title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: Companies are replacing van conversions with wide bus bodies—Sprinters with side-facing benches and tall right-side doors—as campus shuttles. Limited numbers of complete "wagons" (passenger vans) are being produced in Germany and shipped complete to the United States mostly for personal and church van uses. Typical Sprinter Wagons accommodate 8 to 10 passengers and have glass in all possible factory positions. Vans shipped to the United States on-spec (speculation to sell by dealer/distributor) are mostly sent in Arctic White color, but many colors are available. The Dodge dealer network for Sprinters is limited to certified locations (known as "Business Link" certified dealers, usually only awarded to "Five Star" certified dealers), and dealer knowledge is still limited in both sales and service. Special orders typically take one to three months for delivery, and may take even longer due to the assembly and disassembly in Germany, and exporting parts to South Carolina for re-assembly. The exception is passenger van models which are assembled in Germany and exported as complete vehicles. This is because of the United States Chicken Tax. As an unintended consequence, several importers of light trucks have circumvented the tariff via loopholes, known as tariff engineering. Ford (ostensibly a company that the tax was designed to protect), imported its first-generation Transit Connect light trucks as "passenger vehicles" to the U.S. from Turkey, and immediately stripped and shredded portions of their interiors (e.g., installed rear seats, seatbelts) in a warehouse outside Baltimore. To import vans built in Germany, Mercedes "disassembled them and shipped the pieces to South Carolina, where American workers put them back together in a small kit assembly building." The resulting vehicles emerge as locally manufactured, free from the tariff.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: In North America, most Sprinters are sold as cargo vans to expediters in the United States. Such expediters are similar to truck drivers, except they take smaller loads and will wait after unloading until dispatchers find another customer nearby to transport goods. The advent of the Sprinter van with its cargo space of has allowed van expediters to take three skids or pallets, where previously they were limited to a capacity of two pallets A Sprinter is capable of hauling approximately of cargo.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: The vehicle has been adopted by the police in Hong Kong, United Kingdom and in Poland, also and as an ambulance by countries in Western Europe, Scandinavia, the US, Australia and New Zealand. The 515 CDI has become the standard ambulance for use by the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom, and the Health Service Executive (HSE) in the Republic of Ireland.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: Another market in which Sprinters are gaining ground is as van conversions and recreational vehicles. Conversions include RV's, limousines, family and luxury vans, office vans, wheelchair accessible vans and golf vans. Sprinter RV conversions can also be called Sprinter campervans. Sprinter conversions have been produced by several RV and coach manufacturers. Chilled box versions of the Sprinter currently make up the majority of the supermarket Home Delivery fleet across the UK, but demand for these vans has begun to decline. ASDA recently announced that its new fleet would be primarily custom IVECO vans, following in the footsteps of Tesco. Mercedes are currently working with Waitrose Home Delivery, who currently use chilled LWB HR Sprinters, on a prototype of a new generation home-delivery van, which is currently being used in select stores, aiming to cut emissions, costs and increase time-efficiency.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: Sprinters have been used globally as television production vehicles, most commonly as ENG (Electronic News Gathering) and SNG (Satellite News Gathering) vehicles. These are a popular choice for local affiliates for their maneuverability in metropolitan areas and the lack of DOT regulations (in the under 10,000lbs versions).


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: Despite not being marketed as a family vehicle, a custom-modified Dodge-branded Sprinter was used by the ten-member Gosselin family, the subjects of the TLC reality series "Jon & Kate Plus 8".


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: In Colombia the Sprinter is the most popular van for intercity transport. The purchase of a luxuriously appointed Sprinter by the son of former President Julio Cesar Turbay, Julio Cesar Turbay, Jr. prompted a scandal.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: A Mercedes Sprinter was the vehicle used by Mike and Frank on the History Channel reality series "American Pickers" until Season 6, when it was replaced by a Ford Transit.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: The van is also used as a mobile command center by the Garda Síochána which is the national police force of the Republic of Ireland.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: A chassis of the Sprinter is also expected to be used for the upcoming Astrovan II which will be made by Airstream to transport Boeing commercial crew astronauts to Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 41 where they would board the CST-100 Starliner on their way to the International Space Station.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: Although primarily marketed as a goods van, the Sprinter has 5 variants designed to carry passengers. These are made by removing parts of the walls and replacing them with glass window panels.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: This is the smallest of the Sprinter minibuses. There are 4 sub-variants: the 23, 33, 35 and 45. It has 8-18 seats & and is 6.9-7.4 metres long. It has 4 doors: 1 on either side of the driver and front passenger seats (which, like in a van, are segregated from the main passenger compartment), a sliding door in the middle, which goes into the rear passenger seating area, and a set of double doors at the back going into the disabled area with an elevator that can be extended out of the doors when they are open.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: This minibus is a longer variant of the Sprinter Mobility where the front passenger seat has been removed and the front passenger seat door now acts as the door for all passengers. In addition, the back wall has seats along it, but can be opened as a door and the seats removed to make modifications to the interior of the vehicle. It comes in 5 sub-variants: 23, 34, 35, 45 and 55. It has 13-22 seats and is 5.9-7.7 metres long.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: This bus has a high-floor, and in addition to the driver's door, has just 1 automatic passenger door with steps. It is 7.4-7.7 metres long and has 17-19 seats.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: The Sprinter Inkanyezi is marketed in South Africa from 2020s onward as minibus taxi fleet in the country. The car is powered by a 2.0-litre, four-cylinder turbocharged diesel engine and can carry 23 passengers.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: The Mercedes-Benz Sprinter City minibus variant has been in production since 1995 and is marketed through EvoBus. The Freightliner variant has been in production since 2007. There are three sizes, Sprinter City 35, 65 and 77, which seat from 10 to 16 passengers; including standing passengers, these versions can accommodate 22 to 40 passengers. The 77 variant has a low floor throughout and a third pair of wheels at the rear. The Sprinter City has two automatic doors: a set of double doors at the front, used for passengers getting on or off and having a disabled ramp; and a single door behind the rear wheel for passengers alighting, which opens off some stairs in the high-floor area. There is also a manual door on the offside into the driver's cab. The 77 variant has double rear doors.


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: For engine choices, the Sprinter is currently offered with inline four and V6 diesel engines; V6 petrol/gasoline; or liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) engines in Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. In North America, only the six cylinder 3.0 L turbodiesel and 4 cylinder 2.1 L turbo diesel engines are offered. In Brazil, between 1998 and 2002, are used a Maxion/Rover HSD Diesel engine, with 2,5Lt. The versions are 310D with 95PS (Turbo Diesel) and 312D, with 115PS (Turbo Diesel Intercooler).


title: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

text: An electric hybrid version has been tested, but is not currently officially part of the Sprinter range. 2,000 electric Sprinters are to be made by VDL Groep from 2016.


title: TGV

text: The TGV (, "high-speed train"; previously ) is France's intercity high-speed rail service, operated by SNCF. SNCF worked on a high-speed rail network from 1966 to 1974 and presented the project to President Georges Pompidou who approved it. Originally designed as turbotrains to be powered by gas turbines, TGV prototypes evolved into electric trains with the 1973 oil crisis. In 1976 the SNCF ordered 87 high-speed trains from Alstom. Following the inaugural service between Paris and Lyon in 1981 on the LGV Sud-Est (LGV for "Ligne à Grande Vitesse"; "high-speed line"), the network, centered on Paris, has expanded to connect major cities across France (including Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Rennes and Montpellier) and in neighbouring countries on a combination of high-speed and conventional lines. The TGV network in France carries about 110 million passengers a year.


title: TGV

text: The high-speed tracks, maintained by SNCF Réseau, are subject to heavy regulation. Confronted with the fact that train drivers would not be able to see signals along the track-side when trains reach full speed, engineers developed the TVM cab-signalling technology, which would later be exported worldwide. It allows for a train engaging in an emergency braking to request within seconds all following trains to reduce their speed; if a driver does not react within , the system overrides the controls and reduces the train's speed automatically. The TVM safety mechanism enables TGVs using the same line to depart every three minutes.


title: TGV

text: A TGV test train set the world record for the fastest wheeled train, reaching on 3 April 2007. Conventional TGV services operate up to on the LGV Est, LGV Rhin-Rhône and LGV Méditerranée. In 2007, the world's fastest scheduled rail journey was a start-to-stop average speed of between the Gare de Champagne-Ardenne and Gare de Lorraine on the LGV Est, not surpassed until the 2013 reported average of express service on the Shijiazhuang to Zhengzhou segment of China's Shijiazhuang–Wuhan high-speed railway.


title: TGV

text: The TGV was conceived at the same period as other technological projects sponsored by the Government of France, including the Ariane 1 rocket and Concorde supersonic airliner; those funding programmes were known as "champion national" policies (literal translation: national champion). The commercial success of the first high-speed line led to a rapid development of services to the south (LGV Rhône-Alpes, LGV Méditerranée, LGV Nîmes–Montpellier), west (LGV Atlantique, LGV Bretagne-Pays de la Loire, LGV Sud Europe Atlantique), north (LGV Nord, LGV Interconnexion Est) and east (LGV Rhin-Rhône, LGV Est). Neighbouring countries Italy, Spain and Germany developed their own high-speed rail services.


title: TGV

text: The TGV system itself extends to neighbouring countries, either directly (Italy, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany) or through TGV-derivative networks linking France to Switzerland (Lyria), to Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands (Thalys), as well as to the United Kingdom (Eurostar). Several future lines are planned, including extensions within France and to surrounding countries. Cities such as Tours and Le Mans have become part of a "TGV commuter belt" around Paris; the TGV also serves Charles de Gaulle Airport and Lyon–Saint-Exupéry Airport. A visitor attraction in itself, it stops at Disneyland Paris and in tourist cities such as Avignon and Aix-en-Provence as well. Brest, Chambéry, Nice, Toulouse and Biarritz are reachable by TGVs running on a mix of LGVs and modernised lines. In 2007, SNCF generated profits of €1.1 billion (approximately US$1.75 billion, £875 million) driven largely by higher margins on the TGV network.


