A brief account of populism

Populism is something of a catchall term in political life these days. Numerous approaches to the concept exist, and each offers a significantly different insight into the nature of a particular political situation. Rather than try to resolve all the contradictions among the definitions and approaches to populism that exist in the literature on the topic, this section offers a brief statement of the paper’s approach to the topic to ground the “populism” that Donald Trump has foregrounded in contemporary Republican Party politics.

With Mudde and Kaltwasser, populism is here viewed as a thin-centered ideology that frames a “pure” people against a corrupt elite.Footnote ¹ Those who are understood to be elites are, in this framework, engaged in an overt, cynical plan to advance their values and interests against those of an idealized “people” whose rights, desires, and goals are the legitimate ends towards which government ought to work, and whose needs the government is expected to serve. Notably, the goals and values of this “pure” people transcend popular majority rule: the people, properly understood, must be served even if they do not make up a majority of the political community. Their goals and their values are the true, proper ends of the political community.

This thin-centered definition of populism suggests at least one important element of any populist agenda: the question of who is defined as “the people,” and who is defined as the “corrupt elite.” Rogers Brubaker, in his 2017 assessment of the nature and structure of populism in contemporary politics, noted that populists of all types do more than engage in “vertical opposition,” i.e. defining a “people” in whose name they claim to speak in opposition to an evil “elite.” They define antagonisms on a horizontal axis as well.Footnote ² Populists define an “us” not just in relation to “the elite,” but also in tension with others who are demonstrably not elite but are nonetheless seen to be outside some idealized political community. For populists, then, political, cultural, and social contests are efforts to return (or keep) power for the “right” people. These claims are made as part of an effort to protect the rights and power of the idealized community against the proposals and actions of the elites and outsiders whose proposals – indeed, in some cases, whose existence – is seen to pose an existential threat to the ideal community.

Left and right populists define “the people” differently. Left populists find the authentic voice of “the people” in marginalized groups like laborers, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQA+ persons, women, immigrants, and others considered outside the political, economic, and social mainstream. Right populists, in contrast, are more likely to define “the people” in ethnographic–linguistic communities that integrate language, culture, race, history, religion, economic productiveness, and other factors into an idealized “us” being hurt by “the elite.” Whereas left populists claim to represent people who have been ignored and abused by the powerful, aiming to rebalance relationships defined and reinforced by an abusive power structure, right populists see traditional social, cultural, and political relationships as markers of identity that need protection against “outside” forces and “outside” groups who want to replace the established order with an alternative – indeed, alien – one.Footnote ³

A similar process shapes the way(s) populists construct who the “elites” are in any community. Left populists tend to argue that the elites harming society derive their power from their control of capital and/or labor. It is in their ability to promote economic efficiency over securing workers’ living standards that their power lies; in general, left populists argue that such elites support established hierarchies across an array of social, economic, cultural, and environmental dimensions. Right populists, by contrast, see the elites who are harming the community as those who advocate immigration, promote free-trade agreements rather than local industry and productivity, and seem to value the emergence of a cosmopolitan, homogenized, global identity rather than protecting the unique communities in place at any given moment. For right populists, then, elites are not necessarily framed in terms of their economic power. Rather, people who can shape the ways a society (re)defines itself are, for right populists, the true elites.Footnote ⁴

Donald Trump’s rhetoric clearly establishes him as an advocate of right-wing populism. His understanding of “the people” and “the elite” generally corresponds with the outline sketched here. As will be seen, numerous elements of the Republican Party coalition have been making arguments and taking similar positions for a very long time. Trump’s presidency came at the end of a process rather than marking a dramatic invention of a new order in US political life.

Situating Trumpism in the history of right-wing politics in the United States

The current effusion of racist, misogynist, and anti-immigrant elements (among others) of the rhetoric and policy proposals of at least some actors in the Republican Party did not emerge sui generis. Rather, it has emerged from a long history of such attitudes and proposals in the United States – albeit a history not always directly cleaved on lines clearly defined in terms of contemporary US partisan politics. Any conservative movement in the United States today inevitably rests at the intersection of these trends, attitudes, and history. New frames and new perspectives can shape new political movements, but the underlying connections remain in place. Assessing any conservative movement, then, requires unpacking these connections to understand the ways they have been reconnected in a new form. Understanding this history helps situate the current shape of radical politics in the United States.

Focussing on US political history from the beginning of the twentieth century on, for example, draws attention to the reestablishment of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. (Re)founded in Georgia, the Klan drew on its legacy of post-Civil War racial repression while expanding its focus to both anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic goals as well.Footnote ⁵ Given the nature of US political life in this period, the Klan was a disproportionately Democratic Party-affiliated organization; however, the ideas the Klan expounded, and the attitudes it expressed, have proved to be long-lasting in US society. They are not new to the radical right in the US.

