2015-08-29

<p>Is Donald Trump truly one of a kind—a sui generis sensation in U.S. politics? As Americans try to make sense of the businessman-turned-Republican presidential frontrunner and how he’s come to dominate the polls and the airwaves in the 2016 cycle, Politico Magazine decided to consult the archives: Is there a historical figure the Donald resembles—a model who can help explain his rise? We asked some of the smartest historians we know to name the closest antecedent to Trump from the annals of American history. Some maintained that he is a unique product of the era of reality TV, social media and the 1 percent. But others saw similarities to politicians, personalities and tycoons past, from Italy’s former bunga-bunga prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to the last billionaire to disrupt presidential politics, Ross Perot, to segregationist populists like George Wallace. If history repeats itself, consider this a preview of where Trump’s candidacy could go from here. </p> <p> *** </p> <p> <b>George Wallace</b> </p> <p> <i>Garry Wills, professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and contributor to the </i>New York Review of Books </p> <p> Donald Trump has elements of different demagogues from the past. But I am reminded, again and again, of the times when I followed George Wallace around both before and after he was shot during the 1972 presidential race. His campaign slogan was “Send them a message.” The “them” was capacious. Demagogues are all voices for the aggrieved. Some of these are just resenters, but others are denouncers. Wallace, like Trump, loved a fight and went on the attack with insults. (Wallace mocked the pointy-heads who did not even know how to park their bicycles on campus.) When I asked Joe Azbell, who invented the slogan, what it meant, he told me, “People are fed up with government and want to be left alone.” He took pride in the fact that there was no mention of race in all his presidential campaign literature. It’s true that in his presidential run Wallace never brought up race. He did not need to. But he knew there were racists in the North as in the South, and he gave them a certain cover for the real things they were acting on. What people rarely mention with Trump is that, in the right-wing dismay at having a black president and attorney general, racists can huddle under the vaguer appeals of Trump. Ken Burns is one of the few who have publicly recognized that Trump is the voice of the new white supremacists. Burns rightly says that Trump’s long and continuing challenge to President Obama’s birth certificate was code language for “nigger.” Same with the attack on Hispanic immigrants. People who say Trump is appealing to people with legitimate grievances have fallen for his con. His real support comes from the vast pool of racists out there. That’s what reminds me of Wallace. </p> <p> <b>***</b> </p> <p> <b>William Randolph Hearst</b> </p> <p> <i>H.W. Brands, professor of history and government at the University of Texas and author, most recently, of </i>Reagan: The Life </p> <p> I’m reminded of William Randolph Hearst, another media creation (in Hearst’s case, it was his own media) who sought to parlay celebrity into political power. Hearst knew more than Trump does about most issues of public policy, since he had been writing editorials for years, and he had the modesty and perspective to run for Congress before reaching higher. But he was as shameless in self-promotion as Trump, as successful (for a time) in presenting himself as the man of the people (despite being anything but) and eventually was cast aside, as Trump almost certainly will be, when Americans turned from the emotionally satisfying but essentially frivolous exercise of sticking a finger in the eye of the political establishment to selecting a candidate they might actually entrust with power. </p> <p> *** </p> <p> <b>Ross Perot</b> </p> <p> <i>Timothy Naftali, incoming clinical associate professor of history and public service at New York University, author of </i>George H.W. Bush <i>, among other books, and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum</i> </p> <p> In 1992, a prominent American billionaire won nearly 19 percent of the presidential vote, not getting a single electoral vote but coming in second in two states. To some extent, Donald Trump is this generation’s version of Ross Perot, the angry rich savior who wants to rescue the country from incompetent Washington. Like Trump, Perot had never run for political office before he exploded onto the presidential scene. Instead of offering a positive vision, Perot also pushed a message that played to the grievances of those most affected by change—he opposed free trade, gun control and federal deficits. The two billionaires also had the money to hire an experienced political team and run a national campaign without the support of a traditional political party or its donors. </p> <br><p> But there are significant differences. Perot came into the process relatively late in 1992 and did not seek the Republican or Democratic nomination. His background in political causes also gave him remarkable staying power—he would actually drop out and re-emerge as a viable candidate in the final months of the same election cycle. Years of dedication to the cause of the families of American prisoners of war and to finding the missing in action from the Vietnam conflict meant that as he started his quest, he had at least the rudiments of a national political organization and dedicated volunteers, something the Trump phenomenon has yet to produce. On the other hand, Perot was not a celebrity candidate; he had never hosted his own show, and even the company that made him his money was not named Perot. </p> <p> In this regard, Trump is <i>sui generis.