Fogy’s Singular Obsession: The Gold-Plated Blister (A Study in Trumpism).*
With a lot of help from my AI friends
Fogy notes that while America’s two ancient parties—the Democrats and the Republicans—deserve historical autopsies, Trumpism demands something far more urgent: an exorcism. It is not an ideology forged in the slow furnace of centuries but a sudden, spectacular fever dream born of mass disillusionment. “This is just politics!” cry the desperate establishmentarians, as if the world has simply gone slightly mad. Fogy disagrees. It seems painfully clear—and, I suspect, to anyone who remembers a time before reality was optional—that Trumpism is merely the grotesque, funhouse-mirror reflection of America’s deepest, longest-festering psychological wounds.
Trumpism did not spring fully formed from the head of a Greek god. It oozed from the cultural crevices abandoned by everyone else, a thick residue of resentment, nostalgia, and neglect. It is, in essence, a three-part cocktail of poison. First came the Abandoned Man—the Rust Belt worker, the rural resident, the person who felt their dignity and job were outsourced by the GOP’s cold, globalist piety. They were told the Free Market would make them rich; instead, they got a pink slip and a cheap Chinese T-shirt. Then came the Culture Warrior—the socially conservative voter who watched the Democrats weaponize identity and dismiss vast swathes of the country as inherently backward or irredeemably deplorable. They wanted respect, and they got a sneer. And finally, the Nihilist—the exhausted center that simply stopped believing anything the government, the press, or the elites said. They found, in the Duck-in-Chief’s chaos and crassness, a perverse kind of honesty: the comfort of seeing the con laid bare.
The so-called doctrine of Trumpism is not policy but pout—a governance of grievance, an administration of impulse. Its trade stance was never strategic, merely the erection of tariffs like medieval toll bridges meant to punish countries he disliked and to flatter the gut instincts of the abandoned man. Immigration was not border management but weaponized nativism: a symbolic wall, both literal and psychological, promising a return to an imagined, ethnically pristine past. And the state? Never the smaller government once worshipped by conservatives, but a demand for executive overlordship—absolute, unconstrained personal power, wielded against the “Deep State,” the press, and the rule of law itself. The federal government, under this fever, became a machine of personal retribution.
Trumpism is not about what it builds but what it destroys. It is a sickness, a collective psychological surrender to the notion that chaos and anger are the only honest responses left. If Fogy must concede one mitigation, it is this: the terrifying success of Trumpism was not solely the Duck’s dark genius, but the inevitable result of a massive, decades-long failure by both major parties to tend to the emotional infrastructure of the nation. The vacuum left by their managerial arrogance and ideological rigidity was always going to be filled by something loud, ugly, and entirely unexpected.
What emerged was the ultimate American celebrity spectacle turned governing philosophy—a colossal, gold-plated blister on the national psyche, lanced by a leader whose only consistent ideology is the glorification of his own self-pity and the punishment of anyone who dares to contradict him. It is not merely a party but the collective, furious id of a tired empire, lumbering its hideous cargo of ego across the globe and demanding that the world not only look but applaud. And watch we must, for the spectacle is far from over.
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