The True Purpose of Trumpism by Jonathan Chait

By Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/the-true-purpose-of-trumpism.html

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The final and most mysterious element — the one that created the travel ban — is Trumpism. This is the ethno-nationalistic aspect of the president’s governing ideology, which springs both from Trump’s own impulses and from ideas nurtured by a handful of his closest aides, including Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and several staffers brought over from the alt-right publication Breitbart. Trumpism combines an instinctive belief in zero-sum relations between countries with a narrow and retrograde definition of American identity. And a key aspect of Trumpism is surprise. This is partly due to circumstance: There are no off-the-shelf Trumpist agendas that the White House can immediately translate into policy. But in developing their plans, Bannon and Miller have cultivated a maximum amount of secrecy, reportedly conscripting GOP legislative aides who hid their work from their own bosses and shielding most of Trump’s own Cabinet from their plans.

The executive order halting admission of refugees and cracking down on immigration from seven Muslim-­majority countries was a narrower codification of the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” that Trump had promised during the campaign. The implementation was a fiasco. Tens of thousands of travelers en route to the U.S. found themselves blocked, detained, or even deported by Customs agents. Families were separated, children and elderly people terrified. Parents of a 4-month-old with a serious heart condition had to cancel their baby’s planned heart surgery in Oregon. On and on the tragedies mounted. Beyond the humanitarian costs, the toll on business and intellectual life was immediate. A Danish archaeologist was allegedly denied admission to the U.S. because he excavates ancient sites in Iraq. A computer-science-department staffer told one reporter his university had lost 11 Ph.D. candidates to the ban.


The confusion spread worldwide and made a statement of its own. A pillar of Trumpism is the refusal to distinguish between peaceful and violent Muslims. Trump has said “Islam hates us,” and when asked if he distinguishes between radical Islam and the religion as a whole, he brushed off the distinction: “It’s very hard to separate, because you don’t know who is who.” Bannon has repeatedly emphasized his belief that Islam as a whole poses an existential threat to Christianity. (“Islam is not a religion of peace,” Bannon has said. “Islam is a religion of submission.”) Trump has falsely implicated the entire Muslim-American community in the terrorist attacks of domestic radicals in San Bernardino and Orlando. Trump advisers have depicted the threat of radical Islam as “multidimensional and multigenerational” — that is, pervasive and intrinsic to all Muslims. From 1975 to 2015, immigrants from the seven excluded countries killed a total of zero Americans in terror attacks on U.S. soil. And yet Trumpists see terrorism as a pervasive, invisible threat that spreads within Muslim communities. Punishing innocent Muslims for the threat posed by terrorists is not a side effect of their policy but an expression of its tenets.

The collateral damage to academia and tech firms from the ban may, too, have been part of the point. There is a plausible argument that low-skilled immigrants depress wages for workers in blue-­collar fields and that their numbers should thus be reduced. But leaked memos suggest the administration is designing crackdowns on highly skilled immigrants, despite mounds of evidence showing that such immigrants increase incomes for Americans of modest means. Bannon has denounced what he calls “progressive plutocrats in Silicon Valley” and complained that “engineering schools are all full of people from South Asia and East Asia.” Describing his vision for Trumponomics after the elections, he enthused, “It’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up.” There is no economic analysis identifying shipyards and ironworks as promising sectors for public investment. His mind simply runs automatically toward nostalgia for the manly work of an older generation.

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