Trumpism
Trumpism is the political ideologies, social emotions, style of governance, political movement, and set of mechanisms for autocratization and authoritarianism that are associated with 45th U.S. president Donald Trump and his political base. Trumpists and Trumpians are terms used to refer to those exhibiting characteristics of Trumpism. Certain characteristics within public relations and Trump's political base have exhibited symptoms of a cult of personality. 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. Populist themes, sentiments, and methods Trumpism started its development predominantly during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. For many scholars, it denotes a populist political method that suggests nationalistic answers to political, economic, and social problems. These inclinations are refracted into such policy preferences as immigration restrictionism, trade protectionism, isolationism, and opposition to entitlement reform. As a political method, populism is not driven by any particular ideology. Former National Security Advisor and close Trump advisor John Bolton states this is true of Trump, disputing that Trumpism even exists in any meaningful philosophical sense, adding that "[t]he man does not have a philosophy. And people can try and draw lines between the dots of his decisions. They will fail." Writing for the Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (2019), Olivier Jutel claims, "What Donald Trump reveals is that the various iterations of right-wing American populism have less to do with a programmatic social conservatism or libertarian economics than with enjoyment." Referring to the populism of Trump, sociologist Michael Kimmel states that it "is not a theory [or] an ideology, it's