Just a few years later, in the 1930s, an openly fascist movement erupted in the United States. Drawing inspiration from the rise of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, this movement drew on anti-Semitic and anti-communist themes to attack the Democratic Party, especially the administration of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Unions were also a major target of American fascist’s abuse. Expressed most clearly in the emergence of the German American Bund, leaders promoted the use of Hitler salutes and famously held a rally at Madison Square Garden in February 1939 attended by 20,000 people who, among other claims, heard that George Washington was the United States “first fascist.” Notably, George Washington’s portrait was prominently displayed behind the platform. Then, as World War II neared, the Bund advocated that its supporters resist the draft, demanded that German goods should not be boycotted, and generally opposed US entry into the war against Nazi Germany.Footnote ⁶

This movement largely abated during World War II, although it did not entirely disappear. In 1959, the American Nazi Party was founded by George Lincoln Rockwell, a World War II and Korean War veteran. Rockwell drew inspiration from anti-Semitic and anti-communist activists before eventually modeling the phrase “White Power” in response to the emergence of the term “Black Power” during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.Footnote ⁷ After he was assassinated in 1967, his supporters and allies moved into influential positions on the extreme right of American politics. These included David Duke, who would subsequently be a leader in the renewed Ku Klux Klan, and William Pierce, who, under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, wrote The Turner Diaries, the book that inspired Timothy McVeigh to destroy the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK, on 19 April 1995.Footnote ⁸ Successors also included the outright white-supremacist movements such as the Aryan Nations and the Posse Comitatus.

Even as neo-Nazism was expanding in the United States, a movement advocating Christian, racial bigotry grew as well. The Christian Identity movement drew inspiration from British Israelism in insisting that white people were the true chosen People of God, while other racial groups and other religious traditions were subhuman and/or satanic.Footnote ⁹ The Identity movement has declined since the 1990s; however, echoes of its ideas continue to be promulgated in the guise of Christian nationalism – the idea that the United States is a Christian nation whose unique character was established in its divinely inspired founding documents and so is obliged to protect and expand Christian ideas, particularly conservative ideas, in its laws, practices, and social system. Such ideas have informed multiple other radical movements in the US, such as the survivalist wave that emerged during the United States’ social, economic, and political struggles of the 1970s.

At the same time, anti-communist and conspiracy-mongering groups found a voice in US society. Groups such as the John Birch Society linked New Deal programs with Soviet socialism/communism to imagine a politics in which even mainstream political figures like President Dwight D. Eisenhower were communist agents seeking to destroy American freedom. They similarly held that issues that today are encompassed with the label “culture war” – the status of LGBTQ persons, the rights of women to access birth control and/or abortion services, access to pornography, and similar issues – were signs of a growing cultural immorality that, should they be allowed to continue, would destroy the United States from within.Footnote ¹⁰

The militia movement emerged in the 1990s as a prominent element of a broader anti-government wave that moved Republican Party politics to the right, particularly in the American West. Grounded in well-established tropes of the American Revolution – that a small band of volunteer soldiers defeated the world’s most powerful empire – militia leaders held that the federal government had grown abusive of its powers, aggressively assessing authority where it had no constitutional right to go. In making this case, the militia movement linked forces like the farm crisis of the 1980s, the Sagebrush Rebellion, and the sovereign citizens movement to claim the right to reject federal laws and demands that, militia activists insisted, were in violation of the tenets of what they saw as the “real” Constitution – one that constrained federal action and power while maximizing the rights of citizens to take their lives into their own hands.Footnote ¹¹

Notably, militia leaders made an explicit attempt to elide the overt racism and other forms of bigotry that underlay the neo-Nazi, Christian Identity, and, to a lesser extent, survivalist movements that emerged in the decade or so before the militia movement emerged in the 1990s. Militia leaders insisted that their groups had no racial or religious animus, arguing instead that theirs was a movement aimed at correcting the accretion of excessive power and illegitimate legal empowering of the federal government. Put simply, militia leaders argued that they were advocating for the Constitution properly understood. In making this case, they emphasized the ecumenical elements of their doctrine, insisting that anyone of any racial, religious, ethnic, or other identity could (and should) be part of the militia since the only goal the militia had was to restore citizens’ rights as defined in the Constitution but defiled by the federal government. The militia was, in this view, the salvation of the United States, not a challenge to it.Footnote ¹²

Several events and changes in technology in the early 2000s stimulated the emergence of a range of new, aggressive, right-wing movements in the United States. The election of Barack Obama as President; the emergence of the Internet as a tool for decentralized, low-cost organizing and communication; and the global financial crisis of 2007–8 sparked the emergence of new, radical political movements in the United States that drew connection to prior groups and ideas even as they were shaped by contemporary events. For example, the relative privacy (at least from one’s neighbors) and ease of communication across long distances afforded by the Internet made possible the reemergence of an explicitly racist, neo-Nazi right in American political life. Outlets like Stormfront and 4Chan, among numerous others, provided users with outlets in which they could both post hate-filled comments and identify allies on the hard right. While inevitably on the fringes of mainstream political discourse, people like Stormfront founder Don Black and Daily Stormer leader Andrew Anglin utilized shock and hate to draw attention to their sites and their cause. Their ideas found a voice in white-supremacy groups like the Concerned Citizens Council and the League of the South, both of which became regular stops for conservative candidates during political campaigns. Moreover, the issues they espoused – anti-immigration, concerns about racial minorities, and the alleged “Jewishness” of corporations and banks around the world – filtered into concerns raised by many conservatives about the way(s) in which the United States was losing its “true” identity and its “true” path. They also became commonplace, albeit in less explicit form, among the “talking heads” like Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson on Fox News – a news network only formed in 1996 but which rose to preeminence during the early 2000s as a platform for conservative ideas and conservative leaders.Footnote ¹³

