The Travails of Trumpification Revisited

With Donald Trump’s second presidential term now underway, it is the perfect time to pick up your copy of Timothy W. Luke’s The Travails of Trumpification, from Telos Press Publishing. Save 25% on the paperback edition of The Travails of Trumpification by purchasing it in our online store and using the coupon code TRAVAILS25 during checkout. The journal Educational Philosophy and Theory published a collection of reviews of The Travails of Trumpification in 2022, excerpts of which appear below. Read the full set of reviews here (subscription required).

Nancy Love:

As he traces Trump’s rise to power, Luke zeroes in on crucial issues in contemporary politics, such as environmental nationalism, Covid-19 policies, gun control, immigration law, Black Lives Matter and police brutality, ‘Stop the Steal’ and the January 6 insurrection. Taken together, Luke’s reflections constitute a fascinating ‘history of the present’ that attempts to define the ongoing phenomenon of ‘trumpification.’ . . .

Most important, Luke’s essays show that citizens and scholars, politicians and pundits, who would grapple with trumpification need to recognise its complexity, fluidity, and multiplicity. From essay to essay, ‘the Trump Zone’ begins to resemble the kaleidoscopic reflections of a disco ball—perhaps an appropriate metaphor for Trump’s politics. Luke identifies these crucial features of trumpification: the combination of rural, poor, white, and underemployed constituents with a well-funded ‘expertocracy’; the diversity of so-called single-issue voters, such as the gun lobby, and their continued presence in a ‘silent majority’ increasingly marginalised by corporate power; and the Constitutional revisionism evident in ‘reimagining corporations as persons, money as speech, wealth as rights, ideology as image, parties as syndicates, and government as spectacle’. Together these features reveal the slipperiness (my term) of the ‘normal’ in politics today and the challenges that face those committed to sustaining political decorum, legal order, and constitutional patriotism.Continue reading in TelosScope →

Telos 210 (Spring 2025): Rethinking State Power

Telos 210 (Spring 2025): Rethinking State Power is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.

Frustrating the hopes of cosmopolitans and globalists, state power is back. Rather than imagining a replacement of sovereignty with law, political debates now revolve around the particular forms that state sovereignty might take. Even Europe, long seeing itself as the place from which a new international legal order might expand its reach, is reinvesting in military power to protect its sovereignty from the threats posed by Russia, China, and, in some ways, the United States. Yet this realization about the continuing centrality of the state does not mean an abandonment of the moral imperatives and prejudices of the people. On the contrary, state power is being recognized as the instrument through which the people can exercise their will, even as the state places constraints on popular sovereignty. The essays in this issue of Telos consider the ways in which state power interacts with popular attitudes and social institutions in order to establish the basis for sovereignty and law.

Telos 210 (Spring 2025): Rethinking State Power

Introduction
David Pan

The Use and Abuse of Rousseau’s The Social Contract in Modern Political Thought: Toward a Reinterpretation
Mikkel Flohr

The Paradox of Self-Transformation, or, Could Totalitarianism Ever Succeed?
Wolfhart Totschnig

If We Could Stop Fighting Ourselves: Could the Implementation of Günther Jakobs’s Feindstrafrecht Bring About a More Fair Criminal Justice System?
Beau Mullen

Navigating Tension and Integration: Cultivating Positive Interaction between Governance and State-Building
Yuxiao Han

The Tensions between Socioeconomic Reforms and Islamic Doctrines in Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030
Rumy Hasan

Ideas of History and the History of Ideas: The Case of the Rustat Monument
Jay Mens

Digital Sovereignty as Postliberalism: A Response to Milton Mueller’s Open Letter
Johannes Thumfart

Prospects for Trump’s Second Presidency

The Trump Restoration
Mark G. E. Kelly

Trump and the “Golden Age”
Greg Melleuish

Making the Hive Great Again: Spiritual Assault and the Politics of Erasure
Jay A. Gupta

Failure Is in the Cards
Paul W. Kahn

A Clash of Accelerationism and Adjudication: DOGE’s Attacks on the Administrative State
Timothy W. Luke

The Carnival King
Jesse Whitfield

Prospects for Trump’s Second Term: From Economy to Politics . . . and Back!
Michael Marder

Trump, Populism, and the New Class
David Pan

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