TRUMP IS A POPULIST. HE IS TRANSACTIONAL. HE IS PERFORMATIVE. HE IS A FASCIST

You have heard world leaders, professors, even our ministers, media etc use such labels, or characterisation, on Trump, as populist, transactional, performative, even fascist. These labels, or more precisely, slogans, are compressed moral judgements pretending to be analysis. Many are those who think they know what these words mean, and join the bandwagon of apes in appeal to authority. Hold onto your ego and walk with me, and be surprised at what I am very certain you never realised.

"Category" - the hidden Engine of Reality

"In the beginning was the Word.." (John 1:1). The Septuagint uses "Logos" which does not mean the neutral "word' in the modern sense. It leans towards ordering principle, rational structure, articulating reason -- an intelligent pattern that makes reality coherent. God spoke the Universe into existence in a coherent manner out of chaos. In the dual states of quantum physics, actualisation comes from measurement (observation), whether you are studying position or movement of particles. Reality, that is facts, come from proper use of words, within structures. To understand reality, or to fact-check the truth, you must make sure the words conform to "structures" and "categories". Understand these two terms and you can grasp the abstracts I am trying to explain.

"Structure" is how things are actually arranged and related in the real world. It is how they work, interact and constrain each other. Structure answers questions like -- what causes what? what depends on what? what limits what? what role does each part play? Examples:
- The structure of a school exam: time limits, question difficulty, grading rules, student preparation.
- Structure in social and political life: Incentives/punishments, constraints (out-of-bound markers), roles, feedback loops.
- Structure in quantum physics: the apparatus, the question asked, the mathematical framework.
The point here is truth depends on matching the words to the structure. Eg if a system rewards attention, outrage will appear, regardless of morals. In quantum physics, ask a wave-question gets a wave-result, ask a particle-question gets a particle result.

"Category" is not just a way of classifying things -- it is a way of carving reality. In the above examples, school exam, social & political life, quantum physics -- these are categories. Category shapes how reality can appear. It helps in differentiating things. For example "light" is a category -- it is a sound, it is distinct from darkness, it is governed by certain properties. Reality sits on proper categorisation. The librarian categorises the books, a wrong category and its a broken world. The Greatest Categoriser is in Genesis -- creation proceeds by separating, distinguishing and assigning roles. In quantum physics you cannot ask particle and wave questions at the same time -- reality answers only within the category you impose.

I chose Logos and quantum physics here to show that "reality has potential". Actuality (fact, reality) emerges through categorisation. Reality holds if the category fits its structure. Eg the structure for chairs include it being fit for sitting, if you put a fan under "chair", it is a broken world. A librarian catalogues books, if he misplaces a geography book under history, it's a broken world. That geography book is not truth as history. But the geography book is not false, only its reality under history is wrong. A category of geography does not fit the structure for history section.

Confuscius said something along the same lines. "If names are not correct, language is not in accordance with truth. If language is not in accordance with truth, affairs cannot be carried to success."

Slogans are the sharpened blades in the propagandist's arsenal, slicing through minds with deceptive simplicity

Again taking the example of quantum physics, a system exists as a range of possibilities. But once a measurement is chosen, only one outcome is allowed to exist. Jumping from many outcomes to only one is called "collapse". It is not about violence, but about exclusion. Moving from potential to absolute.

In human affairs, there are motives which are ambiguous, actions that can be interpreted multiple ways depending on context, there are causes, incentives, structures that are open questions. When a powerful word is used - "terrorist", "hate speech", "racist", "disinformation", "fascist" -- then motive stops mattering, context stops mattering, incentives stop mattering.

Slogans are used for such purposes. It collapses reality, and that is why it is very dangerous. The label has collapsed the interpretative space. Only one reality is now permitted. For example, the "fascist" label tells you the intent is evil, it is immoral to debate, you are suspect if you try to analyse, maybe you should k**l the person.