The financial crisis that followed the housing crash of 2007–8 intensified the focus of many right-wing activists on the alleged ways in which the political and social system was rigged against “real” Americans. This crisis followed years of speculative investments in the housing market in the US and around the world. Numerous risky financial instruments encouraged the purchase of homes that often cost well beyond the likely ability of the buyer to pay off any mortgage on the property; at the same time, standards for qualifying for home loans fell so far that many loans were issued without anyone checking that the mortgagee had any verifiable income at all. This scheme succeeded as long as housing prices consistently grew; however, when housing prices fell systematically starting in 2007, the housing market collapsed, triggering a global financial meltdown as the cascading failure of mortgagees to make their house payments undermined the banks and investment firms that had supported the speculative purchases in the first place.

Of the many responses to this financial crisis, perhaps the most important in the United States, came to be known as the Tea Party. Ostensibly named as an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already,” the Tea Party was a movement focussed on preventing any government funds being used to bail out individual homeowners who were struggling fiscally. Adopting Revolutionary War costuming and symbolism for their group, Tea Party activists insisted that the government had no business dealing with the fallout from the housing crisis for at least two reasons. First, Tea Party ideologues claimed that the government had itself caused the crisis by encouraging home sales, including sales to people who should have been flagged as incapable of paying their mortgages. Second, activists emphasized the “moral hazard” of loan failures. Accordingly, they insisted that people who could not meet their mortgages needed to “pay the price” of their failure. Otherwise, they would be tempted to overextend themselves again, relying on government to support them in any future fiscal irresponsibility.Footnote ¹⁴

Notably, the housing crisis corresponded with the election of the United States’ first Black President, Barack Obama. Unsurprisingly, his election energized the racist right in American politics, invigorating an expansion of right-wing hate groups and outlets across the United States. The voices of these overt racists were mixed in with, if substantially obscured by, the critiques of Obama’s plans and programs by the institutional Republican Party, mainstream media outlets like Fox News, and groups like the Tea Party. Thus, while the Tea Party, Fox News commentators (along with other right-wing media outlets that used the Internet to reach a global audience, such as Breitbart.com), and Republican Party leaders may not have used explicitly racist language in their opposition to the Obama presidency, such rhetoric and symbolism were a common feature of right-wing politics during Obama’s time in office.

The most obvious movement or theme that was prominent in US politics during the Obama presidency and that captured the mixing of racist and mainstream challenges to Obama’s term was the so-called birther movement. Birthers – who quickly became associated with their most prominent advocate, Donald Trump – claimed that President Obama was not a natural-born citizen of the United States, and so was not eligible under the Constitution to be President. The details of this claim did not bear scrutiny – President Obama’s father was Kenyan, but his mother was a US citizen, granting him so-called “birthright citizenship” even had he not been born in Hawaii – but the facts were not the real point of the claim. Rather, the point of birtherism was to delegitimate the Obama presidency as part of an effort to “Other” Obama – to turn him into an “alien” whose roots not only were not American but also actually were actively “anti-American” by some unarticulated but nonetheless evident metric. According to the Birthers, Obama was Black, alien, and Muslim (at least according to some critics), and otherwise “not American.”Footnote ¹⁵

Taken together, this array of Tea Party, anti-immigrant, anti-government, relatively radical political actors was given the label “alt-right.” This term, first coined in 2010 by Richard Spencer in his online magazine Alternative Right, was subsequently popularized by Steve Bannon when he ran the conservative news site Breitbart.com.Footnote ¹⁶ (Bannon subsequently became Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a key adviser in Trump’s White House.) Its supporters were a key constituency for Donald Trump in 2016.

Such was the intellectual and cultural context in which Donald Trump rose to political prominence in 2015–16. A large and growing racist movement in the United States was exploiting the emergence of the Internet to build networks of allied leaders and groups nationwide. These built on long-standing attitudes in US society about race, economics, and culture to establish a rhetoric in which any effort to promote civil rights or any other government action to address social and economic difference was understood to be communist, socialist, anti-white or any combination of such ideas. In addition, long-held ideas among more mainstream elements of the Republican Party, particularly those related to a limited role for the government in managing or balancing economic conditions in society, were finding large audiences among Tea Partiers, Fox News viewers, and others. Such themes and concerns provided the intellectual and emotional fuel that, as will be seen, Trump used to build support for his presidency and his takeover of the Republican Party.

Situating Trumpism in the history of the institutional right in the United States

While less obvious than the evolution of ideas and policy proposals on the right in American politics over the last century, some attention to the role that institutions have played in shaping right-wing US politics can also help situate the rise of Trumpism to prominence in the United States. As with the brief intellectual and social history articulated earlier in this paper, a historical accounting of key institutions and groups that have supported the Republican Party over the last century can offer insight into the ways the party has evolved to open a space in which the politics Donald Trump espoused could be recognized as “Republican” in the first place. It also provides context for assessing the way Trumpism emerged as the dominant force in contemporary Republican Party politics.