</i> For 30 years, through tireless self-promotion and despite business ups and downs, he has turned a golden T into an unmistakable personal brand. With social media maximizing this sales campaign, broadening it throughout the digital world and making it 24/7, Trump benefits in ways Perot, even with his famous whiteboard, in the pre-Web period could not. With the election more than 14 months away, it still remains to be seen whether the world of screen fiction, rather than American historical fact, provides the best analogy for Trump: if not Perot, perhaps <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(character)">Max Headroom</a>, another television star with signature hair.  </p> <p> *** </p> <br><p> <b>Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the modern Republican Party</b> </p> <p> <i>Sean Wilentz, professor of American history at Princeton University</i> </p> <p> Donald Trump a populist? Wrong. Trump has nothing to do with Andrew Jackson or Huey Long. He has everything to do with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the modern Republican Party. Trump is a Mixmaster blend of the right-wing Republican politics of the past 50 years. He literally recycles Nixon’s demagogy about “the silent majority” and Reagan’s fantasy call to “make America great again.” Those GOP politics became radicalized along the way, not least through three decades of Fox News’ incitement as inflammatory faux-reality TV. Trump is both the creature and exploiter of that radicalism, cynicism and kiss-my-ass bullying culture. He’s a dreamboat all the more attractive for his snarling vulgarity. </p> <p> Jeb Bush’s family got ahead by manipulating the radicalism and extremism at seeming arms length thanks to the dirty tricks of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, but things have gotten out of hand and now Jeb is clueless. Willie Horton and the Swift-boaters can’t ride to Jeb’s rescue. Trump, not he, embodies what the GOP has become. Jeb whines that Trump isn’t a real Republican because he was once something of a Democrat. Who does that remind Republicans of? Reagan was a has-been entertainer who played the role of a citizen-politician. He rose to the White House on smiley supply-side make-believe and tough talk about cracking down on welfare queens. Republicans have openly longed for another version of Ronald Reagan but secretly hoped for one with the viciousness of Richard Nixon. At last they’ve finally found the object of their desire in Donald Trump, thrilled by his crackdown on anchor babies and awed by his Great Wall of Mexico. “Go back to Univision!”: That’s Trump—and today’s GOP. </p> <p> *** </p> <p> <b>Henry Ford</b> </p> <p> <i>David Greenberg, associate professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University</i> </p> <p> Among the chief reasons for Donald Trump’s popularity is the image he has fashioned as a blunt-talking businessman. Hailing from outside the world of politics, he presents himself as willing to speak the unpleasant truths that politicians cannot, and he promises to bring to the White House a businessman’s no-nonsense pragmatism. </p> <p> This fantasy of a brusque businessman riding to rescue our corrupt Washington politics is not new at all. To pick but one notorious example, in the 1910s and 1920s, the role was played by Henry Ford—a pioneering businessman, but a nutcase when it came to politics. In 1918, Ford waged a losing bid for the Senate, and throughout the next decade he flirted with the White House. (The quietly canny Calvin Coolidge shrewdly eased him out of the 1924 race.) Many Americans looked to Ford as a fount of old-fashioned common sense, but his off-the-cuff expressions of contempt and anti-intellectualism—“History is bunk” was his most famous aphorism—also revealed an ugly side. His foolhardiness was exposed when he sued the <i>Chicago Tribune</i> in 1919 for calling him ignorant, and the paper’s lawyers quizzed Ford on basic facts of American history, which he couldn’t answer. The Revolution, he said, occurred in 1812; Benedict Arnold was “a writer, I think.” Yet legions of Americans continued to root for him, some of them celebrating his defiant contempt for education. Eventually Ford would permanently tarnish his reputation when his newspaper, the <i> Dearborn Independent</i>, began promulgating rank anti-Semitism, publishing, for example, the slanderous forgery <i>The Protocols of the Elders of Zion</i>, as well as an anti-Semitic series called <i>The