Slogans make you brain dead. It relieves you of the burden of understanding. It just make a category for you, instead of you trying to comprehend. When someone says Trump is fascist, so was Hitler and Mussolini. Slogan collapses distinction -- when everything becomes the same, nothing is understood. Slogans end debate because they replace explanation with moral certainty, making motives irrelevant, structures invisible and incentives unspeakable.

Slogans are the currency of credentialed consensus. Elites, especially intellectual elites - professors, journalists, NGO folks, establishment networks, use this to signal consensus and moral tribe recognition without doing any fresh thinking. Slogans become their shibboleths - say the right word and you are a bro. We both call Trump a populist, we are bros. A slogan is usually a moral verdict, not an analysis. It is argument-proof, that's why it is powerful. If you say Trump is fascist and when challenged -- just say "well everybody knows that!" Collapse is efficient and that's why institutions love slogans. Once reality is collapsed, no further thinking is required, no dissent is legitimate, no alternative hypothesis can survive, you don't need to defend anything. Slogans work better than arguments - truths work slowly, slogans are viral. That is why you find the liberals, Democrats, and media make non-stop pounding these slogans against Trump.

Trump attracts slogans because he violates language norms -- he speaks blunt and in non-credentialed ways. Trump also has a way of inventing his own slogans that stick - "Make America Great Again", "clear the swamp". These are powerful mass slogans which are crude but honest. They are identity-forming and for mass mobilising. They are just rhetorics, no one mistakes them for theory.

Elite slogans are polished and deceptive -- "threat to democracy", "fascist", "populist". They sound analytical but are vague, immune to counter-evidence and masquerade as expertise. They pretend to hold the higher moral ground.

This is the key insight to what's happening in US. The dual party power structure has inverted. The Democrat has flipped from the party of the workers to the party of elites (leftist elites) and the Republican has flipped from party of capitalist elites to party of workers. Trump's slogans are from the streets for mass mobilising; the liberal elites' faux-moral slogans are from the lecterns to delegitimise mass politics. As elites rely on, and believe in their own, slogans, they replace explanation with classification, virtue signal instead of producing insight, and preserve elite authority while appearing moral. They stop diagnosing their own failures; they radicalise the base they fear (MAGA), and eventually forcing politics into aesthetic or gutter warfare. At that point, style becomes substance. This is where the US is currently.

Reality unfolds through categories; words disclose it when they fit its structure, but slogans flatten it into absolutes and silence truth.

If you mindlessly accept and use these labels without understanding, then you have bought into the propaganda without even realising it. You bought into the intellectual laziness with moral confidence. You lose self-critique, course correction and understanding real power dynamics. You fail to see slogans are tools of power, not shortcuts to truth.

Recall I ask in the previous blog post -- is your brain elite-managerial wired? If you are, chances you are easily persuaded by these elitist slogans pretending to be moral analysis. If you are blue collar-wired like me, you try to comprehend. Digging into category of reality is key.

Trump is a populist

"Populism" is a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups. It is thus partisan and divisive. A populist leader pits one class against another to gain power by permanent mass mobilisation, expanded state and centralised economic control. History has its fair share of these populists.

Let's deconstruct this label and see what it means, how it applies to Trump and what it obscures. Then we compare with Bernie Sanders and  AOC. All are populists, trying to gain power playing one side against another. You can see the danger of slogans. One word doesn't fit all.

Trump - the stylistic populist:
How does this apply to Trump? He uses direct, mass-oriented language to mobilise. He frames politics as people vs system -- conservatives, Judeo-Christian community vs globalist elites, socialists, entrenched corrupt deep state bureaucracy. He bypasses intermediaries (media, party elders - establishment politicians) communicating directly to his base through X or Rumble. 

But using the label on Trump hides from you the truth that he does not dismantle private property, nationalise industries, or create mass party structure. Trump governs largely through existing institutions, not against them. Trump does not come with any governing ideology.

Trump is essentially only a stylistic populist -- just rhetorical, not doctrinal. In style, not in substance. Calling him a populist is a lazy comparison at best, misleading at worst.