Importantly, as was the case with the evolution of the ideas and attitudes described earlier, the notion that the Republican Party was the party of so-called “country club” Republicans – mainstream Protestants who supported limited government (particularly in matters like regulating business through government), low taxes, and anti-communism/anti-socialism – was a fairly accurate description of the Republican political coalition for many years. For much of the history of the Republican Party, at least since World War II, its leaders emphasized maintaining political and social order, the protection of property rights, and rules establishing norms of behavior in public life. The vision of the Republican Party as a place for small businesspeople, farmers, and those otherwise seeking their piece of the American Dream was a fair one, if incomplete.Footnote ¹⁷

This “mainstream” Republican Party was more than just its elected officials and voters/supporters, however. An institutional infrastructure developed to promote conservative ideas, policies, and programs outside the halls of government. Groups like the Hoover Institution (founded in 1919), the American Enterprise Institute (1938), the John M. Olin Foundation (1953), and the Heritage Foundation (1973) worked to promote conservative plans, programs, and agendas in government.Footnote ¹⁸ They also served as training grounds for young people seeking entry in political work, as well as a home base at which senior Republican and conservative leaders could maintain a presence in political life when Republicans were out of office. As such, they worked with groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable to fund a “government-in-waiting” as their political fortunes waxed and waned.

There were alternative voices in the Republican coalition in the early years after World War II, however. William F. Buckley and his supporters, for example, founded National Review in 1955 with the express purpose of challenging the Republican “country club” consensus in favor of a more religiously inspired, more conservative, and more aggressively anti-communist agenda. In 1964, the conservative US Senator from Arizona Barry Goldwater ran a trenchantly conservative campaign that rejected most forms of state power to regulate Americans’ lives – particularly in matters of civil rights for Black Americans – while demanding an aggressive, confrontational foreign policy to counter Soviet communism wherever it appeared on the global stage. Goldwater lost the 1964 election, of course, but it presaged the rise of a more fundamental challenge to the Republican consensus in the future.

After Goldwater’s failed campaign, an array of conservative groups and institutions grew to prominence in an effort to make the Republican Party into, from their point of view, a truly conservative party. Conservative, protestant evangelicals, for example, mobilized aggressively in the 1970s in an effort to counter social and political changes like the civil rights movement, the recognition of women’s reproductive rights in Roe v. Wade (1973), and the liberalization of standards of conduct and dress that accompanied the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Conservative religious organizations like Focus on the Family (founded in 1977), the Moral Majority (founded in 1979), and the Christian Coalition (founded in 1987) brought activists like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Ralph Reed to political prominence as they worked to shape US laws in ways that, they insisted, reflected the true values of God and of the founders of the United States.Footnote ¹⁹ Over time, their actions – and those of many others – transformed the so-called “religious vote” in the US into partisan support for the Republican Party.

The religious right wing of the Republican Party also led to various leaders seeking the Republican Party’s nomination for President during this period. Televangelist Pat Robertson, whose Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) grew in scope and prominence in the 1980s, ran for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1988, for example. While this run was ultimately unsuccessful, the overtly Christian, conservative tone of his campaign created a context in which Pat Buchanan, a conservative activist who first rose to prominence in the 1970s as a member of President Richard Nixon’s staff, launched a campaign to unseat sitting Republican President George H. W. Bush in 1992. Notably, Buchanan’s campaign presaged Donald Trump’s in its focus on opposition to immigration, free trade, and foreign-policy interventionism. It also reflected a starkly Manichean worldview, most notably in Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. In what as known as the “culture war” speech, Buchanan articulated a vision of a corrupt elite seeking to undermine authentic American values in support of a globalist agenda that would harm the lives of ordinary, “decent” Americans.

Concomitant with the rise of the religious right, numerous established institutions became more stridently conservative in their advocacy, particularly in matters of gun rights and government regulation of business. The National Rifle Association (NRA), for example, had mostly concentrated on promoting the rights of hunters and of people who enjoy target shooting since it was founded in 1871. However, starting in the 1970s, the NRA shifted its focus towards the individual rights of citizens to own, carry, and use firearms largely unrestricted by law or custom. It particularly emphasized the utility of firearms for home and personal defense, insisting that owning and using weapons was literally a matter of life and death.Footnote ²⁰ At the same time, groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), created in 1973 to promote conservative legislation across state borders, launched a coordinated effort to shape a national agenda using state legislatures rather than federal action.Footnote ²¹ Meanwhile, think tanks like the Cato Institute, founded in 1977 as a libertarian advocacy center, found common cause with conservative Republican groups in opposing the broad array of labor, environmental, and workplace regulations that grew during the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ²² The Federalist Society, founded in 1982, undertook to promote a conservative agenda through the courts, supporting future lawyers and judges as well as filing legal briefs to advocate for conservative rulings in cases around the United States.Footnote ²³

Donald Trump thus ran for office in 2016 in the context of institutional and ideological flux in the Republican Party. Trump empowered (and was empowered by) a new configuration of Republican-associated groups, individuals, and institutions, one that in the context of the politics of the moment was in a position to capture control of the party. Trump’s victory, as is discussed below, was by no means assured, or even probable in 2016. It was not, however, a complete surprise, either.