International Jew</i>. Next to that raw sewage, Trump’s noxious comments about Mexicans and women look downright civil. </p> <p> In more recent times, numerous other moguls have toyed with the presidency using the argument that Washington needs the blunt pragmatism that only a man from the world of business can provide: Lee Iacocca, Ross Perot, Herman Cain. (In late 2011, lest we forget, Cain was leading the GOP field, polling between 25 and 30 percent.) All of them were ultimately rejected, in part because they lacked an important skill that politics requires: the ability to be politic. </p> <p>   </p> <p> <i>Michael Kazin</i>, <i>professor of history at Georgetown University, co-editor of the website Dissent and author, most recently, of </i>American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation </p> <p> As every intelligent historian knows, history doesn’t repeat itself, not even in rhyme (as Mark Twain once claimed). But one cannot have a discussion without using similes and metaphors, and Donald Trump does remind me of a figure from the American past who nobody, to my knowledge, has mentioned during this campaign: Henry Ford. </p> <p> Ford, like Trump, was a fabulously wealthy and famous businessman with a penchant for making controversial political statements that kept him in the news. As a pacifist, during World War I, he declared, “To my mind, the word ‘murderer’ should be embroidered in red letters across the breast of every soldier.” Then, in the early 1920s, his newspaper, the <i>Dearborn Independent</i>, published vicious anti-Semitic documents, which the industrialist vigorously defended. </p> <p> Ford, like Trump, also moved back and forth between the major parties. In 1918, he was the Democratic candidate for a Senate seat in Michigan and probably would have won if he had bothered to spend any money or campaign for himself. In 1924, despite or perhaps because of his notoriety, many Republicans wanted to draft him for president; a magazine poll in 1923 had him leading all other potential candidates. </p> <p> In the end, however, Ford decided not to run. He was as arrogant as Trump but lacked his political ambition. Yet, the media never tired of him. One critic in the 1920s wrote that modern Americans were eager for “new sensations” that a “tame president” could not fulfill. “If you were a motion-picture producer,” he wrote, “bent on furnishing a glimpse into the future … wouldn’t you choose Henry Ford as your hero?” </p> <p> *** </p> <br><p> <b>Something out of a Mark Twain novel</b> </p> <p> <i>David Blight, professor of American history at Yale University</i> </p> <p> Donald Trump’s real antecedents are in Mark Twain in various places. Especially his use of the Confidence Man, Captain Simon Suggs of Tallapoosa, in a chapter in <i>Huckleberry Finn</i>. There are Trumps aplenty also in Twain’s 1873 novel, <i>The Gilded Age</i>. The Confidence Man is always notoriously full of bravado, hyperbole, shiftiness; he makes people just line up and buy things from him. Frustrated, alienated from normal politics, hating political parties and with very short historical memories, many Americans perversely desire a river boat gambler dealing them bad hands, especially if those cards can confirm their most heartfelt prejudices. </p> <p> But Trump is also a very modern current creation of the Republicans themselves. If you ply the muddy waters of racism, xenophobia, hatred of government and the public sector, as well as rule by a 1 percent, long enough, you are eventually going to create a Frankenstein of your own making in your own midst. As long as that monster has enough confidence and stamina to just keep punching you in the face for the fun of it. In Trump, we have a 1-percenter who will stick his finger in everyone’s eye. Some people love watching that show. Anti-politics and anti-partyism is as old as the early Republic. Our parties were built out of anti-partyism, but we have almost never stopped disliking them. All the earlier examples to whom we might compare Trump—Horace Greeley in 1872, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, George Wallace, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, with a possible exception of Ross Perot—had deep ideological populist politics. Even the Dixiecrats of the late ’40s and early ’50s were not out to entertain; they sought to maintain white supremacy by populist means. Moreover, even the assortment of actors, wrestlers and corporate CEOs who have run for high offices have embraced ideologies of one kind or another. Trump doesn’t really have a politics of ideology; his closest effort at ideology is that he is all about white resentment. Such a stance has a long and successful history in our politics. His populism is about personality and entertainment; people who “follow” him attach to him their own ideologies. He is a monster bred by the white people’s party, the Republicans, of the past two to three decades. And he is also an invention of reality television and social media. </p> <p> It is worth remembering one of Twain’s simple ditties:  “To succeed in life you need two things: confidence and ignorance.”  