Populism and Trump as an Expression of an Unequal Society

Trumpism cannot be explained solely as an electoral anomaly, let alone as the result of a simple communicational manipulation. Its force originates from a prior social crisis: inequality, loss of trust, resentment toward the elites, and a widespread feeling that the political system has stopped listening to a segment of American society.

Donald Trump's election in 2016 revealed a social fracture that had been maturing for decades. His return to power, far from closing that debate, makes it more uncomfortable. If anything, Trumpism showed that a democracy can retain its elections, its parties, and its procedures, while at the same time entering a deep process of distrust regarding its own institutions.

Reducing the phenomenon to conspiratorial theories, fake news, or discursive radicalization would be a mistake. All of that exists and constitutes a real danger, but it is insufficient to understand why millions of people place in Trump an almost redemptive expectation. Behind Make America Great Again there is a promise of symbolic restitution: the idea that someone, at last, names a loss that traditional politics preferred to manage with technicisms or to ignore outright.

Inequality as Fertile Ground

The growing inequality, the lack of opportunities, and the perception of social decline fed a nationalist nostalgia. America First does not function solely as a foreign‑policy slogan; it also operates as an emotional refuge against a world that many feel has ceased to belong to them. The industry that left, the wages that no longer suffice, the towns that lost centrality, and the jobs that changed in nature are part of that landscape.

In that context the shift in political affinity of manual‑worker sectors, especially in Rust Belt areas, is understood. Those blue‑collar workers who for a long time had been considered the social base of progressivism began to find in the Trumpist Republican Party a clearer identity. Not because Trump’s economic program necessarily solved their problems, but because his rhetoric offered them belonging, an enemy, and a narrative.

Nevertheless, a too‑simple reading should be avoided. The American working class did not move as a block. Racial, religious, territorial, and educational differences continue to weigh. While a segment of white workers without a college degree gravitated toward Trump, middle‑class suburbs, minorities, and more educated sectors showed different movements. The country thus appears divided not only by income, but by culture, territory, religion, education, and future expectations.

Political Religion and the Banality of Moral Judgment

Promises to return to an industry that no longer exists in the same way, to restore a lost grandeur, or to defeat internal enemies become a kind of secular prayer. Politics ceases to be a discussion of common ends and begins to resemble a militant faith, where fact‑checking matters less than loyalty to the leader and to the imagined community that the leader claims to embody.

Here a moral dimension emerges that should not be underestimated. When lying ceases to be an accident and becomes a method, public judgment impoverishes. Hannah Arendt warned about the dangers of a society unable to distinguish between reality and fiction, between responsibility and obedience, between moral conscience and belonging to a mass. In Trumpism, that tension reappears in democratic forms: not as a single party, but as a political community that frequently accepts the degradation of rules if that degradation benefits its own.

Can a person condemned or accused of serious institutional abuses continue to be presented as the savior of the nation? Can a political leadership use religious symbols, manufacture moral enemies, and at the same time claim for itself the monopoly of patriotism? The question is not minor, because a portion of contemporary democratic problem precisely lies in moral judgment being subordinated to party affiliation.

Bobbio, Moderation and Party Sectarianism

Norberto Bobbio conceived democracy as a form of coexistence among adversaries, not as a war of extermination between closed identities. His defence of a liberal left, attentive to equality but respectful of freedoms, clashes with a politics founded on permanent radicalisation. Democracy needs conflict, but it also needs limits: the opponent cannot be treated as an absolute enemy and electoral victory cannot enable anything.

The Republican Party under Trump drifted away from that institutional culture. Internal critical voices became increasingly isolated, defeated, or disciplined. The party did not disappear as an electoral machine; on the contrary, it became more effective around a figure. But that effectiveness does not equal republican strength. There can be a strong party and a weakened democracy when loyalty to the leader outweighs loyalty to the rules.

The Popular Mandate and the Risk of Erosion from Within

A warning is essential: liberal democracy does not end with the will of the majority. Elections are necessary, but not sufficient. separation of powers, a free press, judicial independence, alternation, individual rights, and respect for minorities are also required. Without those conditions, democracy can retain the electoral act and slowly lose its liberal content.

Institutional warning

Electoral legitimacy is not a blank check. A leader may come to power by democratic means and use that same legitimacy to weaken controls, rights, and guarantees. That is the most difficult form of detecting democratic erosion: it does not appear against the ballot box, but in the name of it.

The popular mandate can become an instrument of democratic erosion when an autocratic leader interprets it as authorization to colonise institutions, press judges, intimidate opponents, discredit journalists, or present all opposition as the enemy of the people. Many current democratic deteriorations did not begin with tanks on the streets, but with elected leaders who used the legitimacy of the ballot box to weaken the controls that limited their power.

That is the unsettling paradox of Trumpism. It can express a genuine social demand and, at the same time, offer a politically dangerous exit. That a leader is elected does not automatically make him respectful of constitutionalism. Popular sovereignty, if separated from republican limits, can turn into an illiberal majoritarianism where the people are invoked to weaken the conditions that allow the people to elect freely again in the future.

