Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 38. Sunrise is 7:25 and sunset is 4:36 for 9 hours 11 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 86.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 2021, supporters of Donald Trump storm the United States Capitol Building to disrupt the lawful certification of the 2020 presidential election, resulting in four deaths and evacuation of the U.S. Congress.
This libertarian blogger has been a critic of conventional political paradigms to describe America’s national or state politics in these unconventional times.1 Trumpism is not a conventional political movement. It’s an authoritarian populist2 one, no matter how loudly or how insistently the some Trump supporters resist that description. (It’s worth noting that Trump influencers have begun to embrace that plain truth, even if some ordinary Trump voters still blanch at the description.)
Much of this criticism has centered on the conventional political analysis of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel‘s Craig Gilbert. (Gilbert’s views would have been insightful in a former era; ours isn’t that former era.) Gilbert’s latest assessment, of how Trump’s popularity may influence statewide races, comes closer to describing our time candidly:
Wisconsin exemplifies a powerful pattern in modern American politics.
The party that wins the presidency does a lot of losing in the elections that follow. Some scholars call it the “presidential penalty.”
When Republican George W. Bush was president (2001-2009), Democrats won both races for governor in Wisconsin.
When Democrat Barack Obama was president (2009-2017), Republicans won three elections for governor and their first U.S. Senate races since the 1980s.
[…]Here in battleground Wisconsin, we may be seeing a “presidential penalty” not just in fall partisan races, but in Wisconsin’s most important nonpartisan elections, the April contests for state Supreme Court. Nothing like it has happened in the modern era. This is a new political phenomenon.
[…]There are at least two other factors that help explain why the Trump presidency has not only influenced the outcome of court races but had a negative impact on Trump’s own party.
One is that Trump has been an unusually confrontational and polarizing president, utterly dominating the political arena and the public’s attention. You would expect such a president to have more impact on elections for other offices.
See Craig Gilbert, Under Trump, a ‘presidential penalty’ extends to court races, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, January 5, 2026.
Closer, right? Gilbert describes Trump as “an unusually confrontational and polarizing president.” Yes, indeed. There’s more though. Trump is “unusually” confrontational and polarizing because he’s an authoritarian populist to his bones.
An analysis of Trump’s influence can only be accurate if Trump is described and understood accurately.
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- See The Wisconsin Gubernatorial Race Will Be a National Race and Wisconsin’s Election Is Only One Moment in a Long Conflict. ↩︎
- Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press 2017). ↩︎
Watch a superkilonova explode twice in an animation: