The Last Gasps of a Dying Movement
With Trumpism on the decline, some of his remaining supporters have become increasingly violent and unhinged, as seen in Springfield bomb threats, vandalism, and property destruction.
(Homer Simpson wearing cobbled-together riot gear, holding a shotgun and drinking a beer.)
Trump wasn’t the first to suggest Haitian migrants were eating local animals. That lie was spread by a Neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe, an organization which formed in 2023 to protest LGBTQ+ events. This year, they took issue with people from Haiti moving to America, and living in their communities.
Last month, a resident of Springfield named Anthony Harris claimed the Haitians were eating wild ducks. Blood Tribe was largely given sanction by local Republican politician Glenda Bailey, who accused the migrants of having diseases, being involved in gangs, and carrying out voodoo rituals.
Donald Trump, in his most recent debate with Kamala Harris, uncritically repeated Blood Tribe’s lies by saying migrants in Springfield were eating cats and dogs, and stealing pets for food. Neither Springfield police nor city officials have found any evidence of the claims being true.
One migrant living in Springfield has had car windows broken, and has had acid thrown on it. Bomb threats have since been made against hospitals, schools, and government buildings, leading to evacuations. While violent sentiment was present before Trump’s debate, he served to amplify it and give it sanction by painting a target on Springfield, Ohio for every one of his supporters to see.
Some Trump supporters, who have largely spent the last eight years in benighted ignorance of who their favorite person really is, have nothing left except seething hatred for anyone who isn’t them. They have nothing better to do except lash out with anger and frustration against a group they believe might be vulnerable.
As is often the case in far-right spaces, the most violent members uncritically believe any lie thrown their way so long as it allows them an outlet for their frustration over their jobs getting harder, rent getting more expensive, and their lives getting worse over time. They feel the mainstream news is against them, federal law enforcement is against them, systems of education are against them, Democratic governments are against them, historians are against them, young people are against them, and so on.
Their tendency for violence and willingness to readily accept fringe conspiracy theories easily proven false have left them with no community to turn to, no one to join in their cause. High-information Republican voters and prior Republican supporters have increasingly come out to support Kamala Harris, rejecting at least some of what Trump stands for.
The racist, bigoted, fascist, violent movement to get Trump into office a second time has thus experienced a brain drain. Some of the movement’s most ardent supporters turned out to be unregistered foreign agents, taking money from Russia to post pro-Trump content. Other Trump influencers, such as Tucker Carlson, have been found to not believe what they are saying every time they shill for a man who doesn’t pay his bills when he doesn’t feel like it.
Carlson and those like him, such as Sean Hannity, his most ardent and consistent supporter, are college-educated individuals who know better. For them, shilling for Trump began as a profitable venture. Now with their credibility destroyed, they’ve got nothing else to do except continue down the same path.
There is no genuine positivity in the movement, no higher purpose at work. Rather than operating with the intent of creating something positive, they are continually trying to create through the negation of things and people they don’t like- a practice which will not work, no matter how hard they try.
For Trump, with so many investigations, indictments, prosecutions, and court rulings against him, he now has to surround himself with loyalists who will do his bidding at any given moment, rather than people who would disagree and offer an alternative to one of his ideas. He’s left himself as the sole arbiter of wisdom in a movement that never had any wisdom to begin with. What support he does have comes from low-information voters who have difficulty admitting they might have been wrong, just like he does.
All of this came forward explosively in Springfield as fascists there use their favorite tool, violence, to express themselves. They are the last remnants of a movement whose leader will soon be defeated at the polls, and will, once he is no longer a presidential candidate, cease to receive the inordinate amount of favor and tolerance courts have shown him thus far.
With no intellectual backing, with its influencers proven to be taking bribes from Russia, with public sentiment firmly against him, Trumpism will have no choice but to die out. Trump will, despite all of his protestatons and demands for attention, become increasingly irrelevant.
Those who aren’t blinded by their own stubbornness saw what a terrible, awful performance Trump put in at his debate. His line about cats and dogs being eaten was ridiculed as an obvious lie. Without knowing that Blood Tribe and people like them had spread that lie in the first place, his statements can only be taken at face value for the ridiculous claims they are. Anyone who did recognize that he was repeating Neo-Nazi talking points may have realized that, having alienated everyone with a modicum of sense, he has no one credible left to support him.
The violence, racism, and bigotry Trump animated over the last decade won’t go away so easily. But with Trump out of the picture, it won’t find sanction on a national stage, and will again revert to America’s dark corners, waiting for another leader to come forward and animate it once again.
Until that happens, Trumpism is a movement in decline. It’s a movement which has no principled stances. It’s a movement whose members sometimes go to prison for committing crimes. It’s a movement whose leader is already a convicted felon, and an unstable, rambling, incoherent narcissist. The movement has no strategy but to destroy, no statement to make except for grievance. Even the traditional hearkening to a mythic, unrealistic past all fascists do has largely fallen on deaf ears, now that Trump has been in the public eye for a decade.
The violence and threats at Springfield represent the last gasps of a dying movement. The movement, when it goes away, will be held up in other nations as comparisons when fascist movements get started there. Trump will join Hitler as an example of how terrible things can get if fascists are allowed to take national power. The only difference is, while Hitler was a bold, decisive, and cunning criminal, Donald Trump is simply a dumbfounded idiot completely out of his depth.
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