2016:  the failure of the Reagan-era consensus in the Republican Party

By the time of Donald Trump’s election as President in 2016, the idea that the Republican Party was a “country club” party was unsustainable. Whether in ideology, policy goals, or institutional presence, the Republican Party was in transition – and had been at least since Ronald Reagan became the Republican Party’s nominee for President in 1980. After all, as an inheritor of the conservative Republican faction first expressed in the failed campaign of Barry Goldwater for President in 1964, Reagan, who helped nominate Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention, was already committed to many of the ideas that Trump eventually promoted both as a candidate and as President. Reagan’s overt religiosity and appeal to religious voters; the aggressiveness of his anti-communist, anti-statist rhetoric; his focus on so-called “supply-side economics”; and his focus on limiting the government’s power to protect the rights of minorities, including women, persons of color, and the LGBTQ community, while at the same time expanding federal power to regulate abortion rights and same-sex relations, to name only a few, were a significant break from established Republican orthodoxy. The “Reagan revolution” saw the Republican Party promote a new era of American politics focused on lower taxes, lower regulations, and lower social support services.

Reagan’s successors of both parties largely followed the contours of Reagan-era politics during their terms of office. George H. W. Bush, who perhaps most closely fits the model of the “country club Republican” in the modern era of American politics, nonetheless converted to support both supply-side economics and pro-life social politics during his term as Reagan’s vice president; once he took office in his own right, Bush carried much of Reagan’s agenda forward. Notably, the first Democrat to take office after the Reagan Revolution, former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, largely accepted the terms of the Reagan Revolution as he governed. For example, Clinton pushed market-based solutions to social programs and famously declared that “the era of big government is over” in his 1996 State of the Union address,Footnote ²⁴ and promised “the end of welfare as we know it” while supporting legislation that dramatically curtailed welfare benefits for poor Americans.Footnote ²⁵ Clinton’s successor, Republican George W. Bush, was inherently more Reaganesque in his politics than his father, the first President Bush; he favored faith-based programs for social services and religious schools’ receiving federal funding, and expressed a missionary zeal in pursuing foreign-policy objectives – mostly the Iraq War launched in 2003. While his presidency ended in turmoil as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars lingered unresolved even as the financial crisis of 2007–8 roiled the global economy, his was recognizably a Reagan-era presidency.

The shock of the presidency of Barack Obama, Bush’s successor, triggered a deep factional conflict within the Republican Party. The career of Obama’s Republican opponent in the 2008 election, Arizona Senator John McCain, was anchored in old-school, “country club Republican” roots. A former POW and acknowledged war hero, McCain was a conservative, but not a rhetorical firebrand. He famously tamped down a questioner at a campaign event in 2008 who insisted that Barack Obama was an “Arab” and thus could not be trusted, for example.Footnote ²⁶ However, in an effort to reach out to social conservatives, evangelicals, and other more radical elements of the Republican coalition, McCain named Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee. She was grounded in a new era of American politics, one attuned to the performative elements of campaigning and governing. She was also prone to rhetorical flourishes that (deliberately or accidentally) touched on the kinds of racist and anti-immigrant tropes that were in the background of American politics at this time.Footnote ²⁷ Her tendency to embrace racial and other themes was, notably, something of a scandal at the time; the drama of Palin’s candidacy may have influenced the next Republican presidential nominee, Utah Senator Mitt Romney, to choose an economic conservative, but not a social warrior, Paul Ryan, a Republican Congressman from Wisconsin, as his running mate.

This brief accounting of the history of Republican Party presidential nominees from Ronald Reagan through Mitt Romney serves as context for understanding the diversity of the party’s candidates for the presidential nomination in 2016. Eighteen major candidates filed to run in the primaries; a further five candidates filed but were effectively ignored. Of the eighteen widely recognized candidates, most were governors: John Kasich (OH), Jeb Bush (FL), Jim Gilmore (VA), Chris Christie (NJ), Mike Huckabee (AR), George Pataki (NY), Bobby Jindal (LA), Scott Walker (WI), and Rick Perry (TX). Most of the others were, as is typical, prominent elected officials: Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Senator Mario Rubio, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, and South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham. Three were private citizens with no elected or other political experience: Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon; Carly Fiorina, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard; and, of course, Donald Trump.

