Sursa: Casa AlbăDonald Trump has led three marches towards the summit of political power. Twice he succeeded, winning and then regaining the presidency in 2016 and 2024. Once he failed, in 2020, when he lost the chance to remain in the White House.
On each occasion, the driving force behind Trump’s march to power was the culture war.
Issues that had previously occupied a marginal place in public debate were recast as central concerns. Meanwhile, legitimate topics, controversies and public anxieties were pushed out of the realm of rational, nuanced discussion and into an increasingly radicalised political arena.
In each case, the aim of Trumpism was to polarise society. It succeeded, thanks in part to Donald Trump’s bulldozing personal style and in part to the alternative media ecosystem built by the MAGA movement and eccentric, opportunistic billionaires. The latter contributed both enormous sums of money and their own social media platforms, as in the cases of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
As part of the culture war waged by the Trump-MAGA-billionaire alliance, the American public was subjected to a barrage of Trumpist propaganda comparable to the bombing of German and Japanese cities during the Second World War: overwhelming, vengeful and indiscriminate.
The comparison holds not only in terms of the methods used, but also their results. The damage was immense, and the effects on the ground were undoubtedly real. Yet, despite some spectacular victories along the way, the anticipated surrender never came.
Republicans captured by the Trump family adopted the same strategy for the midterm elections. But this time, on November 3, the shock was enormous. Not only did the strategy fail; the cultural-war “bombardment” ended up devastating the very people who had launched it.
It is striking that some of the first to acknowledge this boomerang effect — albeit somewhat reluctantly — were senior Republican conservatives themselves. Florida Governor Ron De Santis, for example, said Republicans had made a mistake by continuing to invest heavily in outdated battles, meaning culture wars. Even Vice-President JD Vance suggested that the party might need to rethink how it approaches immigration.
The rejection of Trump’s methods for winning power is likely to gather pace among Republicans in the coming weeks.
The scale of the disaster was simply too great. As DeSantis put it: “I don’t think calling it an electoral wave would be entirely accurate. It is the political equivalent of a meteor strike.”
The culture wars waged under the banner of Trumpism were built, at their core, around a systematically toxic narrative: the promise of a return to an idealized past — a world that was perfect, spotless and generous. They also promoted an all-encompassing cult of so-called traditional values.
The problem with this vision of a brighter future is that it rests entirely on lies, grotesque distortions and profound hypocrisy.
On that last point, it is worth noting that traditional values, invariably infused with Christian principles, are cynically invoked by some of those who show the least respect for them. This includes dictators — with Vladimir Putin the most striking example — as well as people who have damaged their own families, again including Putin and Trump. It also includes those who say one thing today and do the opposite tomorrow.
Consider JD Vance, who once described Donald Trump as “America’s Hitler”, only to become his parrot in exchange for access to power. Or Marco Rubio, who called his current boss a “con artist” before being welcomed into the Trump administration’s menagerie of loyalists.
The November 3 US elections demonstrated that American society does not forgive those who genuinely make it feel deceived. They showed that the resilience of America’s democratic institutions is remarkably strong. And they proved that even in a country where money is practically worshiped, money cannot buy absolutely everything, everyone or at any time.
But it is equally likely that, after this bruising electoral experience, opportunists will simply reposition themselves as though nothing had happened — just as they have done before.
This will apply to the many Republican politicians who, in pursuit of power and influence, betrayed the public by adopting Donald Trump’s playbook. It will also apply to the numerous billionaires who did much the same, driven by the desire to make even more billions.
Almost overnight, these dyed-in-the-wool opportunists will, as we shall see, lose much of their interest in the savage culture wars with which they had intoxicated tens of millions of Americans.
If recovering their losses requires them to become standard-bearers for progressivism, then progressives they will become. Some of them, after all, had previously been progressives — or something close to it — before reinventing themselves as champions of extreme conservatism.
This is hardly surprising. These people have never had a backbone. What they have always had are interests — and an insatiable thirst for power.
They are remarkably adept at learning lessons from both victories and disasters, and at changing sides in the blink of an eye, moving effortlessly from one political and ideological extreme to the other.
Perhaps the rude awakening delivered by the November 3 US elections will finally offer ordinary people — not just in America, but elsewhere — an opportunity to understand a simple truth: becoming a zealot, falling for political tricks and swallowing moralizing narratives written and delivered by people with no morals of their own will always come back to haunt you.
That, after all, is what the culture wars unleashed by Trumpism were really about. The sections of the public seduced by them believed in those arguments more strongly than their authors ever did. More precisely, ordinary people believed in the causes being promoted, while the leading propagators believed only in the marketing.
The same point applies to Romania’s own George Simion. It is no coincidence that he has embraced Trumpism so enthusiastically and operates in the same profoundly deceptive spirit.
It is painful to watch ordinary people refuse to abandon their old trenches, while the Trumpists who, until yesterday, sold them sentimental stories about traditional values and the morality of Christ rapidly shed those identities after their heavy losses on November 3. They will simply put on a new political outfit, perhaps one radically different from the old one, because the only thing that truly matters to them is their endless pursuit of victory.
And what is true of the state of Trumpism in America is equally true of the state of “sovereigntism” in Romania.
The lessons that need to be learned are the same, because both the methods used to seduce voters and the hidden objectives of those doing the seducing were almost identical.