title: TGV

text: The idea of the TGV was first proposed in the 1960s, after Japan had begun construction of the Shinkansen (also known as the "bullet train") in 1959. At the time the Government of France favoured new technology, exploring the production of hovercraft and the Aérotrain air-cushion vehicle. Simultaneously, the SNCF began researching high-speed trains on conventional tracks. In 1976, the administration agreed to fund the first line. By the mid-1990s, the trains were so popular that SNCF President Louis Gallois declared that the TGV was "the train that saved French railways".


title: TGV

text: It was originally planned that the TGV, then standing for ' ("very high speed") or ' ("high-speed turbine"), would be propelled by gas turbines, selected for their small size, good power-to-weight ratio and ability to deliver high power over an extended period. The first prototype, TGV 001, was the only gas-turbine TGV: following the increase in the price of oil during the 1973 energy crisis, gas turbines were deemed uneconomic and the project turned to electricity from overhead lines, generated by new nuclear power stations.


title: TGV

text: TGV 001 was not a wasted prototype: its gas turbine was only one of its many new technologies for high-speed rail travel. It also tested high-speed brakes, needed to dissipate the large amount of kinetic energy of a train at high speed, high-speed aerodynamics, and signalling. It was articulated, comprising two adjacent carriages sharing a bogie, allowing free yet controlled motion with respect to one another. It reached , which remains the world speed record for a non-electric train. Its interior and exterior were styled by French designer Jacques Cooper, whose work formed the basis of early TGV designs, including the distinctive nose shape of the first power cars.


title: TGV

text: Changing the TGV to electric traction required a significant design overhaul. The first electric prototype, nicknamed Zébulon, was completed in 1974, testing features such as innovative body mounting of motors, pantographs, suspension and braking. Body mounting of motors allowed over 3 tonnes to be eliminated from the power cars and greatly reduced the unsprung weight. The prototype travelled almost during testing.


title: TGV

text: In 1976, the French administration funded the TGV project, and construction of the LGV Sud-Est, the first high-speed line (), began shortly afterwards. The line was given the designation LN1, "" ("New Line 1"). After two pre-production trainsets (nicknamed "Patrick" and "Sophie") had been tested and substantially modified, the first production version was delivered on 25 April 1980.


title: TGV

text: The TGV opened to the public between Paris and Lyon on 27 September 1981. Contrary to its earlier fast services, SNCF intended TGV service for all types of passengers, with the same initial ticket price as trains on the parallel conventional line. To counteract the popular misconception that the TGV would be a premium service for business travellers, SNCF started a major publicity campaign focusing on the speed, frequency, reservation policy, normal price, and broad accessibility of the service. This commitment to a democratised TGV service was enhanced in the Mitterrand era with the promotional slogan "Progress means nothing unless it is shared by all". The TGV was considerably faster (in terms of door to door travel time) than normal trains, cars, or aeroplanes. The trains became widely popular, the public welcoming fast and practical travel.


title: TGV

text: The Eurostar service began operation in 1994, connecting continental Europe to London via the Channel Tunnel and the LGV Nord-Europe with a version of the TGV designed for use in the tunnel and the United Kingdom. The first phase of the British High Speed 1 line was completed in 2003, the second phase in November 2007. The fastest trains take 2 hours 15 minutes London–Paris and 1 hour 51 minutes London–Brussels. The first twice-daily London-Amsterdam service ran 3 April 2018, and took 3 hours 47 minutes.


title: TGV

text: The TGV was the world's third commercial and standard gauge high-speed train service, after Japan's Shinkansen, which connected Tokyo and Osaka from 1 October 1964, and Britain's InterCity 125 on main lines such as the East Coast Main Line, which entered service in 1976.


title: TGV

text: A modified TGV test train holds the world speed record for conventional trains. On 3 April 2007 a modified TGV POS train reached under test conditions on the LGV Est between Paris and Strasbourg. The line voltage was boosted to 31 kV, and extra ballast was tamped onto the permanent way. The train beat the 1990 world speed record of , set by a similarly shortened train (two power cars and three passenger cars), along with unofficial records set during weeks preceding the official record run. The test was part of an extensive research programme by Alstom.


title: TGV

text: In 2007, the TGV was the world's fastest conventional scheduled train: one journey's average start-to-stop speed from Champagne-Ardenne Station to Lorraine Station is .


title: TGV

text: This record was surpassed on 26 December 2009 by the new Wuhan-Guangzhou High-Speed Railway in China where the fastest scheduled train covered at an average speed of . However, on 1 July 2011 in order to save energy and reduce operating costs the maximum speed of Chinese high-speed trains was reduced to , but services between Shijiazhuang and Zhengzhou East on the line still achieve in each direction in 2015. The revival of operation in 2017 on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed railway allows for several services to complete the journey between Shanghai and Beijing in 4 hours and 24 min with an average speed of .


title: TGV

text: A Eurostar (TGV) train broke the record for the longest non-stop high-speed international journey on 17 May 2006 carrying the cast and filmmakers of "The Da Vinci Code" from London to Cannes for the Cannes Film Festival. The journey took 7 hours 25 minutes on an average speed of .


title: TGV

text: The fastest single long-distance run on the TGV was done by a TGV Réseau train from Calais-Frethun to Marseille (i) in 3 hours 29 minutes at a speed of for the inauguration of the LGV Méditerranée on 26 May 2001.


title: TGV

text: On 28 November 2003, the TGV network carried its one billionth passenger, a distant second only to the Shinkansen's five billionth passenger in 2000.


title: TGV

text: Excluding international traffic, the TGV system carried 98 million passengers during 2008, an increase of 8 million (9.1%) on the previous year.


title: TGV

text: In June 2021, there were approximately of "" (LGV), with four additional line sections under construction. The current lines and those under construction can be grouped into four routes radiating from Paris and one that currently only connects to Paris through a section of classical track:


title: TGV

text: In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a plan to "reassess" planned LGV construction, implying that many of the projects listed here will be delayed or not constructed at all. Contrary to this, the French government confirmed 5 new lines in late summer 2018.


title: TGV

text: TGVs have semi-permanently coupled articulated un-powered coaches, with Jacobs bogies between the coaches supporting both of them. Power cars at each end of the trains have their own bogies. Trains can be lengthened by coupling two TGVs, using couplers hidden in the noses of the power cars. The articulated design is advantageous during a derailment, as the passenger carriages are more likely to stay upright and in line with the track. Normal trains could split at couplings and jackknife, as seen in the Eschede train disaster. A disadvantage is that it is difficult to split sets of carriages. While power cars can be removed from trains by standard uncoupling procedures, specialised depot equipment is needed to split carriages, by lifting the entire train at once. Once uncoupled, one of the carriage ends is left without a bogie at the split, so a bogie frame is required to support it. Using Power Cars instead of Electric Multiple Units easily allows for a high ride quality and less electrical equipment.


title: TGV

text: Several TGV types have broken records, including the V150 and TGV 001. V150 was a specially modified five-car double-deck trainset that reached under controlled conditions on a test run. It narrowly missed beating the world train speed record of . The record-breaking speed is impractical for commercial trains due to motor overcharging, empty train weight, rail and engine wear issues, elimination of all but three coaches, excessive vibration, noise and lack of emergency stopping methods.


title: TGV

text: TGVs travel at up to in commercial use. All are at least "bi-current", which means that they can operate at 25 kV, 50 Hz AC (including LGVs) and at 1.5 kV DC (such as the 1.5 kV "lignes classiques" south of Paris). Trains to Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands must accommodate other voltages, requiring "tri-current" and "quadri-current" TGVs. TGVs have two pairs of pantographs, two for AC use and two for DC. When passing between areas of different supply voltage, marker boards remind the driver to turn off power, lower the pantograph(s), adjust a switch to select the appropriate system, and raise the pantograph(s). Pantographs and pantograph height control are selected automatically based on the voltage system chosen by the driver. Once the train detects the correct supply, a dashboard indicator illuminates and the driver can switch on the traction motors. The train coasts across the boundary between sections.


title: TGV

text: The Sud-Est fleet was built between 1978 and 1988 and operated the first TGV service, from Paris to Lyon in 1981. There were 107 passenger sets, of which nine are tri-current (including 15 kV,  Hz AC for use in Switzerland) and the rest bi-current. There were seven bi-current half-sets without seats that carried mail for La Poste between Paris, Lyon and Provence, in a distinctive yellow livery until they were phased out in 2015.


title: TGV

text: Each set were made up of two power cars and eight carriages (capacity 345 seats), including a powered bogie in the carriages adjacent to the power cars. They are long and wide. They weigh 385 tonnes with a power output of 6,450 kW under 25 kV.


title: TGV

text: The sets were built to run at but most were upgraded to during mid-life refurbishment in preparation for the opening of the LGV Méditerranée. The few sets that still have a maximum speed of operate on routes that include a comparatively short distance on LGV, such as to Switzerland via Dijon; SNCF did not consider it financially worthwhile to upgrade their speed for a marginal reduction in journey time.


title: TGV

text: In December 2019, the trains were phased out from service. In late 2019 and early 2020, TGV 01 (Nicknamed Patrick), which was the very first TGV train, did a farewell service that included all three liveries that were worn during their service.


title: TGV

text: The 105-strong bi-current Atlantique fleet was built between 1988 and 1992 for the opening of the LGV Atlantique and entry into service began in 1989. They are long and wide. They weigh 444 tonnes, and are made up of two power cars and ten carriages with a capacity of 485 seats. They were built with a maximum speed of and 8,800 kW of power under 25 kV. The efficiency of the Atlantique with all seats filled has been calculated at 767 PMPG, though with a typical occupancy of 60% it is about 460 PMPG (a Toyota Prius with three passengers is 144 PMPG).


