What does Donald Trump believe? An exercise in political taxonomy
The 45th president of the United States is described as everything from a populist to a patriot or a fascist: how can we identify him in terms of political ideology?
In February 2011, Donald Trump, then best known as host and co-producer of The Apprentice USA, appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Washington DC. He gave his first major political speech, ostensibly to raise the notion that he might run for president—he did not even feature in CPAC’s traditional straw poll—but also to take some patronising swipes at Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the darling of the libertarian right wing.
Ron Paul can’t get elected, I’m sorry... I like Ron Paul, I think he is a good guy but honestly he just has zero chance of getting elected.
Although that speech was not an unalloyed success, it was the moment at which Trump became a national figure in any significant political context. Prior to that, his partisan identity, insofar as he had one, was erratic and inconstant: from 1987 to 1999, he was a registered Republican; he was briefly (1999-2001) a member of then Independence Party, the New York State affiliate of the Reform Party; from 2001 to 2009 he was a Democrat; since then he was been generally a Republican though was unaffiliated in 2011.
As late as July 2015, Trump’s position was not fixed. He told MSNBC that “I identify with some things as a Democrat” and “generally speaking” he was “never a Bush fan”. Yet he seemed to see his philosophical inclinations, such as they are, separately from his pragmatic plans for the future, and explained his presidential ambitions: “I want to run as a Republican. I think I’ll get the nomination”. By November 2016, although he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million votes, he won the Electoral College 304-227 and became president as a Republican.
Trump convulses the American political community to this day. By 12 March 2024, he had won enough delegates to be the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential candidate, having been the front runner since the beginning of the race, and he will formally be selected at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July. After that, if the opinion polls are any kind of indication, he stands a very good chance of winning a second term as president. He is the most polarising figure in American politics, often deliberately so, and his erratic journey to figurehead of the GOP can make his political position hard to discern.
Commentators, supporters and detractors have applied a variety of labels to Trump. Many call him a “populist”, some have refined that to “populist authoritarian” and there are always some people whose knee-jerk reaction to someone with whom they disagree is to brand them a “fascist” or a “Nazi”, and there has been a good deal of that. In his 2016 presidential campaign, he used the slogan “Make America Great Again” (a phrase used by Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Bill Clinton in 1992), and he has also sometimes deployed the phrase “America First”. With Donald Trump, however, more than with almost any other politician, words seem to become slippery and indistinct.
Flushed with boldness, I decided I would try to establish what Trump really does stand for or believe in, in a political, philosophical and ideological sense. If we cannot work back from labels or descriptors, then perhaps we can identified some individual beliefs and construct some kind of identity from those, to help us understand what the 45th president (and perhaps, soon, the 47th president) is really about.
There are some challenges in trying to grasp what Trump really thinks or believes. Again like no other politician, he says what is at the forefront of his mind, with virtually no filter nor any significant delay between speech and thought. His words are not, therefore, carefully calculated, nor necessarily coherent or compatible. He is also profoundly ignorant, and either unaware of or untroubled by his ignorance, so what he thinks and then says will as often as not be shaped by an instinct or sense rather than any normal kind of ratiocination.
John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, has described this kind of irrational thought process. In his memoir of the White House, The Room Where It Happened, he says “His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern—or create—policy. That had its pros and cons.”
I will try to be scrupulously fair, because otherwise the whole exercise is entirely pointless. But let me say something about my own views: I think Trump is a malign, destructive and utterly unlikeable and unsympathetic figure. He seems to have no warmth or humanity about him at all, no spark of generosity or kindness, and he is unremittingly self-serving and self-assured. This is developed to such a high degree that his relationship with the truth is extremely loose: I believe, though of course I do not know him, that he is so indifferent to truth as a concept which is valuable, and so reliant on a misleading interpretation of events to support his own perspective, that we cannot talk about him telling the truth or lying in the sense that most of us would understand. In some habitual liars—I have seen this in people I have known personally, and people I have observed in public life—the manipulation of facts is so inherent in their approach to life and in their methods of argument and persuasion that they no longer see, as most of us do, a relatively straightforward binary of truth and falsehood, with a no-man’s-land of exaggeration and misrepresentation in the middle.