Those who seem to “like” Trump and his “message” may be verifying that credo. </p> <p> *** </p> <p> <b>There’s never been a Trump in American politics</b> </p> <p> <i>Alan Brinkley, professor of history at Columbia University and author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist </i>The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century </p> <p> Donald Trump seems to think that he can become president, although few serious people believe him. Is he a populist who is tapping into a covered well of real feeling? Is he an outlier who is unafraid to speak the unsaid truths of politics? Does he speak for the sliver factions of party? No. Trump is not in the tradition of great—and sometimes dangerous—populists like Huey Long or Father Coughlin in the 1930s. Nor is he a passionate outlier forcing his party to move beyond a centrist position like Edmund Muskie did in 1968. He isn’t even a lightning rod for a single, and unattractive, ideological issue the way George Wallace was in the ’60s and ’70s. Donald Trump just wants to be heard. </p> <p> It is amazing that a candidate for president has no discernable policy nor any belief system other than the certainty that anything he says is right. Trump is not seeking votes, he is simply demanding attention. </p> <p> *** </p> <p> <b>Wendell Wilkie, Teddy Roosevelt, </b> <b>Arthur Godfrey and Lonesome Rhodes</b> </p> <p> <i>Lewis Gould, emeritus professor of American history at the University of Texas</i> </p> <p> I have written <a href="http://blog.oup.com/2015/08/wendell-willkie-donald-trump/">elsewhere</a> about the perceived similarities between Trump and Wendell Willkie. The latter came out of nowhere to achieve the GOP nomination as the sane businessman alternative to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was likely to be pro-Ally in World War II. Willkie indulged in some election isolationism that he recanted post-election. There are also facile comparisons with Theodore Roosevelt and his third-party bid in 1912. Roosevelt, however, was a serious political thinker who compellingly engaged the problems of making the federal government operate beyond the idle mantras of “management” that Trump recently invoked. The key to Trump’s appeal, beyond his white power flirtation with noxious racism, is his television career. Long ago, Gore Vidal opined that television is a barrel that has no bottom to it, and others said the most predictable thing about television is that it is worse every year than the one before. Thus, Trump’s antecedents are such less well-known figures as Arthur Godfrey and Elia Kazan’s Lonesome Rhodes in “A Face in the Crowd.” </p> <p> *** </p> <p> <b>Pat Paulsen and Ronald Reagan</b> </p> <p> <i>James Kloppenberg, professor of American history at Harvard University</i> </p> <p> Donald Trump reminds me of Pat Paulsen, another television clown whose notoriety made him attractive for a short time to disenchanted people who knew little or nothing about politics. Of course, Trump also shares that quality with another former TV personality whose celebrity catapulted him into electoral politics—Ronald Reagan, a man whom those of us living in California during the 1970s could no more easily envision as POTUS than I can imagine Trump being nominated by a major party for that office. Should history repeat itself, Karl Marx will be proven right yet again: The first time was tragedy, the second would be farce. </p> <p> <b>***</b> </p> <br><p> <b>Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman</b> </p> <p> <i>Jacqueline Jones, professor and chair of the history department at the University of Texas and author, most recently, of the Pulitzer Prize finalist </i>A Dreadful Deceit: the Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America </p> <p> In times of great social upheaval in the past and present, a small subset of native-born white Americans has turned to bombastic demagogues and upstart political movements to express their fear of losing what they consider their God-given privileges. More often than not, these whites have scapegoated the most vulnerable members of society as a means of protesting larger social transformations that are seemingly out of their control. In the mid-1850s, an anti-immigrant party called the Know-Nothings gave voice to white Protestants who believed that impoverished newcomers from Ireland were bent on turning the United States into a colony of the Vatican. In 1948, a third party called the Dixiecrats spoke to white supremacists who resisted the demands of African-American activists, men and women largely disfranchised. Indeed, the history of the United States can be written as story of periodic waves of increasing ethnic diversity and expanded civil rights, developments that have threatened the privileges of white men and women in the workplace and the halls of power. Too often, native-born whites have seen American citizenship as a zero-sum game, believing that as minorities won rights, whites must inevitably lose some of theirs. </p> <p> By focusing on the supposed threat that Mexican immigrants pose to the Republic, Donald Trump continues this unsavory tradition