Plus, there is the growing probability that what we call the "white" race developed when a tribe in Eurasia took the wrong turn and headed through a grim region of of the continent that was full of smoldering volcanoes and caves belching poisonous air, right before or right after something made a lot of volcanoes blow up around the world. I read recently that the DNA detectives have figured out that the ancestors of the northern Europeans had brown eyes and skin and black hair until ten thousand years ago, and then suddenly a few had blue eyes, and then, about nine thousand years ago, suddenly many of them had blue eyes and a few had somewhat paler skin and hair, and then, about a thousand years later, there were a few blondes. I speculate that they went through some terrible ordeals in that long journey and learned the wrong lessons from the experience. My favorite finding of these detectives, however, was their discovery that the "white" population is the one with the unusual amount of neanderthaler DNA. I am afraid I was really obnoxious right back at some of my fellow Euro-americans for awhile. Oh, boy! I have spent about seventy years cringing at their quite untroubled assumptions that the other races, as one smirking young woman once told me, had the "primitive" facial features. And they brushed aside all challenges to their narcissistic dogma. I sometimes wonder why they don't all wear little mirrors strapped to their wrists so they can kiss their pretty pink faces often enough to satisfy their self-worship.

[stopdiggin]

12. I don't think there IS a coherent

ideology that applies to Trumpism. And frankly I don't think Trump had/has anything like a coherent ideology either. What I see/hear is at root an angry 'owning the libs,' anti-government pastiche - with the details made up as they go along.

[Strelnikov_]

13. If there is an ideology, it is selling off Government to the highest bidder

But that is kept in the closet. For the Reichenprole, as you note, there is no coherent ideology.

[malaise]

16. Yep that is part of it

Privatize everything

[malaise]

15. To the extent that ideology includes a number of elements

You are partly correct but it’s clear racism, this tough guy persona and misogyny are the dominant elements of their belief system.

[JCMach1]

14. Its ideology is trollery... Everything else is just

The gravy

[TwilightZone]

18. It is a personality cult.

It couldn't be more obvious. It's a textbook example. It's so clearly one that I wouldn't be surprised if it shows up in college courses on the subject before long, if it hasn't already.

[moondust]

19. When they don't even have a platform

it's kind of hard to argue that it is anything more than a cult.

Policies? Wut's dat? MAGA!!!!

[gratuitous]

20. No ideology, but every position just happens to align with white supremacists

So many coincidences.

[Happy Hoosier]

21. I think he's right, mostly....

I am specifying TRUMPISM here, and not the right-wing fever that grips them. Plenty of right-wing nuts are leveraging Trumpism to achieve their ends, but they are not true Trump zealots. I'd say that includes the Republican Congressional leadership. They aren't true Trumpists but they are happy to harness that flavor of stupid to achieve their own ends.

The true Trumpists do not have an ideology really, other than the same kind of nasty selfishness that defines Trump himself. That's why they love him. That kind of base assholishness is what they aspire to.

[ProfessorGAC]

23. Not Buying It, Malaise

It's clearly a cult of personality with no real philosophical center.
However, the big money behind the movement clearly pits american against american by stoking the sentiment you describe.
One example I'll offer is RebeKKKa Mercer. I doubt she's motivated by the superiority of the white male. I'd say she's motivated by expanding the power & control of the 0.1%, of which she's a member.

[malaise]

24. I hope you're right Prof