I think I finally know Trumps ideology and its called Neo-Bonapartism
Bonapartism describes a state that achieves relative autonomy from any single class by claiming to stand above class conflict entirely ruling personalistically through plebiscitary mass appeal and charismatic authority rather than through a party program or a coherent class coalition, while materially serving capital's interests without capital directly controlling the state apparatus. Bonaparte's actual regime combined: personalist rule bypassing parliamentary/institutional mediation, appeals to a cross-class "people" against both organized labor and the traditional elite, military prestige projects and adventurism as legitimation (the whole Second Empire foreign policy pattern), and state-directed economic development (Haussmann's Paris, railway financing) alongside crushing independent labor organization. That's close to a checklist match for Trump: personalist rule, state economic direction, military/security emphasis as legitimating spectacle, hostility to organized labor and the left, appeal over the heads of institutions to a plebiscitary mass base.
Bonapartism in the Marxist tradition is specifically theorized as arising when class conflict reaches a stalemate where no single class can rule directly, so an autonomous executive arbitrates from above, critically, without needing to make durable concessions to labor the way a genuinely hegemonic class-coalition government would. Gramsci's extension of the concept (he uses “Caesarism” interchangeably) is explicitly about a strong personalist arbiter stepping in during a legitimacy crisis of the ordinary political process, offering national/military grandeur and personal charisma as substitutes for programmatic concession. That's the theoretical explanation for exactly why Trumpism is anti social welfare while pro military spending Bonapartist/Caesarist rule doesn't need to buy off labor, because it's explicitly a crisis arbitration form that draws its legitimacy from personal charisma and national mythology rather than from a stable coalition requiring material payoffs.
So: Bonapartism (Marx's term) or Caesarism (Gramsci's near-synonym) is the actual name for 19th-century style personalist strongman, holistic state-directed military-industrial policy, minimal welfare concession, legitimated by charisma and national grandeur rather than institution-building or class-coalition bargaining. Specifically it explains personalist executive rule that serves capital without needing programmatic concession to any class, including capital itself.
Call it anything but fascism
>>2863937"More money for me, fuck you" isn't much of an ideology. Also this is old hat, the Chapotards back in 2017 were talking about the 18th of Brumaire and I think Jacobin had an article comparing Trump to Napoleon III.
I truly don’t think he has any ideology beyond sleeping, partying and eating McDonald’s. He will say and do whatever the people paying him and sucking his dick the most convince him to. He’s raised bourgeoisie, he has no thought beyond “god I hope number go up so I don’t have to actually do any work”
>>2863937I think Bonparatism is a good descriptor for what Trump "is" but I'm not sure it's really an ideology. Egypt really has a regime like this.
Chris Cutrone gets too into contrarianism for its own sake but think he's one of the better American leftists on Bonapartism:
>Bonapartism is characterized for Marxism by precisely the inability of leading political figures to render society and the state tractable: Louis Bonaparte is the “farce,” compared to Napoleon’s (and Caesar’s) “tragedy,” because of his futility; he is not a cunning hero but a comedic villain. Where celestial forces swirl around a protagonist of Divine Fate, instead, we have the folly and error of someone who is merely “human, all-too human” (Nietzsche): not punished but merely scorned by the gods. While the conquering Napoleon summoned Goethe to insist that “there is no Destiny, only politics,” he was for Hegel nonetheless the “World Soul” of eternal History[2] when he rode his horse into town at the young professor’s first academic appointment. Louis Bonaparte is not the substantial character of political action, but a holographic projection of greater forces that neither he nor anyone else can master: “Bonapartism” is Marx/ism’s term for the self-alienation of politics in capitalism. As Marx summed it up about the plebeian masses in capitalism (petite bourgeoisie, lumpenproletariat, et al. — including workers, insofar as they are not self-organized into a social and political force of their own): they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented; they will be represented.[3] Bonapartism means the state represents everyone and no one. The state is universal but also its own particular interest.
>Police and military are “citizens in uniform” — as are bureaucrats — and hence playing a role that anyone could; and yet in capitalism they become their own specific caste apart from everyone. This is not merely a function of specialized knowledge but of role: the peculiar political role of the state in capitalism. Bureaucracy is considered by Marxism to be endemic in capitalism differently from its role in traditional civilization, which was of course a caste system that bourgeois society is not or at least is not supposed to be. Bureaucracy is a function of reification of social and political activity in an alienated society.
>For liberalism, by contrast, Bonapartism is a historical accident and mistake to be avoided; like all crime, it is the responsibility of a bad actor. For Marxism, however, it is not an error or moral infraction of wrong choice but inevitable, because it expresses a necessity in capitalism: if the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat leading to socialism is not met, then the inexorable result is Bonapartism. What is this necessity? For the state to manage the crisis of capitalism.https://platypus1917.org/2025/06/01/bonapartism-is-not-bonaparte/ >ideology
Didn't read a word past that