Donald Trump and Hostess CupCakes: Distinguishing the persisting sources of Trump's popular support, 2015–2025

This is an unusual time in U.S. politics, to say the least. Over the past 10 years or so a politics of reactionary mass resentment has built up in which the targets vary from threatening cultural changes and economic decline to government itself, and fear of immigrants upsetting historic demographic patterns. Collectively, the people in question have found their voice in one man: Donald Trump. Similar trends are noticeable worldwide. How to understand how this has happened in the United States seems particularly difficult. There has been no major recent disaster as such to incite such a dramatic change. Furthermore, the United States, the self-declared defender of liberal democracy, has twice now elected as president someone clearly antithetical in goals and rhetoric to that cause. A proponent of national capitalism organized around his whims is now the apparent alternative to the global capitalism long supported by U.S. governments of both major political parties. Why would people flock in significant numbers to support such a path? It has been difficult to account for Trump's support in conventional sociodemographic categories such as social class or age group. This article uses an alternative approach based on a variety of sources that then adopts a popular U.S. baked good—Hostess CupCakes—to identify three broad groupings of supporters: Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, and Twinkies. Their disparate resentments and logics of attachment come together in the retribution their leader promises to deliver to those whom they see as at the root of their displeasures.