To the degree that these candidates can be grouped ideologically, most represented the established, conservative wing of the Republican Party. Senators Cruz, Rubio, and Graham certainly did; so too did Governors Huckabee, Perry, and Walker. Rick Santorum was a social-warrior conservative who was noteworthy, among other things, for his stridently anti-gay political agenda. Most of the governors were conservative by any reasonable metric; however, they were generally understood to be engaged in governing, meaning that they inevitably compromised with political opponents to achieve desired ends. These governors included Kasich, Bush, Gilmore, Pataki, and Jindal. Chris Christie was, by the standards of the contemporary Republican Party, a throwback: his politics harkened to an era when Republicans were liberal in the sense of being in favor of civil rights and generally keeping out of social controversies. Of the two private citizens not named Trump, Carson presented himself as a person of profound ethical integrity, whereas Fiorina insisted that her business acumen would make her a good President.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, for the most part presented himself as an outsider during the 2016 campaign. More famous as a reality show star and celebrity than as a political leader, only his support for the birther movement, as well as his prior campaign to condemn five young men to death for their alleged roles in a brutal rape in New York’s Central Park in April 1989 presaged his subsequent political positions. Notably, he did not have a particularly established political ideology: in his many years in and around politics, he had been registered as a member of both the Republican and Democratic parties and had donated substantial funds to candidates of both parties in furtherance of his real-estate interests. While the speech in which he announced his candidacy – the famous “descending the escalator” speech at Trump Tower in New York – was noteworthy for its anti-immigrant vitriol, he elsewhere insisted that he would be the advocate for working-class people, as well for the rights of LGBTQ persons.Footnote ²⁸ He likewise repeatedly broke with established Republican talking points defending the Iraq War. Similarly, he challenged Republican orthodoxy in matters of free trade, mutual-defense alliances, and the nature of the United States’ relationships with rivals like Russia, China, and North Korea.

In fact, if anything, Trump was assessed as a vanity candidate when he launched his campaign: a rich man seeking to promote himself and his business using a presidential campaign as a vehicle to other destinations.Footnote ²⁹ Trump, notably, lacked most elements of a political résumé associated with getting elected to the presidency: he had no elected or appointed political experience prior to taking office, nor had he served in a prominent military position that amounted to the same thing as formal political experience. His rhetorical directness was predicted to undermine his election chances in a system that rewards failing to make mistakes as much as accomplishments. And, of course, his opponents were mostly highly experienced politicians who were expected to contest the “real” nomination. Both professional politicians and commentators about American politics found little chance that Trump would win either the nomination or the presidency.

Once the primaries began, however, two major forces shaped the subsequent election. These led to a rapid reduction in the field’s size, as well as to a commanding lead for Donald Trump’s campaign. The first was the outsized focus directed on Trump’s campaign by the media. The second was the nature of the Republican primary process itself.

As for the question of media focus, numerous studies have shown that Trump received a substantial portion of media coverage during the election season in 2016. His propensity to say what were often deemed outrageous things, his commanding stage presence, and his fighter persona all drew viewers and readers to stories about him and his campaign. Given that most media in the United States, even political media, is produced for profit, Trump’s ability to draw an audience fed ever-greater coverage of his campaign. The feedback loop of “Trump draws an audience so let us cover Trump who is drawing an audience as we cover him” effectively swamped other campaigns. However talented the other candidates may or may not have been, few could get heard in the cacophony of Trump coverage. One study suggested that so much attention was paid to Trump’s campaign that it amounted to $2 billion worth of free media coverage for his campaign – attention other campaigns either could not get or had to pay for.Footnote ³⁰

In addition, the Republican Party’s primary rules in 2016 worked to benefit front runners regardless of how small a given candidate’s lead was. These rules inevitably favor any front-running candidate. In 2016, they pushed Trump to a commanding lead quickly. After losing the Iowa caucus on 16 February 2016 (in what he called a rigged election), Trump went on to win 100 percent of the delegates in South Carolina that same month, despite only winning 32.5 percent of the popular vote. He continued to win significant pluralities of delegates as the campaign continued, for example gaining forty-two delegates in Georgia on 1 March despite only winning 38.8 percent of the popular vote. Marco Rubio, who came in second in Georgia, only managed to earn sixteen delegates with 24.4 percent of the vote.Footnote ³¹ With several “mainstream” Republicans splitting the traditional conservative vote, Trump quickly moved into a leading position in the primary campaign. Texas Senator Ted Cruz stayed in the race until May, when Trump’s victory was completed.

It was only as he took increasing control of the primary process that Trump began to express many of the themes that would later drive his campaign and his presidency. While the anti-immigrant theme was central to his candidacy from the beginning, the chants of “Build the wall” came later, as did demands to “Lock her up” aimed at his Democrat opponent, Hillary Clinton. Similarly, the tone of his rhetoric became more aggressive over time, linking both immigrants and the Obama administration’s alleged failures to an asserted rise in crime and economic chaos around the United States. So, too, did his rejection of the kinds of free-trade agreement that had shaped much of the post-World War II global economy. Meanwhile, his apparent openness to pulling back from the leading position the United States had taken in world politics was not an original feature of his candidacy. Rather, it grew as he found an audience convinced that global elites had rigged the political and economic system to benefit those elites, not ordinary people.

Even as late as October 2016, when the Access Hollywood tape was released demonstrating Trump had used derogatory, misogynistic language about women in his celebrity days, there were rumors of efforts to replace Trump as the Republican nominee for President.Footnote ³² Indeed, most analysts believed that Trump would not win election until sometime on election night itself, when, to the surprise of many, news outlets reported that several states expected to vote for Hillary Clinton were too close to call. In the end, many of those states voted for Trump, albeit by very small margins that made Clinton the popular vote winner but allowed Trump to win the Electoral College and thus to win the presidency.

