Editor's Notes: The Arc of Personalism

On December 5, 2024, we published an essay of mine:

America’s Paths to Personalism

The three primary risk vectors of the second Trump administration.

Liberal CurrentsAdam Gurri

In it, I argued that Trump was, first and foremost, an aspiring personalist dictator. I applied the work of Xavier Márquez on the topic of personalism generally to provide a lens into what we ought to expect the attack vectors to be.

I focused mainly on the ways Trump and his Project 2025 gang would consolidate their control over the federal government, but there's more to personalism than that, of course. The UFC event and the nonsense with the Reflecting Pool are just two recent cases of the way self-aggrandizement has driven many of the decisions made in the Trump administration.