Trump is the worst person in the world and the most dangerous, but most of the terrible things he's doing, or trying to do, are other people's ideas. The foreign policy mostly derives from Vladimir Putin. The 2017 tax cut and the one likely to be passed in this term are warmed-over Kochism. Trump's chainsaw approach to government staffing is Elon Musk attempting to impose his techno-Nietzschean view of the superfluousness of ordinary people on the government because he got away with massive staff cuts at Twitter. The assault on government workers is the mad plan of the people who concocted Project 2025, because they want government to stop being useful to other people so they and their fellow Dominionists can take command of government, while also seeking control of society's other six "mountains": family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, and business. Trujmp, who used to brag about getting COVID vaccines developed, has completely outsourced his public health approach to Robert Kennedy Jr.
Obviously, many of these ideas overlap with Trump's own beliefs. Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon might have been the ones encouraging Trump to demonize immigrants starting in 2015, but Trump was always racist. The Project 2025ers want the federal government to be staffed exclusively by people loyal to their cause; Trump wants government to be staffed only by people loyal to him, and that amounts to the same thing.
Some people say Trump has no core beliefs and is merely "transactional." But that's not really correct. While it's true that, to take one example, Trump was somewhat welcoming to LGBTQ people in his first campaign -- he waved a rainbow flag once and said Caitlyn Jenner could use the bathroom of her choice at Trump Tower, while he now demonizes trans people almost as viciously as the Nazis demonized Jews, and last night he propsed a law criminalizing parents who permit a child to undergo gender surgery -- the core principle here is "How do I beat the hated Democrats?" In 2016, he tried to coopt the opposition party, but now he's a demonizer -- an approach he borrowed wholesale from the likes of Christopher Rufo and Libs of TikTok.
Trump is a horrible person, but Bump reminds us that part of what's horrible about Trump is that he's a conduit for the ideas of other horrible people. When we depict Trump as uniquely bad, we overlook the fact that the entire Republican Party and its ideological allies are rotten to the core.
They've been empowered because of decades of Radio Rwanda messaging from the GOP and the right-wing media, which depict Democrats as world-historically evil. Democrats compound the problem by bashing themselves at every opportunity and praising slightly heterodox Republicans like Liz Cheney to the skies. The result is that millions of Americans think the bullyboy beatdowns Trump and his fellow Republicans give to Democrats are beatdowns they deserve, or at least have coming to them.
Trump will continue to let other people tell him what to do. As Bump says, he wanted to escape justice, and we know he also wanted to use the presidency to make money, but apart from that he wanted to "get an unqualified stamp of approval from voters" -- which to him means Republican voters, because, like all Fox viewers, he regards Democrats as subhuman and not even American. Trump will continue to be the worst person in the world, but his awfulness will largely involve saying and doing things he barely understands.