title: TGV

text: Modified unit 325 set the world speed record in 1990 on the LGV before its opening. Modifications such as improved aerodynamics, larger wheels and improved braking were made to enable speeds of over . The set was reduced to two power cars and three carriages to improve the power-to-weight ratio, weighing 250 tonnes. Three carriages, including the bar carriage in the centre, is the minimum possible configuration because of the articulation.


title: TGV

text: The first Réseau (Network) sets entered service in 1993. Fifty bi-current sets were ordered in 1990, supplemented by 40 tri-current sets in 1992/1993. Ten tri-current sets carry the Thalys livery and are known as Thalys PBA (Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam) sets. As well as using standard French voltages, the tri-current sets can operate under the Netherlands' 1.5 kV and Italian and Belgian 3 kV DC supplies.


title: TGV

text: They are formed of two power cars (8,800 kW under 25 kV – as TGV Atlantique) and eight carriages, giving a capacity of 377 seats. They have a top speed of . They are long and are wide. The bi-current sets weigh 383 tonnes: owing to axle-load restrictions in Belgium the tri-current sets have a series of modifications, such as the replacement of steel with aluminium and hollow axles, to reduce the weight to under 17 t per axle.


title: TGV

text: Owing to early complaints of uncomfortable pressure changes when entering tunnels at high speed on the LGV Atlantique, the Réseau sets are now pressure-sealed. They can be coupled to a Duplex set.


title: TGV

text: The Duplex was built to increase TGV capacity without increasing train length or the number of trains. Each carriage has two levels, with access doors at the lower level taking advantage of low French platforms. A staircase gives access to the upper level, where the gangway between carriages is located. There are 512 seats per set. On busy routes such as Paris-Marseille they are operated in pairs, providing 1,024 seats in two Duplex sets or 800 in a Duplex set plus a Reseau set. Each set has a wheelchair accessible compartment.


title: TGV

text: After a lengthy development process starting in 1988 (during which they were known as the TGV-2N) the original batch of 30 was built between 1995 and 1998. Further deliveries started in 2000 with the Duplex fleet now totalling 160 units, making it the backbone of the SNCF TGV-fleet. They weigh 380 tonnes and are long, made up of two power cars and eight carriages. Extensive use of aluminium means that they weigh not much more than the TGV Réseau sets they supplement. The bi-current power cars provide 8,800 kW, and they have a slightly increased speed of .


title: TGV

text: TGV POS (Paris-Ostfrankreich-Süddeutschland or Paris-Eastern France-Southern Germany) are used on the LGV Est.


title: TGV

text: They consist of two Duplex power cars with eight TGV Réseau-type carriages, with a power output of 9,600 kW and a top speed of . Unlike TGV-A, TGV-R and TGV-D, they have asynchronous motors, and isolation of an individual motor is possible in case of failure.


title: TGV

text: The bi-current TGV 2N2 (Avelia Euroduplex) can be regarded as the 3rd generation of Duplex. The series was commissioned from December 2011 for links to Germany and Switzerland (tri-current trains) and to cope with the increased traffic due to the opening of the LGV Rhine-Rhone.


title: TGV

text: They are numbered from 800, and are limited to . ERTMS makes them compatible to allow access to Spain similar to Dasye.


title: TGV

text: The development of TGV trains is being pursued in the form of the "Automotrice à grande vitesse" (AGV) high-speed multiple unit with motors under each carriage. Investigations are being carried out with the aim of producing trains at the same cost as TGVs with the same safety standards. AGVs of the same length as TGVs could have up to 450 seats. The target speed is . The prototype AGV was unveiled by Alstom on 5 February 2008.


title: TGV

text: Italian operator NTV is the first customer for the AGV, and became the first open-access high-speed rail operator in Europe, starting operation in 2011.


title: TGV

text: The design process of the next generation of TGVs began in 2016 when SNCF and Alstom signed an agreement to jointly develop the trainsets, with goals of reducing purchase and operating costs, as well as improved interior design.


title: TGV

text: The design that emerged from the process was named TGV M, and in July 2018 SNCF ordered 100 trainsets with deliveries expected to begin in 2024. They are expected to cost €25 million per 8-car set.


title: TGV

text: In almost three decades of high-speed operation, the TGV has not recorded a single passenger fatality due to accidents while running at high speed on normal passenger service. There have been several accidents, including four derailments at or above , but in only one of these—a test run on a new line—did carriages overturn. This is credited in part to the stiffness that the articulated design lends to the train. There have been fatal accidents involving TGVs on "lignes classiques", where the trains are exposed to the same dangers as normal trains, such as level crossings. These include one terrorist bombing, which could as well have occurred at high speed as not.


title: TGV

text: Following the number of accidents at level crossings, an effort has been made to remove all level crossings on "lignes classiques" used by TGVs. The "ligne classique" from Tours to Bordeaux at the end of the LGV Atlantique has no level crossings as a result.


title: TGV

text: The first environmental protests against the building of an LGV occurred in May 1990 during the planning stages of the LGV Méditerranée. Protesters blocked a railway viaduct to protest against the planned route, arguing that it was unnecessary, and that trains could keep using existing lines to reach Marseille from Lyon.


title: TGV

text: The Turin–Lyon high-speed railway (Lyon-Chambéry-Turin), which would connect the TGV network to the Italian TAV network, has been the subject of demonstrations in Italy. While most Italian political parties agree on the construction of this line, some inhabitants of the towns where construction would take place oppose it vehemently. The concerns put forward by the protesters centre on storage of dangerous materials mined during tunnel boring, like asbestos and perhaps uranium, in the open air. This health danger could be avoided by using more expensive techniques for handling radioactive materials. A six-month delay in the start of construction has been decided in order to study solutions. In addition to the concerns of the residents, RFB – a ten-year-old national movement – opposes the development of Italy's TAV high-speed rail network as a whole.


title: TGV

text: General complaints about the noise of TGVs passing near towns and villages have led the SNCF to build acoustic fencing along large sections of LGV to reduce the disturbance to residents, but protests still take place where SNCF has not addressed the issue.


title: TGV

text: For many years, a service termed SNCF TGV La Poste transported mail for the French mail service, La Poste. It used windowless but otherwise standard TGV rolling stock, painted in the yellow and blue livery of La Poste. However, the service ceased in June 2015.


title: TGV

text: During the COVID-19 pandemic, several TGV trains were transformed into mobile hospitals, in order to transport critically ill patients from overwhelmed hospitals in the East of France to hospitals in the west.


title: TGV

text: Every coach allows for up to 6 patients, allowing for the transport of several dozen patients, attended by a staff of 50 medical workers. Although the train moves at high speed, it accelerates and decelerates smoothly, allowing for medical procedures to be performed during transport.


title: TGV

text: Since July 2017, TGV services are gradually being rebranded as TGV inOui and Ouigo in preparation for the opening of the French HSR market to competition.


title: TGV

text: TGV inOui is SNCF's premium high-speed rail service. The name inOui was chosen because it sounds like the French word "inouï" meaning "extraordinary" (or more literally, "unheard of").


title: TGV

text: Ouigo is SNCF's low-cost high-speed rail service. Trains have a high-density one-class configuration and reduced on-board services. The services traditionally operate from less busy secondary stations, sometimes outside of the city centre. The literal translation of the brand name is "yes go", but the name is also a play on the English homonym, "we go".


title: Trumpism

text: Trumpism is a term for the political ideologies, social emotions, style of governance, political movement, and set of mechanisms for acquiring and keeping control of power associated with Donald Trump and his political base. "Trumpists" and "Trumpian" are terms used to refer to those exhibiting characteristics of Trumpism, whereas political supporters of Trump are known as "Trumpers".


title: Trumpism

text: The precise composition of Trumpism is contentious and is sufficiently complex to overwhelm any single framework of analysis; it has been called an American political variant of the far-right, and the national-populist and neo-nationalist sentiment seen in multiple nations worldwide from the late 2010s to the early 2020s. Though not strictly limited to any one party, Trump supporters became a significant faction of the Republican Party in the United States, with the remainder often characterized as "establishment" in contrast. Some Republicans became members of the Never Trump movement, with several leaving the party in protest of Trump's ascendancy.


title: Trumpism

text: Some commentators have rejected the populist designation for Trumpism and view it instead as part of a trend towards a new form of fascism or neo-fascism, with some referring to it as explicitly fascist and others as authoritarian and illiberal. Others have more mildly identified it as a specific lite version of fascism in the United States. Some historians, including many of those using a "new fascism" classification, write of the hazards of direct comparisons with European fascist regimes of the 1930s, stating that while there are parallels, there are also important dissimilarities.


title: Trumpism

text: The label "Trumpism" has been applied to national-conservative and national-populist movements in other Western democracies, and many politicians outside of the United States have been labeled as staunch allies of Trump or Trumpism, or even as their country's equivalent to Trump, by various news agencies; among them are Silvio Berlusconi, Jair Bolsonaro, Horacio Cartes, Rodrigo Duterte, Pauline Hanson, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Nigel Farage, Hong Joon-Pyo, Boris Johnson, Jarosław Kaczyński, Bidzina Ivanishvili, Marine Le Pen, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Viktor Orbán, Najib Razak, Matteo Salvini, and Geert Wilders.


title: Trumpism

text: Trumpism started its development predominantly during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. For many scholars, it denotes a populist political method that suggests nationalistic answers to political, economic, and social problems. These inclinations are refracted into such policy preferences as immigration restrictionism, trade protectionism, isolationism, and opposition to entitlement reform. As a political method, populism is not driven by any particular ideology. Former National Security Advisor and close Trump advisor John Bolton states this is true of Trump, disputing that "Trumpism" even exists in any meaningful philosophical sense, adding that "[t]he man does not have a philosophy. And people can try and draw lines between the dots of his decisions. They will fail."