To illustrate what I mean, let us look briefly at Trump’s inauguration as president in January 2017. In advance of the occasion, he predicted, because he is boastful and self-aggrandising, that there would be “an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout”. Federal and local agencies responsible for the management of the crowds worked on predictions of between 700,000 and 900,000, but these were modest numbers compared to the estimated 1.8 million who had attended Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. That is believed to be the largest attendance ever, the record having previously belonged to President Lyndon Johnson, for whose inauguration in 1965 an estimated 1.2 million people travelled to the National Mall.
It is not easy to be precise about the size of crowds at inaugurations. However, using overhead imagery and passenger volume data from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, a picture was constructed, and it was one of a modest attendance. The Metro saw 570,557 passengers, lower than the average for a weekday, and experts cited by The New York Times estimated that there were around 160,000 people on the National Mall in the hour leading up to the inauguration. An expert in crowd science put a very broad range on the attendance of between 300,000 and 600,000; broad, but very clearly much smaller than Obama in 2009 and Johnson in 1965, and lower than estimates for Bill Clinton in 1993 and perhaps George W. Bush in 2005. Certainly it did not fulfil Trump’s prediction of “record-setting”, nor was it really “unbelievable”. One could perhaps call it “respectable”.
The reaction of Donald Trump and his administration was interesting and, I think, illustrative of his approach to truth. The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, aimed high and described the event as having “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe”. Reports which contradicted this were, he claimed, deliberate attempts to downplay the enthusiasm for the new president. He then presented a series of simply incorrect passenger figures for the Metro on various inauguration days. When these mistakes were pointed out, Trump’s senior counsellor, Kellyanne Conway, said, in a phrase which is now infamous, that Spicer had given “alternative facts”.
Spicer partially relented later, saying that he had been given incorrect figures for the Metro. Even so, available and reliable data showed that his other claim, that it had been the most watched on television and online, was simply not true. Trump also directed the National Parks Service to provide photographs of the crowd, but insisted that they were cropped to make the crowd seem larger than it was.
I dwell on this because it shows something fundamental about Trump and his administration which must always be borne in mind when trying to understand what is being said and what is meant. The president had no hesitation in lying, or at least making a wildly overoptimistic prediction. When this was exposed, the initial response was not to change tack, and certainly not to admit error, but in fact to maintain the lie more stridently still. Meanwhile, Trump was happy to falsify “evidence” to sustain the untruths he and his staff had told. If any mistakes had been made, they were blamed on others. But the principal approach was just to ignore indisputable reality and maintain a fiction as if the emphatic nature of it somehow had a force equivalent to truth. Essentially, believe the lie hard enough, and it becomes true.
What does Donald Trump believe? Let’s look at foreign policy first. The former president has a suspicion of international agreements which are not obviously transactional. If he cannot see immediately what the United States gains from a relationship, and how that compares with what the other party or parties are receiving, he suspects that it is unfair and an attempt to cheat America. This has been most obviously displayed in his approach to NATO, and Trump has made it clear that he thinks European countries have enjoyed a free ride on defence for too long.
He exhibited the same thinking in the Indo-Pacific too. Before he was even elected, Trump had accused China of currency manipulation, saying that an official declaration in that respect by the Treasury Department would “force China to the negotiating table and open the door to a fair—and far better—trading relationship”. Equally, he has made little secret of his indifference to China’s designs on Taiwan, not least because he believes that Taiwan has been responsible for the decline of the American semiconductor industry. “Taiwan did take all of our chip business… We used to make all of our own chips, now they're made in Taiwan… they took our business away.”
The former president’s approach to Korea is typically idiosyncratic. As a candidate, he indicated he would meet North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, and, while describing him as a “maniac”, had some strange words of praise.
How many young guys—he was like 26 or 25 when his father died—take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden... he goes in, he takes over, and he’s the boss. It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. I mean this guy doesn’t play games. And we can’t play games with him.
Trump also suggested the United States had no interest in a conflict between North Korea and South Korea, undermining a central security relationship in the region and leading Pyongyang to declare a tactical victory.
This fixation with Kim Jong Un illustrates an important part of Trump’s approach to international relations: his admiration for strong, autocratic leaders. It was obvious with Vladimir Putin, and Trump said in the first month of his presidency that he “respected” the Russian leader while waving away the accusation that he was a “killer”. Meanwhile he was full of praise for Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, whose controversial war on drugs saw thousands killed without trial.
