Trump is Not a Populist

The American Era of Post-Populism

Earlier this month, I wrote a piece for Newsweek, arguing that Trump’s new political style is irreducible to the established notion of populism. The piece was edited, and unfortunately certain original arguments were lost, including a discussion of the perplexing emergence of MAGA-Communism. In the spirit of stubbornness, I have decided to share the original version of the article on here, for you all to get a better impression of my intended meaning. There is more to say, since the piece was written, on Gaza and Ukraine, but that will be saved for another post.

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‘Populist reason’, as the French theorist Ernesto Laclau called it, functions insofar as it warps political discourse. Not only does it draw excessively oversimplified distinctions in the body politic, but it additionally offers false solutions: politics is identified with “left” and “right”, or today with “woke” or “rational/free/democratic”. And yet something about the spectacle of Trump’s election victory and the New Republican administration remains irreducible to the established notion of populism. To understand Trump’s return, his classification as a populist must be rethought.

A unique enigma of the Trump campaign was the controversial ‘MAGA Communism’ movement: American communists sympathised with the confrontational anti-establishment discourse that Trump deployed, seeing in it an ally against the hegemonic global politics of the Democrats. As irrational as this phenomenon is, it is nonetheless impossible to fathom other so-called populist movements, with similar left vs right rhetoric, appearing under the same conjunction: ‘Nazi Communism’ – even ‘Milei, Bolsonaro, or Meloni Communism’ (all prominent right-wing populist figures) – is unimaginable. As fragmented as it was, the defining trait in the development of communism was to oppose and reject the right-wing populist trends which coloured 20^th century Europe, and yet a possibility emerged for its exclusive sympathy with MAGA. The logic of Trump’s politics cannot therefore simply be categorised alongside other populist figures, who would never be assimilable the label of communism. Something about the Trump-MAGA movement remains irreducible to populist reason, and to understand this it is worthwhile to first define what is meant by populism.

The structural logic of populism that Laclau (one of the most recognised theorists of populism) presents is a logic of false solutions: a plurality of different social demands are directed towards a singular cause. In post-WWI Germany, for example, the general destabilisation of economic and political structures found an ‘empty signifier’ as Laclau calls it (a purely virtual solution): the Jews. Populism ignores very real and differentiated social problems and cuts across them with a fictive target, a target that simultaneously satisfies all, and none, of these problems. It is true that Trump has in the past deployed similar methods, including a sweeping condemnation of Mexicans for unrest in the US body politic. Something has nevertheless shifted between the Trump of 2016 and 2024/25. ‘America First’ no longer simply implies US-nationalism and an exclusionist policy towards global markets and geopolitics. Today it has an imperial tone: America First implies American domination, a certain subjugation of the rest of the world to Trump and his tech-billionaire team. Trump’s politics function today not by providing populist solutions to social demands, but by reconstructing these demands according to pre-existing solutions. It is on the perplexing question of Greenland and the abstract notion of ‘America First’ that we can better understand the inversion of populism that Trump represents.

With his threat to take over Greenland from Denmark by ‘military force’, Trump’s former exclusionism/protectionism appears to be slowly replaced with an imperialist tone. Yet this directly contradicts the demands of the body politic he initially captured in 2016. The appeal to domestic policy, to placing American jobs first and to ending a long-standing foreign interference which characterised the financial interests of Democratic policy over the last decades, was in 2016 intended as Trump’s solution to a set of existing social demands by the American voter body: demands to have their own wellbeing protected and to shift government responsibility towards domestic rather than foreign interests. Today, on the other hand, Trump has reconstructed the very demands that he claims to be satisfying. There is nothing exclusionist about annexing Greenland – Trump contradicts his 2016 populist logic, and yet appears all the more popular in consequence. He is supported not for his exclusionist policies, but by his chauvinistic imperialism (Greenland and the Panama Canal being the principal symptoms). His voter base has become concerned with topics that would not have featured for the 2016 Trump-voter – all because Trump’s privately-oriented solutions have the effect of creating their own public demand.

Elon Musk’s tweet as the Greenland spectacle was making headlines only strengthened this paradox: dismissing any concerns for Greenland’s national identity, Musk stated that Greenlanders are “most welcome” to become American. This ‘becoming American’ is not merely an invitation from Greenland citizens to migrate to America, but to universally welcome a US takeover of their country. This freedom to become American is nothing but the freedom of forced choice. Not only can Greenland be annexed, but the public should want this, and welcome this US hostility.

This creation of demands for which Trump subsequently offers a ‘solution’ is a defining element of the emergence of the New Republicans. Greenland, Canada (which Trump stated does not, unlike Greenland, require a military takeover, but only a takeover by ‘economic force’), the teaching of LGBT rights in school, tariffs, Milei-like free capitalist markets… All of these obsessive reference points for the upcoming Republican administration have set new coordinates for the demands and worries of the US citizen. ‘Should the US strengthen its trading position with tariff threats?’, ‘Will my child be turned homosexual if they are not homeschooled?’, ‘Are NATO or Denmark hindering US economic growth?’ – these are everyday categories imposed from the top down. Populist solutions are not simply placed atop a set of social demands, but in an even more denigrating reversal, Trump seems to be instructing the US populace of what they themselves should want.

Trump’s climate change denial is another constituent of this logic: it is widely agreed that the climate crisis will lead to economic catastrophe for populations around the world, including the US. Yet the climate question is at odds with private financial interests and international fossil fuel corporations which drive Trump’s politics. The great task of the New Republicans was therefore to format public demands into a set of coordinates on which ecology does not figure, or for which it cannot be an apparent source of solutions. He described the Paris agreement as a ‘bad deal’ (when is facing up to artificial climate destruction ever meant to constitute a good deal?), and received extensive support for leaving the Paris agreement on his first day in office. Once again, Trump did not merely appeal to ecological concerns by a false (populist) solution, but rather ensured that these concerns themselves would be exchanged for something beneficial to his own interests.

Those who still try to account for Trump’s return by an appeal to the category of populism are therefore missing a crucial point. A new logic is deployed which we cannot merely label as populist: a logic which does not furnish false solutions from an irreconcilable plurality of demands, but rather reconstructs demands in accordance with privately serving solutions without real social origins. Solutions, in other words, with no original demand – this is what the New Republicans offer. In 2016, Trump could indeed be categorised as a populist, but this is no longer the case. Understanding Trump’s politics means understanding that they are qualitatively different from, and irreducible to, the widely used notion of populism.

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