A brief analysis of the Trump presidency

As the purpose of this paper is to assess the context in which Donald Trump was elected rather than to assess the whole of his presidency, this section assesses Trump’s term in office from the perspective of the factions of the party his administration represented. From the beginning, the Trump presidency manifested the inherent factional tensions within the Republican coalition. Over time, the more radical, angrier elements of the party prevailed.

To take Cabinet appointments as one indicator of factional cleavage, it is noteworthy that Trump’s first appointments were a mix of established, experienced Republican officials or allies and more populist/radical appointees, often people with limited government experience. Trump’s pick as Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, had been governor of Georgia, for example. Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, was a US Senator from Alabama. James Mattis, Secretary of Defense, was a general in the Marine Corps; John Kelly, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Homeland Security – and soon thereafter White House chief of staff – was also a four-star general in the US Marines. Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, was an established businessman who was CEO of ExxonMobil before taking the position. Appointees like Ellen Chao (transportation) and Steve Mnuchin (Treasury) were, likewise, recognized as typical choices for Cabinet roles.

Other appointees were more radical, reflecting a tilt towards the right-wing populist element of the Republican coalition. Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education, was from a family worth billions of dollars; she rose to prominence as a strong advocate for charter schools – a position not typical of the Secretary of Education. Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce, promoted the privatization of many government functions, the ending of numerous free-trade agreements, and increasing tariffs on US trading partners – again, positions not normally taken by Commerce Secretaries, particularly not Republican ones. Meanwhile, Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who became Secretary of Energy, famously called for the elimination of his department entirely. Ryan Zinke, Trump’s first Interior Secretary, had no senior management experience before taking the position (although he had served as a Navy SEAL and in the US House of Representatives); he was a strong advocate of rolling back environmental protections established over many decades, as well as of increasing energy production on federal lands. Ben Carson, the former surgeon who was appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, likewise had no senior executive experience before assuming the position.

At the sub-Cabinet level Trump’s picks were more overtly radical. In addition to making family members Ivanka Trump (daughter) and Jared Kushner (son-in-law) close advisers with flexible portfolios, Trump sought support from people like campaign adviser and noted alt-right leader Steve Bannon. He named air force general Michael Flynn as his national security adviser (NSA), albeit only briefly as Flynn was forced to resign having been charged with lying to the FBI. Trump even briefly named Steve Bannon – perhaps the most influential right-wing populist in contemporary American politics – to the National Security Council. (Notably, Flynn’s successor as NSA, army general H. R. McMaster, had Bannon removed from that position.Footnote ³³) Similarly, Trump named campaign adviser Kellyanne Conway to his staff, and named Stephen Miller, the architect of the so-called “Muslim ban” executive order, to his staff as well.

There were several other early signs that, from the beginning of his presidency, the Trump administration would govern in ways more likely to excite his right-wing populist supporters than win over his detractors. In addition to the obvious fact that Trump had made building a wall at the US–Mexico border a centerpiece of his campaign (a wall that Mexico would pay for), one of Trump’s first executive orders as President was an effort to block people of various countries with predominantly Muslim populations from entering the US. This order was consistent with his general stance opposing immigration to the United States. In addition, he announced that the United States would not follow the environment protocols of the Paris Agreement, a global initiative on climate change agreed in 2016 that President Obama had previously committed the United States to adopting. Additionally, he began appointing conservative judges – usually vetted through the Federalist Society – to the many openings available during his presidency.

If there was a point at which the right-wing populist tilt of Trump’s presidency was highlighted clearly, it came with the events of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, in August 2017. This rally, first held on the campus of the University of Virginia and then on the streets of Charlottesville the next day, was a flash point in US history. Hundreds of white supremacists (of numerous organizations) came to Charlottesville ostensibly to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, the commander of Confederate forces during the US Civil War. After a torchlit nighttime rally on 11 August, violence broke out on 12 August among the white supremacists and groups who arrived to challenge the supremacists’ message. In the ensuing conflict, a woman named Heather Heyer was killed when a white supremacist drove his car into the crowd where she was protesting against the pro-white-supremacy forces.Footnote ³⁴

After this tragedy, expectations were high that Donald Trump would make a speech decrying the violence, calling for the restoration of order, and mitigating the hate displayed on the streets of Charlottesville. Indeed, in the parlance of contemporary politics, such a statement is “low-hanging fruit”: it is easy to do, popular, and assured of making a President appear “presidential.” Trump, however, did not make such a conciliatory, consoling speech. Instead, while Trump did make a speech decrying the violence in Charlottesville, he quickly adopted a position of moral equivalence regarding the different groups who fought there. There were, Trump noted, “very fine people on both sides” of the conflict, “And you had, you had a group on one side that was bad. And you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now. You had a group – you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent.” “I’ve condemned many different groups,” he continued, “but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”Footnote ³⁵ Trump effectively legitimized the actions taken by racist, anti-Semitic, right-wing populists – cementing the position of such forces in his administration.

The backlash against this speech presaged the many combative exchanges that would follow during the Trump presidency. Whether dealing with foreign countries, military crises, or COVID, however, in each case Trump tended to react and engage in the same gruff, direct, and unconventional style – a style that challenged both conventional ways Presidents generally addressed such matters and the established positions taken by recent Republican Presidents. Whether in performative or policy terms, Trump’s general approach was to adopt positions popular with right-wing populist positions in the Republican Party coalition.