title: Trumpism

text: Writing for the "Routledge Handbook of Global Populism" (2019), Olivier Jutel claims, "What Donald Trump reveals is that the various iterations of right-wing American populism have less to do with a programmatic social conservatism or libertarian economics than with enjoyment." Referring to the populism of Trump, sociologist Michael Kimmel states that it "is not a theory [or] an ideology, it's an emotion. And the emotion is righteous indignation that the government is screwing 'us'". Kimmel notes that "Trump is an interesting character because he channels all that sense of what I called 'aggrieved entitlement,'" a term Kimmel defines as "that sense that those benefits to which you believed yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unseen forces larger and more powerful. You feel yourself to be the heir to a great promise, the American Dream, which has turned into an impossible fantasy for the very people who were supposed to inherit it."


title: Trumpism

text: Communications scholar Zizi Papacharissi explains the utility of being ideologically vague, and using terms and slogans that can mean anything the supporter wants them to mean. "When these publics thrive in affective engagement it's because they've found an affective hook that's built around an open signifier that they get to use and reuse and re-employ. So yes, of course you know, President Trump has used MAGA; that's an open signifier that pulls in all of these people, and is open because it allows them all to assign different meanings to it. So MAGA works for connecting publics that are different, because it is open enough to permit people to ascribe their own meaning to it."


title: Trumpism

text: Other contributors to the "Routledge Handbook of Populism" note that populist leaders rather than being ideology driven are instead pragmatic and opportunistic regarding themes, ideas and beliefs that strongly resonate with their followers. Exit polling data suggests the campaign was successful at mobilizing the "white disenfranchised", the lower- to working-class European-Americans who are experiencing growing social inequality and who often have stated opposition to the American political establishment. Ideologically, Trumpism has a right-wing populist accent.


title: Trumpism

text: Historian Peter E. Gordon raises the possibility that "Trump, far from being a violation of the norm, actually signifies an emergent norm of the social order" where the categories of the psychological and political have dissolved. In accounting for Trump's election and ability to sustain stable high approval ratings among a significant segment of voters, Erika Tucker argues in the book "Trump and Political Philosophy" that though all presidential campaigns have strong emotions associated with them, Trump was able to recognize, and then to gain the trust and loyalty of those who, like him felt a particular set of strong emotions about perceived changes in the United States. She notes, "Political psychologist Drew Westen has argued that Democrats are less successful at gauging and responding to affective politics—issues that arouse strong emotional states in citizens."


title: Trumpism

text: Like many academics examining the populist appeal of Trump's messaging, Hidalgo-Tenorio and Benítez-Castro draw on the theories of Ernesto Laclau writing, "The emotional appeal of populist discourse is key to its polarising effects, this being so much so that populism 'would be unintelligible without the affective component.' (Laclau 2005, 11)" Scholars from a wide number of fields have argued that particular affective themes and the dynamics of their impact on social media-connected followers characterize Trump and his supporters.


title: Trumpism

text: Communications scholar Michael Carpini states that "Trumpism is a culmination of trends that have been occurring for several decades. What we are witnessing is nothing short of a fundamental shift in the relationships between journalism, politics, and democracy." Among the shifts, Carpini identifies "the collapsing of the prior [media] regime's presumed and enforced distinctions between news and entertainment." Examining Trump's use of media for the book "Language in the Trump Era", communications professor Marco Jacquemet writes that "It's an approach that, like much of the rest of Trump's ideology and policy agenda, assumes (correctly, it appears) that his audiences care more about shock and entertainment value in their media consumption than almost anything else."


title: Trumpism

text: The perspective is shared among other communication academics, with Plasser & Ulram (2003) describing a media logic which emphasizes "personalization ... a political star system ... [and] sports based dramatization." Olivier Jutel notes that "Donald Trump's celebrity status and reality-TV rhetoric of 'winning' and 'losing' corresponds perfectly to these values", asserting that "Fox News and conservative personalities from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Alex Jones do not simply represent a new political and media voice but embody the convergence of politics and media in which affect and enjoyment are the central values of media production."


title: Trumpism

text: Studying Trump's use of social media, anthropologist Jessica Johnson finds that social emotional pleasure plays a central role writing, "Rather than finding accurate news meaningful, Facebook users find the affective pleasure of connectivity addictive, whether or not the information they share is factual, and that is how communicative capitalism captivates subjects as it holds them captive." Looking back at the world prior to social media, communications researcher Brian L. Ott writes: "I'm nostalgic for the world of television that Neil Postman (1985) argued, produced the 'least well-informed people in the Western world' by packaging news as entertainment. (pp. 106–107) Twitter is producing the most self-involved people in history by treating everything one does or thinks as newsworthy. Television may have assaulted journalism, but Twitter killed it." Commenting on Trump's support among Fox News viewers, Hofstra communications college dean Mark Lukasiewicz has a similar perspective writing, "Tristan Harris famously said that social networks are about 'affirmation, not information'—and the same can be said about cable news, especially in prime time."


title: Trumpism

text: From Kreiss's 2018 account of conservative personalities and media, information became less important than providing a sense of familial bonding, where "family provides a sense of identity, place, and belonging; emotional, social, and cultural support and security; and gives rise to political and social affiliations and beliefs." Hochschild gives the example of one woman who explains the familial bond of trust with the star personalities. "Bill O'Reilly is like a steady, reliable dad. Sean Hannity is like a difficult uncle who rises to anger too quickly. Megyn Kelly is like a smart sister. Then there's Greta Van Susteren. And Juan Williams, who came over from NPR, which was too left for him, the adoptee. They're all different, just like in a family."


title: Trumpism

text: Media scholar Olivier Jutel focuses on the neoliberal privatization and market segmentation of the public square, noting that, "Affect is central to the brand strategy of Fox which imagined its journalism not in terms of servicing the rational citizen in the public sphere but in 'craft[ing] intensive relationships with their viewers' (Jones, 2012: 180) in order to sustain audience share across platforms." In this segmented market, Trump "offers himself as an ego-ideal to an individuated public of enjoyment that coalesce around his media brand as part of their own performance of identity." Jutel cautions that it is not just conservative media companies that benefit from the transformation of news media to conform to values of spectacle and reality-TV drama. "Trump is a definitive product of mediatized politics providing the spectacle that drives ratings and affective media consumption, either as part of his populist movement or as the liberal resistance."


title: Trumpism

text: Researchers give differing emphasis to which emotions are important to followers. Michael Richardson argues in the "Journal of Media and Cultural Studies" that "affirmation, amplification and circulation of disgust is one of the primary affective drivers of Trump's political success." Richardson agrees with Ott about the "entanglement of Trumpian affect and social media crowds" who seek "affective affirmation, confirmation and amplification. Social media postings of crowd experiences accumulate as 'archives of feelings' that are both dynamic in nature and affirmative of social values (Pybus 2015, 239)."


title: Trumpism

text: Using Trump as an example, social trust expert Karen Jones follows philosopher Annette Baier in claiming that the masters of the art of creating trust and distrust are populist politicians and criminals. On this view, it is not moral philosophers who are the experts at discerning different forms of trust, but members of this class of practitioners who "show a masterful appreciation of the ways in which certain emotional states drive out trust and replace it with distrust." Jones sees Trump as an exemplar of this class who recognize that fear and contempt are powerful tools that can reorient networks of trust and distrust in social networks in order to alter how a potential supporter "interprets the words, deeds, and motives of the other." She points out that the tactic is used globally writing, "A core strategy of Donald Trump, both as candidate and president, has been to manufacture fear and contempt towards some undocumented migrants (among other groups). This strategy of manipulating fear and contempt has gone global, being replicated with minor local adjustment in Australia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Italy and the United Kingdom."


title: Trumpism

text: Other academics have made politically urgent warnings about Trumpian authoritarianism, such as Yale sociologist Philip S. Gorski who writes,


title: Trumpism

text: Some academics regard such authoritarian backlash as a feature of liberal democracies. Some have even argued that Trump is a totalitarian capitalist exploiting the "fascist impulses of his "ordinary" supporters that hide in plain sight." Michelle Goldberg, an opinion columnist for "The New York Times", compares "the spirit of Trumpism" to classical fascist themes. The "mobilizing vision" of fascism is of "the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it", which "sounds a lot like MAGA" (Make America Great Again) according to Goldberg. Similarly, like the Trump movement, fascism sees a "need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's historical destiny." They believe in "the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason".


title: Trumpism

text: Conservative columnist George Will considers Trumpism similar to fascism, stating that Trumpism is "a mood masquerading as a doctrine". National unity is based "on shared domestic dreads"—for fascists the "Jews", for Trump the media ("enemies of the people"), "elites" and "globalists". Solutions come not from tedious "incrementalism and conciliation", but from the leader (who claims "only I can fix it") unfettered by procedure. The political base is kept entertained with mass rallies, but inevitably the strongman develops a contempt for those he leads. Both are based on machismo, and in the case of Trumpism, "appeals to those in thrall to country-music manliness: 'We're truck-driving, beer-drinking, big-chested Americans too freedom-loving to let any itsy-bitsy virus make us wear masks.'"