Perhaps we can characterise Trump’s approach to foreign affairs like this: he is brutally and simplistically “America first”, insofar as his superficial assessment of the United States’ interests is his guiding priority. Any relationship with another country is measured against the apparent and immediate benefit for America, and longer term or intangible gains are secondary at best. But this can be complicated or derailed entirely by a personal rapport with a foreign leader, such as in the case of Vladimir Putin.
The final element, which extends beyond the realm of international affairs, is Trump’s absolute belief in the power of making deals. This is a carry-over from his business career: in 1987, he published his first book, The Art of the Deal. It was very successful, although Trump’s claim that it was “the No. 1 selling business book of all time” was, of course, wildly inaccurate, but it was written by journalist Tony Schwartz, who revealed in 2016 that Trump had played no part in the composition of the text. Nevertheless, it is a fundamental tenet of his approach to politics that everything, every problem, can yield to a “deal” if negotiated with sufficient skill.
In broad domestic terms, Trump can fairly be described as a “nationalist”. He devoted a great deal of energy to immigration, proposing the building of a wall along the border with Mexico and imposing a ban on foreign nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the United States, ostensibly to protect against terrorism. Similarly, he has demonstrated generally protectionist instincts when it comes to trade, using tariffs to attempt to reduce America’s trade deficit by shifting from multilateral to bilateral agreements. He has regarded domestic manufacturing jobs as a sign of economic prosperity as well as a totem of political virility, although he was not notably successful in reviving the sector.
The Trump position on law and order is similarly nuanced (or perhaps muddled). He has long supported capital punishment, and when campaigning for the presidency in 2016 asserted that “torture absolutely works”. He pledged “I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”, though he did not do so after he was elected. Trump has been very supportive of the police and dismissive of those who argue against long prison sentences. However, his hard line on drugs was a novelty of his political involvement from 2015/16, having once been in favour of legalising all drugs, and he has expressed support for the medical use of marijuana.
This very short examination shows how difficult it is to encapsulate Donald Trump’s beliefs within a conventional ideology, let alone a label. Isolationist but willing to conclude bilateral deals, concerned to show strength but willing to abandon long-standing allies, tough on crime but open-minded on medical marijuana: the blunt truth is that Trump’s views can only ever been descriptively rather that predictively. There is a pervasive nostalgia underlying his policies—his slogan was, after all, “Make America Great Again”—and his approach is sufficiently broad-brush that reality has not always changed his direction of travel such as on restoring manufacturing jobs.
Trump has an impatience with systems and institutions which is common among those who have been successful in the private sector, and carries some of the attendant mindset that government is more often the problem than the solution. Yet he does not believe in free trade and is content for the state to use its power in areas like immigration and energy security. Overall, though, this confusion or inconsistency is reflective of Trump’s innovative, perhaps unique, style of politics: the fundamental priority is the “vibe”, how voters feel in very generalised terms about the state of the world and the intentions of their leaders. Detailed policy prescriptions are secondary to this, and in some cases frankly irrelevant.
Beyond November’s presidential election, there is a potential inflection point for politics, principally in the United States but eventually, because this is how the world works, for the rest of the global community. Is Trump a one-off, a maverick detached from policy, actions and the normal conventions of public life? Or has he changed the ecosystem in which politicians operate, and those who follow him will have to adapt to the new conditions? It is a question which could change everything.
Surprised you don't mention his flip flops on abortion, which would indicate that he has no real views of his own on the issue. His self proclaimed deal making ability was not much in evidence during his presidency. For instance, he didn't really try to get a promised Infrastructure Bill passed though Democrats would probably have been up for a deal. His core political belief seems to be America First, which puts him at odds with the Republican positioning in the post war era but harks back to the isolationist tendency which was strong in both parties in the Thirties and right up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. The secret of his success is that his collection of slogans appeal greatly to a section of blue collar voters in the Upper Mid West who previously usually voted Democratic but feel they have been abandoned by both parties due to the effects of globalisation etc. Trump has so remade the Republican Party in his own image that, even if he loses this year, it is unlikely that a more conventional candidate (e.g. Nikki Haley) will win the nomination in 2028. In fact, I'm convinced that if he loses this year he will seek the nomination again in 2028 and, given his hold on the Republican grassroots, he would start as a strong favourite.
Hes the greatest. Thats what he believes. Hopefully he will be inprison or dead from obesity related disease soon.