From the Capitol to the Presidential Return

The assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the denial of the 2020 electoral result, the attempts to overturn outcomes in decisive states, and the pressure on election officials were not minor episodes. They signaled a break with an elemental rule of democracy: accepting defeat. A democracy can endure intense conflicts, but it can hardly sustain itself if one of its main political forces turns defeat into fraud and alternation into betrayal.

The issue is even more delicate because Trump returned to power with a clear victory. That strengthens the mandate discourse and reduces internal incentives for republican moderation. The problem is not that an electoral majority governs; that is inherent to democracy. The problem arises when that majority is presented as authorization to reorder the State under a logic of revenge, purge, or political punishment.

Special Elections and the Democratic Expectation

At this point, the special elections of the current political cycle began to occupy a central place in the reading of the Democratic opposition. Not because they are a prophecy, but because they function as a kind of thermometer. From 2025 and during this year a series of results accumulated that, viewed together, show a Republican difficulty in maintaining the same level of support that Trump had achieved in 2024. Some seats were directly lost; others were retained, but with weaker margins. In both cases, the political signal was uncomfortable for the incumbents.

The distinction matters. It would not be accurate to say that the Republicans lost all the seats at stake. It can be said, however, that in the congressional special elections reported so far the Republican Party lost ground relative to its 2024 presidential performance, even when it managed to keep the seat. And on the level of state legislatures, where changes in voter mood are often perceived earlier, the Democrats managed to turn that relative improvement into concrete victories.

Brookings logged more than a hundred special elections in the 2025‑2026 cycle and highlighted that, in the contests observed, the Democrats were improving their percentages relative to the previous benchmark while the Republicans were receding. MultiState, for its part, calculated a median Democratic over‑performance of around ten points in the 2026 state legislative specials. As with any partial measurement, it must be taken cautiously; but as a political climate indicator it is a signal hard to ignore.

Some cases became especially symbolic. In Texas, Taylor Rehmet won a special election for the state Senate in a district that Republicans considered safe and that Trump had won decisively. It was not a marginal defeat: Rehmet prevailed with a comfortable margin and the result opened a discussion about the Latino vote, Fort Worth’s suburbs, and the Republican capacity to retain districts that seemed entrenched. In Florida, Emily Gregory secured a state seat in a district that includes Mar‑a‑Lago, Trump’s residence, defeating a Republican candidate backed by the president himself. The image was politically potent: a district associated with Trumpism elected a Democrat in a low‑visibility race, precisely the type of contest where party machinery usually carries great weight.

There were also less spectacular results, but equally relevant for reading the climate: Republican margins that narrowed, red districts that ceased to be comfortable, super‑majorities at the state level placed under pressure, and a Democratic opposition that began to view the mid‑term elections not only as an institutional defence but as a real opportunity to limit the legislative power of Trumpism. The point is not that each special election mechanically anticipates November, but that together they sketch a wear‑down trend.

For Democrats, these defeats and Republican setbacks feed a reasonable expectation. The hope does not stem so much from massive enthusiasm for the Democratic Party, whose own prestige remains limited, but from a possible fatigue with Trump’s political style: permanent conflict, threatening rhetoric, institutional tension, concern over the cost of living, and wear‑out faced by increasingly harsh immigration policies. The opposition reads the specials as clues that there is an electorate willing to set limits.

But caution is necessary. Special elections usually have low turnout, depend on specific candidates, and can be heavily influenced by local dynamics. They should not be turned into an automatic prediction for November. More than a forecast, they are a warning: they show that the climate may be less favorable for Republicans than the presidential victory suggested, and that the Trumpist coalition may not operate with the same intensity when the leader is no longer being voted for, but his representatives are.

The Opposition’s Challenge

The Democratic opposition, however, cannot limit itself to waiting for anti‑Trumpism to do all the work. If the origin of Trumpism is linked to a representation crisis, then the democratic response cannot be solely institutionalist or moral. It must also speak about wages, housing, health, territory, work, and insecurity about the future. Otherwise, it risks correctly denouncing the illiberal threat but without rebuilding the social bond that allowed that threat to grow.

Electorally defeating Trump or limiting his legislative power may be necessary, but not sufficient. A liberal democracy is not saved merely by stopping the leader who strains it; it must also repair the conditions that made his rise possible. Punitive voting may win a mid‑term election, but a durable democratic alternative needs more than rejection: it must offer belonging, dignity, and a promise of the future that does not depend on manufacturing enemies.

Trump as Symptom and Cause

Can it then be asserted that Trump is a threat to democracy? Yes, but with essential precision: Trump is a threat because he aggravates a crisis that preceded him. He is a symptom of a democracy that stopped representing entire sectors of its society and, at the same time, a cause of institutional decay that turns that discontent into organised distrust of the press, judges, election officials, and political opponents.

American democracy is not in crisis because there are angry voters. It is in crisis because part of that anger was articulated by a leadership that despises the limits of power and turns social frustration into fuel for an exceptionalist politics. Trump did not invent inequality, nor polarization, nor the representation crisis. But he organized them under a political form capable of justifying institutional damage in the name of a supposed national restitution.

In short, Trump is not only the voice of an unequal society. He is also proof that a democracy can be eroded from within when legitimate discontent finds an illiberal conduit. There lies his strength and also his danger: he expresses a real demand, but translates it into a response that threatens to empty democracy of that which makes it worthy of that name.