title: Trumpism

text: Disputing the view that the surge of support for Trumpism and Brexit represents a new phenomenon, political scientist Karen Stenner and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt present the argument that Discussing the statistical basis for their conclusions regarding the triggering of such waves, Stenner and Haidt present the view that "authoritarians, by their very nature, want to believe in authorities and institutions; they want to feel they are part of a cohesive community. Accordingly, they seem (if anything) to be modestly inclined toward giving authorities and institutions the benefit of the doubt, and lending them their support until the moment these seem incapable of maintaining 'normative order'"; the authors write that this normative order is regularly threatened by liberal democracy itself because it tolerates a lack of consensus in group values and beliefs, tolerates disrespect of group authorities, nonconformity to group norms, or norms proving questionable, and in general promotes diversity and freedom from domination by authorities. Stenner and Haidt regard such authoritarian waves as a feature of liberal democracies noting that the findings of their 2016 study of Trump and Brexit supporters was not unexpected, as they wrote:


title: Trumpism

text: Author and authoritarianism critic Masha Gessen contrasted the "democratic" strategy of the Republican establishment making policy arguments appealing to the public, with the "autocratic" strategy of appealing to an "audience of one" in Donald Trump. Gessen noted the fear of Republicans that Trump would endorse a primary election opponent or otherwise use his political power to undermine any fellow party members that he felt had betrayed him.


title: Trumpism

text: The 2020 Republican Party platform simply endorsed "the President's America-first agenda", prompting comparisons to contemporary leader-focused party platforms in Russia and China.


title: Trumpism

text: Nostalgia is a staple of American politics but according to Philip Gorski, Trumpian nostalgia is novel because among other things "it severs the traditional connection between greatness and virtue." In the traditional "Puritan narrative, moral decline precedes material and political decline, and a return to the law must precede any return to greatness. ... Not so in Trump's version of nostalgia. In this narrative, decline is brought about by docility and femininity and the return to greatness requires little more than a reassertion of dominance and masculinity. In this way, 'virtue' is reduced to its root etymology of manly bravado." In studies of the men who would become Trump supporters Michael Kimmel describes the nostalgia of male entitlement felt by men who despaired "over whether or not anything could enable them to find a place with some dignity in this new, multicultural, and more egalitarian world. ... These men were angry, but they all looked back nostalgically to a time when their sense of masculine entitlement went unchallenged. They wanted to reclaim their country, restore their rightful place in it, and retrieve their manhood in the process."


title: Trumpism

text: The term that describes the behavior of Kimmel's angry white males is toxic masculinity and according to William Liu, editor of the journal "Psychology of Men and Masculinity", it applies especially to Trump. Kimmel was surprised at the sexual turn the 2016 election took and thinks that Trump is for many men a fantasy figure, an uber-male completely free to indulge every desire. "Many of these guys feel that the current order of things has emasculated them, by which I mean it has taken away their ability to support a family and have great life. Here's a guy who says: 'I can build anything I want. I can do anything I want. I can have the women I want.' They're going, 'This guy is awesome!'"


title: Trumpism

text: Social psychologists Theresa Vescio and Nathaniel Schermerhorn note that "In his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump embodied HM <nowiki>[</nowiki>hegemonic masculinity<nowiki>]</nowiki> while waxing nostalgic for a racially homogenous past that maintained an unequal gender order. Trump performed HM by repeatedly referencing his status as a successful businessman ("blue-collar businessman") and alluding to how tough he would be as president. Further contributing to his enactment of HM, Trump was openly hostile toward gender-atypical women, sexualized gender typical women, and attacked the masculinity of male peers and opponents." In their studies involving 2007 people, they found that endorsement of hegemonic masculinity better predicted support for Trump than other factors, such as support for antiestablishment, antielitist, nativist, racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic perspectives.


title: Trumpism

text: Neville Hoad, an expert on gender issues in South Africa, sees this as a common theme with another strongman leader, Jacob Zuma, comparing his "Zulu Big Man version of toxic masculinity versus a dog whistle white supremacist version; the putative real estate billionaire turned reality television star". Both authoritarian leaders are figureheads living the "masculinist fantasy of freedom" supporters dream of, a dream bound to national mythologies of the good life. According to Hoad, one description of this symbolism comes from Jacques Lacan who describes the supremely masculine mythic leader of the primal horde whose power to satisfy every pleasure or whim has not been castrated. By activating such fantasies, toxic masculine behaviors from opulent displays of greed (the dream palaces of Mar-a-Lago and Nkandla), violent rhetoric, "grab them by the pussy" "locker room" "jokes" to misogynist insults, philandering, and even sexual predatory behavior including allegations of groping and raping become political assets not liabilities.


title: Trumpism

text: Gender role scholar Colleen Clemens describes this toxic masculinity as "a narrow and repressive description of manhood, designating manhood as defined by violence, sex, status and aggression. It's the cultural ideal of manliness, where strength is everything while emotions are a weakness; where sex and brutality are yardsticks by which men are measured, while supposedly 'feminine' traits—which can range from emotional vulnerability to simply not being hypersexual—are the means by which your status as "man" can be taken away." Writing in the "Journal of Human Rights", Kimberly Theidon notes the COVID-19 pandemic's irony of Trumpian toxic masculinity: "Being a tough guy means wearing the mask of masculinity: Being a tough guy means refusing to don a mask that might preserve one's life and the lives of others."


title: Trumpism

text: Tough guy bravado appeared on the internet prior to attack on Congress on January 6, 2021, with one poster writing, "Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in ... . Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die." Of the rioters arrested for the attack on the U.S. Capitol, 88% were men, and 67% were 35 years or older.


title: Trumpism

text: According to 2016 election exit polls, 26% of voters self identified as white evangelical Christians, of whom more than three-fourths in 2017 approved of Trump's performance, most of them approving "very strongly" as reported by a Pew Research Center study. In contrast, approximately two-thirds of non-white evangelicals supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, with 90% of black Protestants also voting for her even though their theological views are similar to evangelicals. According to Yale researcher Philip Gorski, "the question is not so much why evangelicals voted for Trump then—many did not—but why so many white evangelicals did." Gorski's answer to why Trump, and not an orthodox evangelical was the first choice among white evangelicals was simply "because they are also white Christian nationalists and Trumpism is inter alia a reactionary version of white Christian nationalism."


title: Trumpism

text: Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir sees the politics of purity in the white Christian nationalist rhetoric of evangelical supporters, such as the comparison of Nehemiah's wall around Jerusalem to Trump's wall keeping out the enemy, writing, "the notion of the enemy includes 'Mexican migrants', 'filthy' gays, and even Catholics 'led astray by Satan', and the real danger these enemies pose is degradation to a 'blessed—great— ... nation' whose God is the Lord."


title: Trumpism

text: Theologian Michael Horton believes Christian Trumpism represents the confluence of three trends that have come together, namely Christian American exceptionalism, end-times conspiracy, and the prosperity gospel, with Christian Americanism being the narrative that God specially called the United States into being as an extraordinary if not miraculous providence and end-times conspiracy referring to the world's annihilation (figurative or literal) due to some conspiracy of nefarious groups and globalist powers threatening American sovereignty. Horton thinks that what he calls the "cult of Christian Trumpism" blends these three ingredients with "a generous dose of hucksterism" as well as self-promotion and personality cult.


title: Trumpism

text: Evangelical Christian and historian John Fea believes "the church has warned against the pursuit of political power for a long, long time," but that many modern day evangelicals such as Trump advisor and televangelist Paula White ignore these admonitions. Televangelist Jim Bakker praises prosperity gospel preacher White's ability to "walk into the White House at any time she wants to" and have "full access to the King." According to Fea, there are several other "court evangelicals" who have "devoted their careers to endorsing political candidates and Supreme Court justices who will restore what they believe to be the Judeo-Christian roots of the country" and who in turn are called on by Trump to "explain to their followers why Trump can be trusted in spite of his moral failings", including James Dobson, Franklin Graham, Johnnie Moore Jr., Ralph Reed, Gary Bauer, Richard Land, megachurch pastor Mark Burns and Southern Baptist pastor and Fox political commentator Robert Jeffress.


title: Trumpism

text: For prominent Christians who fail to support Trump, the cost is not a simple loss of presidential access but a substantial risk of a firestorm of criticism and backlash, a lesson learned by Timothy Dalrymple, president of the flagship magazine of evangelicals "Christianity Today", and former chief editor Mark Galli, who were condemned by more than two hundred evangelical leaders for co-authoring a letter arguing that Christians were obligated to support the impeachment of Trump.


title: Trumpism

text: Historian Stephen Jaeger traces the history of admonitions against becoming beholden religious courtiers back to the 11th century, with warnings of curses placed on holy men barred from heaven for taking too "keen an interest in the affairs of the state." Dangers to the court clergy were described by Peter of Blois, a 12th-century French cleric, theologian and courtier who "knew that court life is the death of the soul" and that despite participation at court being known to them to be "contrary to God and salvation," the clerical courtiers whitewashed it with a multitude of justifications such as biblical references of Moses being sent by God to the Pharaoh. Pope Pius II opposed the clergy's presence at court, believing it was very difficult for a Christian courtier to "rein in ambition, suppress avarice, tame envy, strife, wrath, and cut off vice, while standing in the midst of these [very] things." The ancient history of such warnings of the dark corrupting influence of power over holy leaders is recounted by Fea who directly compares it to behavior of Trump's court evangelical leaders, warning that Christians are "in jeopardy of making idols out of political leaders by placing our sacred hopes in them."


title: Trumpism

text: Jeffress claims that evangelical leaders' support of Trump is moral regardless of behavior that "Christianity Today"s chief editor called "a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused." Jeffress argues that "the godly principle here is that governments have one responsibility, and that is Romans 13 [which] says to avenge evil doers." This same biblical chapter was used by Jeff Sessions to claim biblical justification for Trump's policy of separating children from immigrant families. Historian Lincoln Muller explains this is one of two types of interpretations of Romans 13 which has been used in American political debates since its founding and is on the side of "the thread of American history that justifies oppression and domination in the name of law and order."