Bernie Sanders - the revolutionary populist:
His target is the capitalist structure itself. "Billionaire class" is the category he goes after.  Institutions are legitimate only if reoriented toward redistribution. Sanders will want major structural revamps via law. In economics, Sanders stand for state expansion, explicit redistribution, and normative hostility to concentrated private power. 

The danger is not Sanders' intentions, but the logic his framing incentivises. Sanders sees wealth as a moral wrong (even though he himself is a millionaire). When inequality is moralised, grievance becomes permanent, and the state acquires a standing mandate to expand.

He moralises economic difference. Being wealthy is not just unequal, but unjust. Inequality stops being treated as a policy problem but a moral condition. Moral categories don't allow trade-offs, they demand correction. Thus politics move away from pragmatic balancing and toward moral enforcement.

Sanders framing has a permanent grievance logic. This system is structurally rigged. No reform can ever fully resolve the injustice. New disparities will always be discoverable. Even large redistribution cannot fix capitalism. Thus politics becomes continuous mobilisation. If injustice is structural, politics never ends. It escalates. There is no stable equilibrium, only ongoing struggle.

This is Sanders problem in logic: If economic difference is morally wrong, and grievance is permanent, then the state is the only legitimate corrector, new powers are always justifiable and authority never fully retracts.

AOC - the cultural revolutionary populist:
AOC targets the background moral architecture of society -- norms, language and historical legitimacy.-- to recode how justice is understood. By treating all domains as political and framing injustice as permanent emergency, she seeks not just policy change but  "ownership of meaning" itself, ensuring that future debates begin on morally pre-loaded terrain. 

"Control over ownership" means control over what words, symbols and narratives mean socially. Who owns the meaning decides what counts as harm, progress, extremist, etc. If you control the meaning, you don't need censorship. Social pressure will do the work for you and institutions comply preemptively. Now you can see why in US the fights over definitions, speech codes, symbolic gestures are not trivial. They are power struggles upstream of law. Why judges cannot describe what is a woman, why you have to use somebody's preferred pronouns, etc.  

AOC wants cultural change which serves 3 strategic goals:
- Make redistribution feel morally necessary, not politically optional. Culture has to be reshaped because it is structurally unjust, historically oppressive and systematically biased. If you object, you are not just conservative, but cruel.
- To expand the state to not just being a manager, but a moral actor. In democratic society, there is a brake on state power due to fear of overreach, respect for neutrality and individual rights. She seeks cultural reframing to weaken these guardrails. If culture teaches neutrality is complicit, inequality is violence and delays cause harm, then intervention becomes urgent, process feels immoral and expansion is justified.
- To seek irreversible political asymmetry (political parties with unequal power). Culture is upstream of law. Change the culture, the law changes. She wants to recode the culture so that the progressive Left Democrats speak in the language of justice while the conservative right speaks in the language of procedure (constitutional). Once culture changes, institutions will self-adjust and bureaucrats internalise the moral direction. Thus the Democrats will lock-in their electoral power. (Regarding bureaucrats change according to the culture-- you can see how this has already happened in the US. Trump is hampered in his admin by activist judges, university alumnus, and woke federal employees sabotaging from within.

Style can look similar. Direction is everything

Summing up:
I have gone too deep into populism here just to demonstrate that slogans are so dangerous because it collapses into one outcome whereas it is actually full of potential. There are many types of populists. In relation to branding Trump as a populist, I want to show you instead of buying into the pre-conditioned category of negativity of someone trying to gain power by catering to the public sentiments, we should distinguish populists by style and their direction.

In terms of style, Trump is chaotic, Sanders is calm, and AOC is moral/immoral. Once again, if you are a Trump-hater or elite-managerial-wired, you focus on style. Trump is the most chaotic leader, he causes chaos, etc. You have missed out on the substance.

What is important is to sort the populism category by their direction, the axis they are moving. Style can look similar. Direction is everything. Both Sanders and AOC are revolutionary populists. They are ideology-driven and destructive. Think Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, think Mao Tse Tung, or think Pol Pot.

