Trumpism is dead, long live populism!

Donald Trump is done for. Trumpism too. That’s the main takeaway of the Midterms. Many of the candidates Trump backed performed badly and Trump’s own incessant meddling in the Republican campaign seems to have turned voters off. That curious, manic, sometimes amusing little epoch in modern Western politics – the Trump era – is over.

But anyone who thinks this means populism is over is kidding themselves. Those folk of a more technocratic bent who are currently clinking their glasses of champagne at the prospect that populism is heading for the graveyard of bad ideas are in for a rude awakening. For there’s another takeaway from these Midterms – Trumpism might be dead, but populism lives.

Trump’s humiliation is undeniable. There will be many reasons the Republicans didn’t do as well as expected, with that noisily predicted Red Wave turning out to be more of a red dribble. But a key one is Trump. His boys took a beating.

TV’s Dr Mehmet Oz, loudly backed by Trump, lost the Republicans’ Senate seat to John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Trump-anointed candidates Don Bolduc and Blake Masters did badly in New Hampshire and Arizona respectively. Trump fave Herschel Walker appears to have underperformed in the race to be Senator in Georgia. It looks like there will be a run-off there. Strikingly, as NBC reports, the feeling in the GOP is that they’ve got to ‘keep Trump away from Georgia’. Trump love has become a kiss of death for aspiring politicians.

ABC reckons that at least 14 of Trump’s picks have lost their election bids. Even a top Trump adviser now says, ‘This is a sinking ship’. Trump himself is reportedly ‘fuming’, stewing at his Mar-a-Lago estate over his failure to use the Midterms to reassert the politics of MAGA. What will become of his much-trailed ‘big announcement’ as to whether he’s going to run in 2024 remains to be seen. Surely even Trump is not so bonkers as to run after so many of his picks fell flat and when the most recent poll suggests almost 55 per cent of Americans have an unfavourable view of him.

Wither populism? Not so fast. The decline and fall of Trump’s brash political brand wasn’t the only story of the Midterms. There was also the rise and rise of Ron DeSantis. DeSantis’s star is soaring. In 2018 he won the governorship of Florida by one percentage point. In these Midterms he won by almost 20 percentage points. He thrashed the record margin achieved by Jeb Bush when he won in Florida by 12.8 percentage points.

DeSantis’s win has bucked so many trends. He won in Florida’s heavily Latino counties. No Republican candidate for governor has won those places in a generation. He even won in Miami-Dade County, heavily Cuban, and ‘historically a huge source of Democratic votes’, in CNN’s words. This was ‘the most eye-popping outcome in his blowout victory over Democrat Charlie Crist’, CNN says.

DeSantis clearly excites voters. He’s changed minds and won hearts. And how has he done this? With populist policies and populist ideas.

From Covid to ‘wokeness’, DeSantis rejects cultural-elite thinking and does his own thing. He rejected lockdowns and mask mandates. He even bigged up Florida as a refuge for the lockdown-weary. ‘Florida has become the escape hatch for those chafing under authoritarian, arbitrary and seemingly never-ending mandates and restrictions’, he said in January this year.

He stands up to ‘woke indoctrination’ in schools. He opposes the teaching of critical race theory on the basis that guilt-tripping white kids about their race grates against ‘the fundamental truth that all individuals are equal before the law and have inalienable rights’.

He has outlawed ‘classroom instruction’ on issues relating to ‘sexual orientation or gender identity’ for schoolkids under the age of ten, which some Dems predictably slammed as homophobic and transphobic, but which many parents, including Latino parents, clearly consider a very good thing. Most normal people don’t want their nine-year-old to be told there are a hundred genders.

He’s taking on big corporations too, rather putting the left to shame with his willingness to stand up to big businesses. When Disney CEO Bob Chapek slammed DeSantis’s law against teaching kids about sex and gender, DeSantis responded by introducing a law that will dissolve Reedy Creek, an area of around 40 square miles that houses the Walt Disney Resort and over which the Disney company enjoys sweeping powers, including powers of taxation. Even the Washington Post sounded begrudgingly impressed that DeSantis is confronting ‘corporate America’.

Here’s the thing about DeSantis: he does populism properly. He does it far more thoughtfully than Trump ever did. Many American voters knew Trump was a blunt instrument. But they were willing to wield him because they really wanted to make a point against the ancien regime of technocracy, paternalism and illiberalism. Voters made a pact with that buffoon in order to make it clear that they wanted political change, that they were sick and tired of being looked down upon by the Democratic establishment in particular as a problematic blob in constant need of correction and cancellation. That they have now discarded the truncheon of Trumpism does not mean they’ve put away their populist desires. They just know that a smarter political weapon is needed now.

And that could be DeSantis. Trump’s fall and his rise suggest populism isn’t dying but rather is being refined. It is becoming more intellectually substantial, more confident. If Trump was the battering ram, perhaps DeSantis will be the proper politician who walks through the doors that have been battered down. If he runs in 2024, that is. Trumpism is dead, long live populism!