title: Trumpism

text: From Jeffress's reading, government's purpose is as a "strongman to protect its citizens against evildoers", adding: "I don't care about that candidate's tone or vocabulary, I want the meanest toughest son a you-know-what I can find, and I believe that is biblical." Jeffress, who referred to Barack Obama as "paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist," Mitt Romney as a cult follower of a non-Christian religion and Roman Catholicism as a "Satanic" result of "Babylonian mystery religion" traces the Christian libertarian perspective on government's sole role to suppress evil back to Saint Augustine who argued in "The City of God against the Pagans" (426 CE) that government's role is to restrain evil so Christians can peacefully practice their beliefs. Martin Luther similarly believed that government should be limited to checking sin.


title: Trumpism

text: Like Jeffress, Richard Land refused to cut ties with Trump after his reaction to the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, with the explanation that "Jesus did not turn away from those who may have seemed brash with their words or behavior," adding that "now is not the time to quit or retreat, but just the opposite—to lean in closer." Johnnie Moore's explanation for refusing to repudiate Trump after his Charlottesville response was that "you only make a difference if you have a seat at the table." Trinity Forum fellow Peter Wehner warns that "[t]he perennial danger facing Christians is seduction and self-delusion. That's what's happening in the Trump era. The president is using evangelical leaders to shield himself from criticism."


title: Trumpism

text: Evangelical biblical scholar Ben Witherington believes Trump's evangelical apologists' defensive use of the tax collector comparison is false and that retaining a "seat at the table" is supportable only if the Christian leader is admonishing the President to reverse course, explaining that "[t]he sinners and tax collectors were not political officials, so there is no analogy there. Besides, Jesus was not giving the sinners and tax collectors political advice—he was telling them to repent! If that's what evangelical leaders are doing with our President, and telling him when his politics are un-Christian, and explaining to him that racism is an enormous sin and there is no moral equivalency between the two sides in Charlottesville, then well and good. Otherwise, they are complicit with the sins of our leaders."


title: Trumpism

text: Evangelical Bible studies author Beth Moore joins in criticism of the perspective of Trump's evangelicals, writing: "I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive and dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it." Moore warns that "we will be held responsible for remaining passive in this day of seduction to save our own skin while the saints we've been entrusted to serve are being seduced, manipulated, USED and stirred up into a lather of zeal devoid of the Holy Spirit for political gain." Moore's view is that "[w]e can't sanctify idolatry by labeling a leader our Cyrus. We need no Cyrus. We have a king. His name is Jesus."


title: Trumpism

text: Other prominent white evangelicals have taken Bible based stands against Trump, such as Peter Wehner of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center and Russell D. Moore president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. Wehner describes Trump's theology as embodying "a Nietzschean morality rather than a Christian one," that evangelicals' "support for Trump comes at a high cost for Christian witness," and that "Trump's most enduring legacy [may be] a nihilistic political culture, one that is tribalistic, distrustful, and sometimes delusional, swimming in conspiracy theories." Moore sharply distanced himself from Trump's racial rhetoric stating, "The Bible speaks so directly to these issues," and, "that, really, in order to avoid questions of racial unity, one has to evade the Bible itself."


title: Trumpism

text: Presbyterian minister and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Chris Hedges thinks many of Trump's white evangelical supporters resemble those of the German Christians movement of 1930s Germany who also regarded their leader in an idolatrous way, the Christo-fascist idea of a "Volk" messiah, a leader who would act as an instrument of God to restore their country from moral depravity to greatness. Also rejecting the idolatry, John Fea said "Trump takes everything that Jesus taught, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, throws it out the window, exchanges it for a mess of pottage called 'Make America Great Again', and from a Christian perspective for me, that borders on—no, it is a form of idolatry."


title: Trumpism

text: Theologian Greg Boyd challenges the religious right's politicization of Christianity, and the Christian nationalist theory of American exceptionalism, charging that "a significant segment of American evangelicalism is guilty of nationalistic and political idolatry." Boyd compares the cause of "taking America back for God" and policies to force Christian values through political coercion to the aspiration in first century Israel to "take Israel back for God" which caused followers to attempt to fit Jesus into the role of a political messiah. Boyd argues that Jesus declined, demonstrating that "God's mode of operation in the world was no longer going to be nationalistic."


title: Trumpism

text: Boyd asks to consider Christ's example, asking questions such as whether Jesus ever suggested by word or example that Christians should aspire to gaining power in the reigning government of the day, or whether he advocated using civil laws to change the behavior of sinners. Like Fea, Boyd states he is not making the argument of passive political non involvement, writing that "of course our political views will be influenced by our Christian faith" but rather that we must embrace humility and not "christen our views as 'the' Christian view". This humility in Boyd's view requires Christians to reject social domination, the "'power over' others to acquire and secure these things", and that "the only way we individually and collectively represent the kingdom of God is through loving, Christ like, sacrificial acts of service to others. Anything and everything else, however good and noble, lies outside the kingdom of God."


title: Trumpism

text: Horton thinks that rather than engage in what he calls the cult of "Christian Trumpism", Christians should reject turning the "saving gospel into a worldly power", while Fea thinks the Christian response to Trump should instead be those used in the civil rights movement, namely preaching hope not fear; humility, not power to socially dominate others; and responsible reading of history as in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail rather than nostalgia for a prior American Christian utopia that never was.


title: Trumpism

text: Conservative orthodox Christian writer Rod Dreher and theologian Michael Horton have argued that participants in the Jericho March were engaging in "Trump worship", akin to idolatry. In the "National Review", Cameron Hilditch described the movement as: Emma Green in "The Atlantic" blamed pro-Trump, evangelical white Christians and the Jericho March participants for the storming of the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, saying: "The mob carried signs and flag declaring Jesus Saves! and God, Guns & Guts Made America, Let's Keep All Three."


title: Trumpism

text: Sociologist Arlie Hochschild thinks emotional themes in Trump's rhetoric are fundamental, writing that his "speeches—evoking dominance, bravado, clarity, national pride, and personal uplift—inspire an emotional transformation," deeply resonating with their "emotional self-interest". Hochschild's perspective is that Trump is best understood as an "emotions candidate", arguing that comprehending the emotional self-interests of voters explains the paradox of the success of such politicians raised by Thomas Frank's book "What's the Matter with Kansas?", an anomaly which motivated her five-year immersive research into the emotional dynamics of the Tea Party movement which she believes has mutated into Trumpism.


title: Trumpism

text: The book resulting from her research, "Strangers in Their Own Land", was named one of the "6 books to understand Trump's Win" by the "New York Times". Hochschild claims it is wrong for progressives to assume that well educated individuals have mainly been persuaded by political rhetoric to vote against their rational self interest through appeals to the "bad angels" of their nature: "their greed, selfishness, racial intolerance, homophobia, and desire to get out of paying taxes that go to the unfortunate." She grants that the appeal to bad angels are made by Trump, but that it "obscures another—to the right wing's good angels—their patience in waiting in line in scary economic times, their capacity for loyalty, sacrifice, and endurance", qualities she describes as a part of a motivating narrative she calls their "deep story", a social contract narrative that appears to be widely shared in other countries as well. She thinks Trump's approach towards his audience creates group cohesiveness among his followers by exploiting a crowd phenomenon Emile Durkheim called "collective effervescence", "a state of emotional excitation felt by those who join with others they take to be fellow members of a moral or biological tribe ... to affirm their unity and, united, they feel secure and respected."


title: Trumpism

text: Rhetorically, Trumpism employs absolutist framings and threat narratives characterized by a rejection of the political establishment. The absolutist rhetoric emphasizes non-negotiable boundaries and moral outrage at their supposed violation. The rhetorical pattern within a Trump rally is common for authoritarian movements. First, elicit a sense of depression, humiliation and victimhood. Second, separate the world into two opposing groups: a relentlessly demonized set of others versus those who have the power and will to overcome them. This involves vividly identifying the enemy supposedly causing the current state of affairs and then promoting paranoid conspiracy theories and fearmongering to inflame fear and anger. After cycling these first two patterns through the populace, the final message aim to produce a cathartic release of pent-up ochlocracy and mob energy, with a promise that salvation is at hand because there is a powerful leader who will deliver the nation back to its former glory.


title: Trumpism

text: This three-part pattern was first identified in 1932 by Roger Money-Kyrle and later published in his "Psychology of Propaganda". A constant barrage of sensationalistic rhetoric serves to rivet media attention while achieving multiple political objectives, not the least of which is that it serves to obscure actions such as profound neoliberal deregulation. One study gives the example that significant environmental deregulation occurred during the first year of the Trump administration due to its concurrent use of spectacular racist rhetoric but escaped much media attention. According to the authors, this served political objectives of dehumanizing its targets, eroding democratic norms, and consolidating power by emotionally connecting with and inflaming resentments among the base of followers but most importantly served to distract media attention from deregulatory policymaking by igniting intense media coverage of the distractions, precisely due to their radically transgressive nature.


title: Trumpism

text: Trump's skill with personal branding allowed him to effectively market himself as the Money-Kyrle extraordinary leader by leveraging his celebrity status and name recognition. As one of the communications director for the MAGA super PAC put it in 2016, "Like Hercules, Donald Trump is a work of fiction." Journalism professor Mark Danner explains that "week after week for a dozen years millions of Americans saw Donald J. Trump portraying the business magus [in "The Apprentice"], the grand vizier of capitalism, the wise man of the boardroom, a living confection whose every step and word bespoke gravitas and experience and power and authority and ... money. Endless amounts of money."


title: Trumpism

text: Political science scholar Andrea Schneiker regards the heavily promoted Trump public persona as that of a superhero, a genius but still "an ordinary citizen that, in case of an emergency, uses his superpowers to save others, that is, his country. He sees a problem, knows what has to be done in order to solve it, has the ability to fix the situation and does so. According to the branding strategy of Donald Trump ... a superhero is needed to solve the problems of ordinary Americans and the nation as such, because politicians are not able to do so. Hence, the superhero per definition is an anti-politician. Due to his celebrity status and his identity as entertainer, Donald Trump can thereby be considered to be allowed to take extraordinary measures and even to break rules."