Revolutionary populism of old sought to overthrow and replace the existing order. They viewed institutions as illegitimate by design. Therefore institutions must be captured or destroyed, rewrite new rules and constitution and change property relations. Their economic posture were redistributive, centralising and state-expansion. Their rhetorical pattern was "The system is fundamentally unjust", "We must remake society", "Neutral institutions are enemies".

Sanders is more traditional revolutionary. His fight is against wealth inequality and he wants redistribution of income, but constrained by American institutions and temperament. His end is fairly classical -- more equal material outcomes, a larger welfare state, a democratic socialism via policy, not by the gun. He thinks if voters see material improvement, legitimacy follows. You can see that Sanders talk economics, not symbols.

AOC is an entirely different creature. She is a culture revolutionary. For her, it is less about ownership of factories (the economics), but more about ownership of meaning (culture control, leading to entrenched power) Her's is progressive liberalism moving towards not just "more socialism" but towards an end where -- redistribution is not just fair, but a moral baseline; where a person's identity determines outcome; institutions actively correct disparities; there is no neutral space (you cannot disagree); and where politics control everything.

Revolutionaries are ideology-driven, hell-bent on tearing down old systems. Sanders and AOC may both be Democrats who work together in their "Fighting Oligarchy" tour, but their destination differs. Sanders populism works in the older frame -- legitimacy through material improvement, within election mandate, and a primary class axis. AOC works on the newer progressive ethos of owning meaning for permanent power, control culture to recode society, and identity politics for mobilisation. AOC operates in the total confusion of wokeism culture that is the US today. Sanders isn't headed to anywhere near where AOC is going. Sanders want to change who gets what; AOC wants to change what society believes anyone deserves in the first place, a society as defined by her.. 

Trump's populism is counter-revolutionary. Countering what and built by whom?

You should ponder beyond the dust stirred up by Trump's chaotic style to understand where he is headed. Trump's populism is not revolutionary. In fact, Trump is a counter-revolutionary.

What is Trump countering and built by whom?
Trump is countering a slow, elite-led transformation of governance that shifted power away from voters toward insulated systems (administrative, cultural and foreign-policy) built over 40-50 years by bipartisan elites and unelected technocrats. This is about power controlled by establishment elites referred to sarcastically as the Uniparty. Establishment politicians of both parties pretend to fight in public debates, but sign deals and shake hands in backrooms leaving their voters out in the cold.

Trump is not tearing down the state. He is attacking where sovereignty quietly moved. Let's look at some of these:

- Administrative autonomy:
Presidents face election every 4 years. Bureaucrats entrenched in their jobs. Eleclected officials with long shelf-life become career bureaucrats. This is the "deep state". Agencies began making quasi-law through regulation, interpret mandates expansively and act with moral confidence, not electoral risk. Trump reasserts executive control over agencies, forces visibility.He is saying "These are not priesthoods. They answer to the electorate." Deep staters are mad.
- Global elite consensus:
The Uniparty considers trade, borders, labour flows, war, climate, finance -- are to be treated as post-political questions. They agreed free-trade is inevitable, globalisation is irreversible, foreign interventions managerial, domestic losers are "adjusted cost". Trump counters this by re-politising "settled" questions; forcing costs back into debate; treating global arrangements as negotiable. This shocks the establishment elites and the primary reason they hate Trump's guts. Because the establishment politicians' power depends on issues staying "non-negotiable".
- Cultural authority monopoly:
Media, universities, NGOs, Hollywood, bureaucrats had turned woke. They define acceptable speech, enforce moral norms informally (cancel culture?) and shape policy via narrative pressure. Trump counters these by breaking speech taboos, delegitimising cultural arbiters, speaking directly to mass audience. Trump does not replace cultural authority -- he disrupts its exclusivity. The whole plethora of these lefties hate him for challenging them.
- Foreign policy insulation:
For decades US frame wars as humanitarian, security decisions bypass public consent and failure rarely produced accountability. Trump counters this by treating alliances transactionally, demanding burden-sharing and questioning permanent commitments. This enraged entire ecosystems that felt threatened -- think tanks, defence contractors and diplomatic prestige circuits

When you hear ministers and other copycats say Trump is a disruptor, what were you thinking? "Disruptor" is another category leading you to see a loud Trump yelling, interupting others mid-sentence, foul language calling out his detractors, table-thumping .... See where Trump has reclaimed presidential and electorial sovereignty and you understand who has lost power and why these are the people that wish him dead.