Another way to assess the emerging dominance of right-wing populism in the Trump administration is in addressing the significant turnover among leadership of major government institutions during his term in office. Over time, most of Trump’s “traditional” appointees (as outlined earlier in this paper) left their positions and were replaced with nominees – often interim – more overtly loyal to Trump’s demands of their agencies. This pattern intensified as Trump’s term neared its end: one element of the apparent Trump effort to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election involved the elevation of a relatively low-ranking staffer in the Department of Justice to the position of Attorney General so that he could pursue legal action to support Trump’s claims.

Seen against this background, the insurrection of 6 January 2021 was more the culmination of a long process than a sudden eruption of surprising violence. For Trump and his supporters, neither they nor the insurrectionists themselves were doing anything wrong. Rather, they were trying to correct a wrong – to restore the nation to its right path. It did not matter that they were breaking the law since their “lawbreaking” was in defense of the true, right, proper outcome of the election. It was the law – and the broken institutions that made the law – that was corrupt, and thus the insurrectionists were obliged to break the law if they were to enact their duties as good, true, patriotic Americans. The insurrectionists, then, were true patriots willing to put their bodies on the line to defend the nation from harm. They were acting as defenders of the constitutional order properly conceived.

Concluding observations

As is clear from the argument laid out here, Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, and its concomitant shift towards a right-wing populist agenda, occurred amidst an array of ideological, institutional, and political changes that had been ongoing inside the Republican Party for a long time. The historical and institutional inertia of the Republican Party’s coalition was embedded in a vision of the party as a place for pro-business, limited government, anti-communist advocacy. Numerous experienced political leaders stood between Donald Trump and the presidency in 2016; so, too, did his own reputation as a playboy businessman and vanity candidate. There were, however, trends, patterns, and movements towards a radicalized Republican Party inside the Republican coalition at the time of Trump’s election. Elements of the Republican Party’s constituency had promoted anti-immigrant, racist, and ethno-nationalist themes for many years. The party’s demands for limited government extended beyond the parameters of business regulation into the realm of civil rights, with many Republican activists insisting that it was beyond the proper powers of the federal government to work to transform racial relations in American society. Others asserted a similar position on matters of gender equality. Yet others focussed on the so-called “culture wars” of issues like abortion rights and LGBTQA+ equality.

Beyond these political, social, and cultural trends, an emergent ecosystem of conservative institutions shaped Republican Party politics in the years before Trump won the presidency in 2016. Advocacy organizations used money donated by wealthy patrons and by supportive people to push arch-conservative programs and train new generations of activists to enact these agendas once Republicans won office. In the aftermath of the Reagan Revolution such institutions proliferated, setting the stage for a transformation of Republican Party politics at some point in the future.

Trump entered electoral politics amid these trends and transformations. For many supporters his brashness and unconventional style seemed to reflect their own frustrations with a political and social order that had shifted dramatically since the 1960s. His willingness to challenge the supposed benefits of economic policies like free trade and social and cultural globalization appealed both to people who lost their jobs in the new world order and to those who sensed that a true, proper, “better” way of life was being swept away. Hence the brilliance of the MAGA slogan: “Make America great again” was both a promise and a lament. It imagined the restoration of an America (that, admittedly, had never existed for all Americans) that was filled with hope and opportunity even as it promised that such a renewed America would continue well into the future. For those who felt left out of a changed America, MAGA represented hope even when it was framed in the dark, angry rhetoric of ethnic, religious, and cultural bias.

Similar energy influenced Trump’s reelection in 2024. In the immediate aftermath of the 6 January 2021 insurrection, for example, numerous Republican political leaders condemned Trump for his actions (and inactions) on 6 January. He faced a second impeachment (if not a trial while in office) and was removed from several prominent social-media platforms. The Republican Party elite, as well as prominent sociocultural leaders, clearly tried to usher Trump off the political stage. However, these efforts were unsuccessful as “Trump’s people” linked their grievances and fears with his and insisted that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, storm Congress, and spread the “Big Lie” about election fraud in the 2020 presidential election were either fundamentally legitimate political acts necessitated by circumstance or, alternatively, did not happen at all. For Trump’s populist supporters, “the elite” could not be trusted or believed. Indeed, elite attacks on Trump were only further proof that Trump’s politics and style were “right.”

The ideas, attitudes, and approaches Donald Trump took to advance his presidency (in both its first and second terms) fell outside the established mainstream of Republican Party politics. However, his approach to politics found engaged supporters amongst a broad swath of conservative voters, donors, and institutions. Hence the Trump presidency should not be understood as the hostile takeover of the Republican Party by an insurgent, deviant group. Rather, it represented a shift in the groups and persons who won power within the Republican coalition. More shifts will surely come: no coalition is infinitely stable. Nonetheless, it is clear that the values, plans, and programs that Trump proffered in winning office in 2016 and 2024 are likely to remain popular among elements of the Republican coalition well into the future. They are, after all, deeply embedded in its past.