For too long a time, I thought that the president* was not non-ideological but, rather, an-ideological. I thought he never gave any thought to any subject deeper than personal avarice and personal celebrity. The guy palled around with whatever politician could enrich him the most, or with whom he could bask in the warmest form of reflected glory. (That's how all those pictures of him with the Clintons came about.) It was about the only thing that gave me any comfort when he was elected. He didn't care enough to care enough, I figured. That actually might be what saved the country from him.
...
Somebody, and my money's on Steve Bannon and/or Stephen Miller, has convinced the president* that he should adopt some ideology, if only for appearances sake. What he's adopted is a perilous mixture of the worst of America's police unions and the already existing fringe of the civilian American Right, and he's adopted it with the enthusiasm of any convert.

I came to this conclusion while following the essential Twitter feed of J.J. McNab—who, along with the indefatigable David Neiwert, has made a mission of following these peculiar political fauna—who pointed out that the president* has adopted at least through his actions the politics of the "constitutional sheriffs" movement. This is a profoundly disturbed vision of democracy whereby the local sheriff is presumed to be the highest legal authority within a jurisdiction. Therefore, they are empowered to interfere with even the lawful authority of state and federal officials. (The actions of the Bundy bunch, recently acquitted in federal court, were based in this theory.) Both Joe Arpaio and David Clarke are adherents of this movement and, with a hurricane bearing down on Houston, the president* found time to pardon Arpaio and to plug Clarke's new book-like product on the electric Twitter machine.

There is no question that the president* has a sweet tooth for authoritarian solutions; he's already given one speech that could fairly be characterized as a winking acknowledgement that police violence shouldn't be of great concern to the police who are violent. And his American Carnage inaugural address created a country of the mind that makes the lurid civic fantasies of Wayne LaPierre look like visits to Rivendell. Over this past weekend, he reversed an Obama ban on the sale of military equipment to local police departments. From CNN:

President Barack Obama issued an executive order in 2015 prohibiting the transfer of a host of equipment, including armored vehicles, grenade launchers, high-caliber weapons and camouflage uniforms following controversy over the "militarization" of the police response to unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. "We've seen how militarized gear can
sometimes give people a feeling like there's an occupying force as opposed to a force that's part of the community that's protecting them and serving them," Obama said at the time. "It can alienate and intimidate local residents and send the wrong message." President Donald Trump will sign a new executive order Monday rescinding Obama's directive and Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed the policy change during a speech at the annual conference of the Fraternal Order of Police in Nashville, Tennessee, where he received multiple standing ovations and appeared touched by the warm welcome.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a57232/what-is-trumps-ideology/