of blaming the powerless for transformations wrought by the powerful. Many undocumented immigrants are engaged in menial, low-paid service or construction work. Living in the shadows, they are the victims of routine wage-theft, and live under the constant fear that their families will be separated and deported to Mexico. These men, women and children are not the cause of the profound economic changes affecting the United States today—the rise of a global marketplace, the spread of technological innovations and the increasing concentration of wealth and political influence. Indeed, well-connected empire-builders such as the billionaire Donald Trump are the drivers of this new economy. Trump, then, like many demagogues in the past, seeks to deflect attention from the culpability of people of his own class, those with outsized power, to those who are the victims of that power. </p> <p> In breaking with conventions of civil discourse to label immigrants murderers and rapists, and to call politicians “stupid,” Trump echoes figures such as Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman, governor and U.S. senator from the state in the early 20th century. Vardaman made a career of denigrating African Americans in the most shocking way, and approving of lynching (a form of domestic terrorism) to thwart black aspirations and ambitions. Today, Trump appeals to only a small proportion of the American electorate, but social media amplifies his outrageous statements, delighting not only his followers but also the editors, reporters, talk-show hosts and bloggers who crave a good story, especially a sordid one with a long, if less than honorable, history.    </p> <p> *** </p> <p> <b>Sui generis, with a touch of Silvio Berlusconi</b> </p> <p> <i>Jeremy Mayer, associate professor in the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs at George Mason University</i> </p> <p> Donald Trump has no exact matches in American history, in part because of the alteration in campaign finance laws. Billionaires now have a real advantage in American politics. Unlike every other person running for president in the major parties, Trump doesn’t have to spend hours each week begging for dollars. In the past, great wealth was almost a disadvantage in pursuing the White House. Now, because of both legal and societal changes, it is mostly a plus. </p> <p> Trump is also sui generis in that he has been playing media politics for decades. Ross Perot had an avuncular and oddly appealing style on television, but he was awkward in many interactions with the media. He hated the exposure of his life and business empire, and the inability to control the story. Trump loves to mix it up, and gives as good as he gets. He’s our first reality television candidate. Not even Ronald Reagan was as comfortable in front of the camera as Trump is. He’s absolutely fearless. If he messes up, he’s confident that he can make it work for him anyway. So far, that’s been mostly true. </p> <p> This makes Trump almost bulletproof. Imagine, just for a moment, if a traditional American politician tried to appeal to the Christian right with Trump’s personal baggage? The marriages, the supermodels, the scandals, the obscenities, the gambling wealth. Yet even among Republican evangelicals, he’s doing pretty well. </p> <p> Finally, the area of Trump’s appeal that has the most resonance in American history is his nativism/populism. We have seen a lot of that in our long electoral history, from the Know Nothings to George Wallace. Trump’s implicit racial appeal, to kick the brown immigrants out and to replace that incompetent black man in the White House, is vivid enough to help explain his surging popularity. Put an old rich white guy back in charge, one who is not afraid to tell the truth to those uppity minorities. People forget how well Wallace did in a lot of Midwestern and Northern primaries in 1964 and in the general election of 1968. </p> <p> Put all that together in one package, and we’ve never seen anything like him. Neither has any other country, with the possible exception of Italy. If I had to pick a parallel, I’d say Trump is the American Berlusconi. Fabulously rich, ignorant of policy and governance, lubricious to a fault and a populist braggadocio. </p> <p> *** </p> <p> <b>An unprecedented product of the times</b> </p> <p> <i>Joseph J. Ellis, professor emeritus of history at Mount Holyoke College and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning </i>Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation <i> and, most recently, </i>The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution </p> <p> I don’t think we’ve seen a serious presidential candidate like Donald Trump before, because such a creature would not have been possible in the pre-Internet, pre-Twitter, pre-social media world. As our definitions of credibility, competence and even coherence have been digitized, as deliberation cannot exceed the time required to touch a keyboard, evanescence is the new authenticity, and the Trump phenomenon, while unprecedented, is the wave of the future. </p><br>

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