I've said it before and I'll say it again, Trumpism is merely the term applied to what was already starting in the Republican party because he was it's first president--he's merely the current face of it and once he's out they'll know what to do and not do in the future so it doesn't look quite as bad as it is, and if anything will try broadening it's appeal since Trump himself is no longer attached to it.
Yep. You can see it bubble up through various Presidential and (one VP candidate) over the years. Pat Buchanan, Morry Taylor, Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum.Huckabee, Santorum, etc. were something different though: The culture war they were fighting in was centered around religion. Trumpism is part of a secular culture war, centered more on ethnic and national identity than religious adherence. In the 2016 primaries, for example, Trump did best with Evangelicals who don't actually go to church. From Peter Beinart's 2017 column on this:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/breaking-faith/517785/But non-churchgoing conservatives didn’t flock to Trump only because he articulated their despair. He also articulated their resentments. For decades, liberals have called the Christian right intolerant. When conservatives disengage from organized religion, however, they don’t become more tolerant. They become intolerant in different ways. Research shows that evangelicals who don’t regularly attend church are less hostile to gay people than those who do. But they’re more hostile to African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims. In 2008, the University of Iowa’s Benjamin Knoll noted that among Catholics, mainline Protestants, and born-again Protestants, the less you attended church, the more anti-immigration you were. (This may be true in Europe as well. A recent thesis at Sweden’s Uppsala University, by an undergraduate named Ludvig Broomé, compared supporters of the far-right Swedish Democrats with people who voted for mainstream candidates. The former were less likely to attend church, or belong to any other community organization.)
How might religious nonattendance lead to intolerance? Although American churches are heavily segregated, it’s possible that the modest level of integration they provide promotes cross-racial bonds. In their book, Religion and Politics in the United States, Kenneth D. Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown reference a different theory: that the most-committed members of a church are more likely than those who are casually involved to let its message of universal love erode their prejudices.
Whatever the reason, when cultural conservatives disengage from organized religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasizing morality and religion and emphasizing race and nation. Trump is both a beneficiary and a driver of that shift.
