The Seventh Party System (Durant Scenario)

The Seventh Party System began in 2016 with the death of the Sixth Party System. The Seventh Party System lasted for over four decades, stretching from 2016 to around 2052. It was followed by the The Eighth Party System (Durant Scenario), which came into power because of the mass decline of Trumpism in the United States.

The Rise of Trumpism
Trumpism is a term for the political ideologies, social emotions, style of governance, political movement, and set of mechanisms for acquiring and keeping control of power associated with Donald Trump and his political base. Trumpists and Trumpian are terms used to refer to those exhibiting characteristics of Trumpism, whereas political supporters of Trump are known as Trumpers.

The exact terms of what makes up Trumpism are contentious and are sufficiently complex to overwhelm any single framework of analysis; it has been called an American political variant of the far right, and the national-populist and neo-nationalist sentiment seen in multiple nations worldwide from the late 2010s to the early 2020s. Though not strictly limited to any one party, Trump supporters became a significant faction of the Republican Party in the United States, with the remainder often characterized as "establishment" in contrast, though later the neo-conservative/moderate faction became the anti-establishment group within the party. Some Republicans became members of the Never Trump movement, and some left the party in protest.

Some commentators have rejected the populist designation for Trumpism and view it instead as part of a trend towards a new form of fascism, with some referring to it as explicitly fascist and others as authoritarian and illiberal. Others have more mildly identified it as a specific lite version of fascism in the United States. Some historians, including many of those using a new fascism classification, write of the hazards of direct comparisons with European fascist regimes of the 1930s, stating that while there are parallels, there are also important dissimilarities.

The label Trumpism has been applied to national-conservative and national-populist movements in other Western democracies, and many politicians outside of the United States have been labeled as staunch allies of Trump or Trumpism, or even as their country's equivalent to Trump, by various news agencies; among them are Silvio Berlusconi, Jair Bolsonaro, Horacio Cartes, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Nigel Farage, Hong Joon-Pyo, Boris Johnson, Jarosław Kaczyński, Marine Le Pen, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Viktor Orbán, Najib Razak, Matteo Salvini, and Geert Wilders.

Trumpism began with the Tea Party movement during Barack Obama's first term as president, and they became a vocal Republican minority by coming out in large numbers in 2010. Donald Trump (who eventually became the 46th and 48th President of the United States) adopted the Tea Party as his own and used populist fervor to win the Republican nomination in 2016, 2020, 2024, and 2028. Many Republican officials, fearing that they would lose reelection or their elections altogether, either embraced or disavowed Trump. Some, such as Senators Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins left the party to serve as Democrats or Independents that caucuses with Democrats. Others, such as Colin Powell, labelled Trump a "true RINO," noting that Reagan had been the pinnacle of conservatism in America. Powell was censured in a narrow vote by the Republican National Committee in 2021, and so were many others between 2019 and 2029, such as Senators John McCain, Romney, Collins, Murkowski, Dole, and others; Governors Charlie Baker, Chris Sununu, Chris Christie, Phil Scott, and Larry Hogan; and at least 969 other sitting or former Republican officials.

When Trump was defeated in 2016, he immediately announced he was running for the 2020 election, despite never having conceded.