title: Trumpism

text: According to civil rights lawyer Burt Neuborne and political theorist William E. Connolly, Trumpist rhetoric employs tropes similar to those used by fascists in Germany to persuade citizens (at first a minority) to give up democracy, by using a barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, threats, xenophobia, national-security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never-ending search for scapegoats. Neuborne found twenty parallel practices, such as creating what amounts to an "alternate reality" in adherents' minds, through direct communications, by nurturing a fawning mass media and by deriding scientists to erode the notion of objective truth; organizing carefully orchestrated mass rallies; bitterly attacking judges when legal cases are lost or rejected; using an uninterrupted stream of lies, half-truths, insults, vituperation and innuendo designed to marginalize, demonize and eventually destroy opponents; making jingoistic appeals to ultranationalist fervor; and promising to slow, stop and even reverse the flow of "undesirable" ethnic groups who are cast as scapegoats for the nation's ills.


title: Trumpism

text: Connolly presents a similar list in his book "Aspirational Fascism" (2017), adding comparisons of the integration of theatrics and crowd participation with rhetoric, involving grandiose bodily gestures, grimaces, hysterical charges, dramatic repetitions of alternate reality falsehoods, and totalistic assertions incorporated into signature phrases that audiences are strongly encouraged to join in chanting. Despite the similarities, Connolly stresses that Trump is no Nazi but "is rather, an aspirational fascist who pursues crowd adulation, hyperaggressive nationalism, white triumphalism, and militarism, pursues a law-and-order regime giving unaccountable power to the police, and is a practitioner of a rhetorical style that regularly creates fake news and smears opponents to mobilize support for the Big Lies he advances."


title: Trumpism

text: Reporting on the crowd dynamics of Trumpist rallies has documented expressions of the Money-Kyrle pattern and associated stagecraft, with some comparing the symbiotic dynamics of crowd pleasing to that of the sports entertainment style of events which Trump was involved with since the 1980s. Critical theory scholar Douglas Kellner compares the elaborate staging of Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" with that used with Trump supporters using the example of the preparation of photo op sequences and aggressive hyping of huge attendance expected for Trump's 2015 primary event in Mobile, Alabama, when the media coverage repeatedly cuts between the Trump jet circling the stadium, the rising excitement of rapturous admirers below, the motorcade and the final triumphal entrance of the individual Kellner claims is being presented as the "political savior to help them out with their problems and address their grievances".


title: Trumpism

text: Connolly thinks the performance draws energy from the crowd's anger as it channels it, drawing it into a collage of anxieties, frustrations and resentments about malaise themes, such as deindustrialization, offshoring, racial tensions, political correctness, a more humble position for the United States in global security, economics and so on. Connolly observes that animated gestures, pantomiming, facial expressions, strutting and finger pointing are incorporated as part of the theater, transforming the anxiety into anger directed at particular targets, concluding that "each element in a Trump performance flows and folds into the others until an aggressive resonance machine is formed that is more intense than its parts."


title: Trumpism

text: Some academics point out that the narrative common in the popular press describing the psychology of such crowds is a repetition of a 19th-century theory by Gustave Le Bon when organized crowds were seen by political elites as potentially anarchic threats to the social order. In his book "" (1895), Le Bon described a sort of collective contagion uniting a crowd into a near religious frenzy, reducing members to barbaric, if not subhuman levels of consciousness with mindless anarchic goals. Since such a description depersonalizes supporters, this type of Le Bon analysis is criticized because the would-be defenders of liberal democracy simultaneously are dodging responsibility for investigating grievances while also unwittingly accepting the same us vs. them framing of illiberalism. Connolly acknowledges the risks but considers it more risky to ignore that Trumpian persuasion is successful due to deliberate use of techniques evoking more mild forms of affective contagion.


title: Trumpism

text: The absolutist rhetoric employed heavily favors crowd reaction over veracity, with a large number of falsehoods which Trump presents as facts. Drawing on Harry G. Frankfurt's book "On Bullshit", political science professor Matthew McManus points out that it is more precise to identify Trump as a bullshitter whose sole interest is to persuade, and not a liar (e.g. Richard Nixon) who takes the power of truth seriously and so deceitfully attempts to conceal it. Trump by contrast is indifferent to the truth or unaware of it. Unlike conventional lies of politicians exaggerating their accomplishments, Trump's lies are egregious, making lies about easily verifiable facts. At one rally Trump stated his father "came from Germany", even though Fred Trump was born in New York City.


title: Trumpism

text: Trump is surprised when his falsehoods are contradicted, as was the case when leaders at the 2018 United Nations General Assembly burst into laughter at his boast that he had accomplished more in his first two years than any other United States president. Visibly startled, Trump responded to the audience: "I didn't expect that reaction." Trump lies about the trivial, such as claiming that there was no rain on the day of his inauguration when in fact it did rain, as well as making grandiose "Big Lies," such as claiming that Obama founded ISIS, or promoting the birther movement, a conspiracy theory which claims that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. Connolly points to the similarities of such reality-bending gaslighting with fascist and post Soviet techniques of propaganda including Kompromat (scandalous material), stating that "Trumpian persuasion draws significantly upon the repetition of Big Lies."


title: Trumpism

text: Journalist Elaina Plott suggests ideology is not as important as other characteristics of Trumpism. Plott cites political analyst Jeff Roe, who observed Trump "understood" and acted on the trend among Republican voters to be "less ideological" but "more polarized". Republicans are now more willing to accept policies like government mandated health care coverage for pre-existing conditions or trade tariffs, formerly disdained by conservatives as burdensome government regulations. At the same time, strong avowals of support for Trump and aggressive partisanship have become part of Republican election campaigning—in at least some parts of America—reaching down even to non-partisan campaigns for local government which formerly were collegial and issue-driven. Research by political scientist Marc Hetherington and others has found Trump supporters tend to share a "worldview" transcending political ideology, agreeing with statements like "the best strategy is to play hardball, even if it means being unfair." In contrast, those who agree with statements like "cooperation is the key to success" tend to prefer Trump's adversary former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.


title: Trumpism

text: On January 31, 2021, a detailed overview of the attempt by combative Trump supporters to subvert the election of the United States was published in "The New York Times". Journalist Nicholas Lemann writes of the disconnect between some of Trump's campaign rhetoric and promises, and what he accomplished once in office—and the fact that the difference seemed to bother very few supporters. The campaign themes being anti-free-trade nationalism, defense of Social Security, attacks on big business, "building that big, beautiful wall and making Mexico pay for it", repealing Obama's Affordable Care Act, a trillion dollar infrastructure-building program. The accomplishments being "conventional" Republican policies and legislation—substantial tax cuts, rollbacks of federal regulations, and increases in military spending. Many have noted that instead of the Republican National Convention issuing the customary "platform" of policies and promises for the 2020 campaign, it offered a "one-page resolution" stating that the party was not "going to have a new platform, but instead ... 'has and will continue to enthusiastically support the president's America-first agenda.'"


title: Trumpism

text: An alternate nonideological circular definition of Trumpism widely held among Trump activists was reported by Saagar Enjeti, chief Washington correspondent for "The Hill", who stated: "I was frequently told by people wholly within the MAGA camp that trumpism meant anything Trump does, ergo nothing that he did is a departure from trumpism."


title: Trumpism

text: Trumpism differs from classical Abraham Lincoln Republicanism in many ways regarding free trade, immigration, equality, checks and balances in federal government, and the separation of church and state. Peter J. Katzenstein of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center believes that Trumpism rests on three pillars, namely nationalism, religion and race. According to Jeff Goodwin, Trumpism is characterized by five key elements: social conservatism, neoliberal capitalism, economic nationalism, nativism, and white nationalism.


title: Trumpism

text: At the 2021 CPAC conference, Trump gave his own definition of what defines Trumpism: "What it means is great deals, ... . Like the USMCA replacement of the horrible NAFTA. ... It means low taxes and eliminated job killing regulations, ... . It means strong borders, but people coming into our country based on a system of merit. ... [I]t means no riots in the streets. It means law enforcement. It means very strong protection for the second amendment and the right to keep and bear arms. ... [I]t means a strong military and taking care of our vets ... ."


title: Trumpism

text: Social psychology research into the Trump movement, such as that of Bob Altemeyer, Thomas F. Pettigrew, and Karen Stenner, views the Trump movement as primarily being driven by the psychological predispositions of its followers. Altemeyer and other researchers such as Pettigrew emphasize that no claim is made that these factors provide a complete explanation, mentioning other research showing that important political and historical factors (reviewed elsewhere in this article) are also involved. The academic peer-reviewed journal "Social Psychological and Personality Science" published the article "Group-Based Dominance and Authoritarian Aggression Predict Support for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election", describing a study concluding that Trump followers have a distinguishing preference for strongly hierarchical and ethnocentric social orders that favor their in-group.


title: Trumpism

text: In a non-academic book which he co-authored with John Dean entitled "Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers", Altemeyer describes research which reaches the same conclusions. Despite disparate and inconsistent beliefs and ideologies, a coalition of such followers can become cohesive and broad in part because each individual "compartmentalizes" their thoughts and they are free to define their sense of the threatened tribal in-group in their own terms, whether it is predominantly related to their cultural or religious views (e.g. the mystery of evangelical support for Trump), nationalism (e.g. the Make America Great Again slogan), or their race (maintaining a white majority).


title: Trumpism

text: Altemeyer, MacWilliams, Feldman, Choma, Hancock, Van Assche and Pettigrew claim that instead of directly attempting to measure such ideological, racial or policy views, supporters of such movements can be reliably predicted by using two social psychology scales (singly or in combination), namely right-wing authoritarian (RWA) measures which were developed in the 1980s by Altemeyer and other authoritarian personality researchers, and the social dominance orientation (SDO) scale developed in the 1990s by social dominance theorists.