Who built the system that Trump is countering?
It is not a cabal. There is no conspiracy. It is simply a coalition of interests that slowly aligned. These "builders" include post-cold war Democrats (Obama, Clinton); managerial Republicans (Bush, Romney, McCain, Chenney, McDonnell, etc), bureaucratic professionals, global finance and trade elites, cultural insttutions (Hollywood?), NGOs and legal advocacy networks, media groups. These elitists shared belief is politics should be constrained, experts should govern. There was no design, it syncretised incrementally into what some call technocratic liberalism, managerial globalism or elite proceduralism. These are the belief systems Trump wants to crack. Constitutional power should return to the Executive who represents the people.

Trump strengthens electoral sovereignty by weakening elite autonomy

Trump's counter-revolutionary populism is not about dismantling institutions but changing their operating systems. He makes bureaucrats politically visible and accountable, turns norms into contested terrain, forces elites to justify themselves publicly, and re-introduces uncertainty into "settled " domains. He is shifting friction in the system.

To the elites under the Uniparty system era who were insulated and enjoyed the stability, their political coziness is challenged by Trump. When Trump politicises agencies, challenges global rules, disrespects elite language norms, both establishment Democrats and Republicans go bersek. They lose control, not loss of democracy. They confuse the two. Those who cherish democratic values should applaud, but it is strange elite-managerial-wired folks are unable to see when they buy into slogans. They too cannot see the difference between loss of control vs loss of democracy.

What looks like chaos from inside the elite systems and to those elite-managerial wired folks, to the electorate (at lease MAGA and conservatives) it looks like representation.

Trump is Transactional

"A transactional person approaches relationships and interactions based on a "give-to-get" mindset, expecting an immediate or equivalent return for their effort. They focus on short-term, self-serving exchanges, viewing interactions as tasks or deals rather than building emotional intimacy or long-term connections." (Google)

What this slogan hides is that all politics is transactional - Trump is explicit about it; making transactions visible reduces elite discretion; other presidents just hide transactions under moral language ("values", "norms".)

Trump views alliances as conditional, he thinks in deal terms, he is explicit about leverage and exchange His style is closer to realist statecraft than moral failure. What Trump is openly saying is "I won't play by the ritual language that conceals power." So yes, the category is true, but it is dishonest framing with intent to discredit.

Trump is Performative

"A person who is performative acts for an audience to gain validation, applause, or to bolster their image, rather than acting out of genuine belief or care. Their behavior is often characterized by inauthentic, exaggerated, or "for show" actions designed to make a specific impression, such as posting about charity for recognition." (Google).

Yes, Trump performs in that he uses spectacle intentionally, dominates attention cycles, he understands media psychology better than his critics. But slogans collapse truth and hide that which can be interpretative. The reality is modern politics is performance, practically everbody perfoms one way or another. Technocrats perform competence, NGOs perform values, diplomat performs civility. What Trump does differently is that he breaks the illusion by making performance obvious. Calling him "performative" implies insincerity. Performance and sincerity are not opposites in mass politics. Bottom line is while the category is true, it is trivial.

Trump is a Fascist

Those who use "fascist" to characterise Trump show their technical and historical ignorance. Historically, the fascist category requires the following structures -- one-party mass movement, suppression of independent institutions, fusion of state and ideology, and corporatist state control (primacy of the collective over individual). The first two structures are authoritaranism before ideology. Thus it can come from the Right (Conservatives, Libertarians) or from the Left (Socialists - Democrats, Liberals). The last two structures are socialists. The two famous fascists in history are Hitler and Mussolini and they are both leaders of Socialists Party. Trump is a conservative -- technically it is conceptually incoherent or oxymoronic to call him a fascist. A fascist can only come from the Left, not the Right of the political spectrum.

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