Despite the recurring populist appeal of his persistently chauvinistic and uncompromising image, the Trump of 2016 is becoming unrecognisable compared to the Trump of 2024. The Middle American body politic that was awakened and drawn to Trump in 2016 appeared to see in him a kernel of reason: a down-to-earth rejection of the Democratic bureaucracy of Washington that had progressively alienated its domestic population. For many voters, Trump presented himself as libertarian uninterested in the political tango of late-stage globalisation, and concerned only with freedom within the US.
Rather than rejecting Trump as a fascist, many left-wing thinkers were forced to acknowledge the appeal of Trump to the working masses, and to understand the extensive appeal of his anti-bureaucratic narrative. Any serious research into his campaign funding and lobbyists would, of course, quickly reveal that Trump in reality stood for a corporate globalism that would cause even more harm to the very workers he was appealing to. Yet on the surface, Trump seemed to 'make sense'. On the surface, Trump's narrative, the same narrative that swept up so many of the workers' votes, veiled his private corporate interests and instead appealed to a national sense of free information exchange and the prioritisation of American freedom and security.
This veil of libertarian openness is now nowhere to be found. Trump no longer masks his desire for political power at any cost - he no longer laces his authoritarian tendencies in vague appeals to liberty and justice. The Trump-Raffensperger phone call - in which Trump asked Georgia's Secretary of State to change the number of Republican votes, in order to win a majority over Joe Biden - was one of several instances surrounding the 2020 election where Trump happily expressed his abandonment of any just process around the electoral college, and seemed to suggest his intention to win at any cost. On several occasions, the Trump campaign attempted to interfere not only with vote counting by pressuring state and local officials but with the standard processes of the US Electoral College.
During this time, Trump could nevertheless appeal to the absurd suggestion that 'everything is rigged', and that he was, by inference, the only true figure of free speech in US politics. With his 2024 campaign, however, Trump seems to no longer even be concerned with the question of free speech or even freedom. The libertarian, anti-authoritarian ideals that he recycled in 2016 have no utility for his now fully articulated wish for political dominance. In 2024, Trump has proudly stated that Russia would be justified in doing 'whatever they want' to those NATO countries that do not pay enough (the defence of Western rights is therefore, for Trump, nothing more than an economic question, and authoritarian dictators have a free pass if Trump does not get his way). He has openly expressed his intention to eliminate, lock up, or get rid of his political opponents, and has reached new heights of controversy for mixing with and even having dinner with and complimenting far-right figures such as Nick Fuentes. Despite his obscenity even 8 years ago, it is impossible to consider the Trump of 2016 openly avowing the authoritarian and crypto-fascist practices that we see with the 2024 Trump.
Yet despite the abandonment of any libertarian anti-bureaucratic veil, and an open adoption of politically oppressive methods, support for Trump does not appear to falter. It is undoubtedly necessary to comment on and discuss the growing crypto-fascist colour of Trump's narrative, yet it is clear that this is in itself not enough to condition a change in voter behaviour.
Fascism and authoritarianism is precisely what the voters of 2016 were afraid of in choosing Trump, yet the marked shift in his political ideology has not lost him any of this previous support. This appears as a clear contradiction in the voting body: Trump expresses a shift towards the oppressive discourse that his voters were so afraid of, yet the fact of this shift seems to have no effect, and is met only with indifference and support. To understand this, it could be of value to turn towards Freud, who recognised on the political and on the personal front, the inefficacy of pure facts that would contradict an ideological position. Freud recognised that a fact uttered by itself had no weight. It was not repressed (i.e. not accepted and made unconscious) but 'disavowed'. In other words, a fact could be disarmed by being accepted at an indifferent face value.
When a cold truth is uttered, Freud found that the way it could be disavowed and be made to have no effect, was in fact to be accepted. This is perpetually clear where politics is concerned: the 'facts' of impending ecological and humanitarian catastrophes are often readily acknowledged as facts, but rarely are they treated with the weight that they imply. They fall under the formula that psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni calls 'I know very well, but nevertheless...' I know very well that this is the case, but nevertheless there are other things to be concerned by.
With Trump, the fact that his genuine authoritarian policies are revealed is easily disavowed. It is precisely by accepting the negative, anti-democratic actions that Trump is responsible for, that support for him is simultaneously possible (e.g. 'at least he tells the truth', 'he's better than those Democrat liars' etc.). For Freud, the way to avoid the paradox of disavowal was through engaging with the 'transference', in other words to engage with the ideological context that distorts and disarms facts. With Trump, it seems clear that pointing out his contradictions is not enough, but that the battle against Trump must be fought in his own ideological register. It is not enough to simply disprove Trump, but to prove that there are even better, more 'American' (in the sense of free and democratic) alternatives, and that where Trump fights with ad hominems and chauvinism, he can be taken down by them too.
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