title: Trumpism

text: In May 2019, Monmouth University Polling Institute conducted a study in collaboration with Altemeyer in order to empirically test the hypothesis using the SDO and RWA measures. The finding was that social dominance orientation and affinity for authoritarian leadership are highly correlated with followers of Trumpism. Altemeyer's perspective and his use of an authoritarian scale and SDO to identify Trump followers is not uncommon. His study was a further confirmation of the earlier mentioned studies discussed in MacWilliams (2016), Feldman (2020), Choma and Hancock (2017), and Van Assche & Pettigrew (2016).


title: Trumpism

text: The research does not imply that the followers always behave in an authoritarian manner but that expression is contingent, which means there is reduced influence if it is not triggered by fear and what the subject perceives as threats. The research is global and similar social psychological techniques for analyzing Trumpism have demonstrated their effectiveness at identifying adherents of similar movements in Europe, including those Belgium and France (Lubbers & Scheepers, 2002; Swyngedouw & Giles, 2007; Van Hiel & Mervielde, 2002; Van Hiel, 2012), the Netherlands (Cornelis & Van Hiel, 2014) and Italy (Leone, Desimoni & Chirumbolo, 2014). Quoting comments from participants in a series of focus groups made up of people who had voted for Democrat Obama in 2012 but flipped to Trump in 2016, pollster Diane Feldman noted the anti-government, anti-coastal-elite anger: "'They think they're better than us, they're P.C., they're virtue-signallers.' '[Trump] doesn't come across as one of those people who think they're better than us and are screwing us.' 'They lecture us.' 'They don't even go to church.' 'They're in charge, and they're ripping us off.'"


title: Trumpism

text: Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich explained the central role of dominance in his speech "Principles of Trumpism", comparing the needed leadership style to that of a violent bear. Psychology researcher Dan P. McAdams thinks a better comparison is to the dominance behavior of alpha male chimpanzees such as Yeroen, the subject of an extensive study of chimp social behavior conducted by renowned primatologist Frans de Waal. Christopher Boehm, a professor of biology and anthropology agrees, writing, "his model of political posturing has echoes of what I saw in the wild in six years in Tanzania studying the Gombe chimpanzees," and "seems like a classic alpha display."


title: Trumpism

text: Using the example of Yeroen, McAdams describes the similarities: "On Twitter, Trump's incendiary tweets are like Yeroen's charging displays. In chimp colonies, the alpha male occasionally goes berserk and starts screaming, hooting, and gesticulating wildly as he charges toward other males nearby. Pandemonium ensues as rival males cower in fear ... Once the chaos ends, there is a period of peace and order, wherein rival males pay homage to the alpha, visiting him, grooming him, and expressing various forms of submission. In Trump's case, his tweets are designed to intimidate his foes and rally his submissive base ... These verbal outbursts reinforce the president's dominance by reminding everybody of his wrath and his force."


title: Trumpism

text: Primatologist Dame Jane Goodall explains that like the dominance performances of Trump, "In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: Stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position." The comparison has been echoed by political observers sympathetic to Trump. Nigel Farage, an enthusiastic backer of Trump, stated that in the 2016 United States presidential debates where Trump loomed up on Clinton, he "looked like a big silverback gorilla", and added that "he is that big alpha male. The leader of the pack!"


title: Trumpism

text: McAdams points out the audience gets to vicariously share in the sense of dominance due to the parasocial bonding that his performance produces for his fans, as shown by Shira Gabriel's research studying the phenomenon in Trump's role in "The Apprentice". McAdams writes that the "television audience vicariously experienced the world according to Donald Trump", a world where Trump says "Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat."


title: Trumpism

text: Cultural anthropologist Paul Stoller thinks Trump masterfully employed the fundamentals of celebrity culture-glitz, illusion and fantasy to construct a shared alternate reality where lies become truth and reality's resistance to one's own dreams are overcome by the right attitude and bold self-confidence. Trump's father indoctrinated his children from an early age into the sort of positive thinking approach to reality advocated by the family's pastor Norman Vincent Peale. Trump boasted that Peale considered him the greatest student of his philosophy that regards facts as not important, because positive attitudes will instead cause what you "image" to materialize. Trump biographer Gwenda Blair thinks Trump took Peale's self-help philosophy and "weaponized it".


title: Trumpism

text: Robert Jay Lifton, a scholar of psychohistory and authority on the nature of cults, emphasizes the importance of understanding Trumpism "as an assault on reality". A leader has more power if he is in any part successful at making truth irrelevant to his followers. Trump biographer Timothy L. O'Brien agrees, stating: "It is a core operating principle of Trumpism. If you constantly attack objective reality, you are left as the only trustworthy source of information, which is one of his goals for his relationship with his supporters—that they should believe no one else but him." Lifton believes Trump is a purveyor of a solipsistic reality which is hostile to facts and is made collective by amplifying frustrations and fears held by his community of zealous believers.


title: Trumpism

text: Social psychologists refer to this as collective narcissism, a commonly held and strong emotional investment in the idea that one's group has a special status in society. It is often accompanied by chronic expressions of intolerance towards out-groups, intergroup aggression and frequent expressions of group victimhood whenever the in-group feels threatened by perceived criticisms or lack of proper respect for the in-group. Identity of group members is closely tied to the collective identity expressed by its leader, motivating multiple studies to examine its relationship to authoritarian movements. Collective narcissism measures have been shown to be a powerful predictor of membership in such movements including Trump's.


title: Trumpism

text: In his book "Believe Me" which details Trump's exploitation of white evangelical politics of fear, Messiah College history professor John Fea points out the narcissistic nature of the fanciful appeals to nostalgia, noting that "In the end, the practice of nostalgia is inherently selfish because it focuses entirely on our own experience of the past and not on the experience of others. For example, people nostalgic for the world of "Leave It to Beaver" may fail to recognize that other people, perhaps even some of the people living in the Cleaver's suburban "paradise" of the 1950s, were not experiencing the world in a way that they would describe as 'great.' Nostalgia can give us tunnel vision. Its selective use of the past fails to recognize the complexity and breadth of the human experience ... ."


title: Trumpism

text: According to Fea, the hopelessness of achieving such fanciful versions of an idealized past "causes us to imagine a future filled with horror" making anything unfamiliar the fodder for conspiratorial narratives that easily mobilize white evangelicals who cannot summon "the kind of spiritual courage necessary to overcome fear." As a result, they not only embrace these fears but are easily captivated by a strongman such as Trump who repeats and amplifies their fears while posing as the deliverer from them. In his review of Fea's analysis of the impact of conspiracy theories on white evangelical Trump supporters, scholar of religious politics David Gutterman writes: "The greater the threat, the more powerful the deliverance." Gutterman's view is that "Donald J. Trump did not invent this formula; evangelicals have, in their lack of spiritual courage, demanded and gloried in this message for generations. Despite the literal biblical reassurance to 'fear not,' white evangelicals are primed for fear, their identity is stoked by fear, and the sources of fear are around every unfamiliar turn.


title: Trumpism

text: Social theory scholar John Cash notes that disaster narratives of impending horrors have a broader audience than a single community whose identity is associated with specific collectively held certainties offered by white evangelical leaders, pointing to a 2010 Pew study which found that 41 percent of those in the US think that the world will either definitely or probably be destroyed by the middle of the century. Cash points out that certainties may be found in other narratives which also have the unifying effect of binding like minded individuals into shared "us versus them" narratives such as those based on race or political absolutisms. Cash notes that all political systems must endure some such exposure to the lure of narcissism, fantasy, illogicality and distortion. Further, Cash thinks that psychoanalytic theorist Joel Whitebook is correct that "Trumpism as a social experience can be understood as a psychotic like phenomenon, that "[Trumpism is] an intentional [...] attack on our relation to reality." Whitebook thinks Trump's playbook is like that of Putin's strategist Vladislav Surkov who employs "ceaseless shapeshifting, appealing to nationalist skinheads one moment and human rights groups the next."


title: Trumpism

text: Cash makes comparisons to an "Alice in Wonderland" world when describing Trump's adept ability to hold a looking glass up to followers with disparate fantasies by seemingly embracing all of them in a series of contradictory tweets and pronouncements. Cash cites examples such as Trump appearing to support and encourage the "very fine people" among the "neo-Nazi protestors [who] carried torches that were clear signifiers of a nostalgia" after Charlottesville or for audiences with felt grievances about America's first black president, conspiracy fantasies such as the claim that Obama wiretapped him. Cash writes: "Unlike the resilient Alice, who, having stepped through the looking-glass, insists on truth and accuracy when confronted by a world of reversals, contradictions, nonsense and irrationality, Trump reverses this process. Captivated by his own image and, hence, both unwilling and unable to step through the looking-glass for fear of disturbing and dissolving that narcissistic fascination with his preferred self-image, Trump has dragged the uninhibited and distorted world of the other side of the looking-glass into our shared world."


title: Trumpism

text: Although the leader possesses dominant ownership of the reality shared by the group, Lifton sees important differences between Trumpism and typical cults, such as not advancing a totalist ideology and that isolation from the outside world is not used to preserve group cohesion. Lifton does identify multiple similarities with the kinds of cults disparaging the fake world that outsiders are deluded by in preference for their true reality—a world that transcends the illusions and false information created by the cult's titanic enemies. Persuasion techniques similar to those of cults are used such as indoctrination employing constant echoing of catch phrases (via rally response, retweet, or Facebook share), or in participatory response to the guru's like utterances either in person or in online settings. Examples include the use of call and response ("Clinton" triggers "lock her up"; "immigrants" triggers "build that wall"; "who will pay for it?" triggers "Mexico"), thereby deepening the sense of participation with the transcendent unity between the leader and the community. Participants and observers at rallies have remarked on the special kind of liberating feeling that is often experienced which Lifton calls a "high state" that "can even be called experiences of transcendence".