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Melanie Phillips
The fissure in Trumpworld

The fissure in Trumpworld

The argument over Ukraine stands proxy for deeper divisions

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Melanie Phillips
Mar 12, 2025
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Tucker Carlson interviewing President Vladimir Putin, February 2024

This is an expanded version of my column in The Times (£)

The uproar over American policy on Ukraine has illuminated something that has been obscured about the constituency that supports President Donald Trump.

With his epic disruption of the established order both at home and across the world, the general assumption is that Trumpism is a singular way of looking at things. That it is, itself, a Thing.

Depending on whether you love him or hate him, Trump is either returning America to sanity and renewing the compact of citizenship between government and the public; or he is a capricious strongman who is turning the presidency into a Mafia-style protection racket and himself into a kind of emperor.

In other words, what he stands for is viewed through the lens of Trump’s own personality and behaviour.

However, the idea that his support base is united around one way of thinking and that Trumpworld is a monolithic political force is wrong. There’s a deep fissure running through it, with Ukraine on one side of the chasm.

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