Donald Trump May Break the Mold, but He Fits a Pattern, Too

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/21/us/politics/donald-trump-presidential-race.html

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The New York media mogul approached his party’s convention having already shaken the political system: The power brokers had attacked him as a dangerous rogue, mocked his hairstyle and branded him a “low voluptuary” for his colorful personal life. And yet William Randolph Hearst loomed over the St. Louis gathering as a threat to seize the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

Mr. Hearst, a publisher of lurid tabloid newspapers serving his first term in Congress, was crushed in the balloting as the party leaders of 1904 rejected him. His message — a blend of populist economic policies and muscular nationalism, sometimes called “Hearstism” — would await another standard-bearer, at another time.

More than a century later, Donald J. Trump is poised to do what Mr. Hearst could not: claim a major party’s nomination for president of the United States. His candidacy has upended the Republican Party, baffling and then vanquishing opponents who dismissed him as a celebrity sideshow. Even now, many prefer to treat his success as a freak occurrence without precedent in United States history.

But if Mr. Trump will be the first figure of his kind to claim a presidential nomination, his candidacy falls within an American tradition of insurgent politics that has found expression in other moments of social and economic rupture, often attaching itself to folk heroes from the world of big business or the military.

His hazy political philosophy, often labeled “Trumpism,” draws on themes of American identity and sovereignty — preoccupations that have convulsed one party or the other from time to time, before subsiding.

And consciously or not, Mr. Trump has followed a path trod for more than a century by nationalist outsiders who coveted the presidency, from Hearst to Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Ross Perot. Like them, he has presented himself as an archetype of American ingenuity and grit — a tough, patriotic businessman — and offered himself as a champion against swirling international forces that he describes, in conspiratorial terms, as undermining the United States.

His running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, hailed Mr. Trump in a “60 Minutes” interview as a heroic leader who “embodies American strength.”

Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president and 1984 Democratic presidential nominee, said he saw Mr. Trump as an heir to a tradition of isolationism and cultural paranoia that surfaces from time to time as a “recurrent theme” in American politics. Mr. Trump, he said, had articulated a familiar exhortation “for America to withdraw from the world, that we have only threats coming from abroad.”

Mr. Mondale, 88, said Mr. Trump appeared determined to undermine American traditions of internationalism and multiculturalism. He called Mr. Trump a “hate advocate.”

“His attack on Mexicans, on judges, on immigrants of all kinds — it all has this ‘We have to protect ourselves from them’ theme,” Mr. Mondale said.

Historians see in Mr. Trump’s candidacy the winding together of different strains in reactionary politics under a single banner. No reality television star has run for president before, but Mr. Trump, with his grasp of the art of notoriety, has forebears of a kind in General MacArthur and Charles A. Lindbergh, the celebrity aviator whose “America First” slogan Mr. Trump has appropriated, and in Hearst and Henry Ford, a pair of renowned and eccentric tycoons who eyed the presidency.

His message contains echoes of George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who sought the White House on a law-and-order platform, and of Mr. Perot and Lee A. Iacocca, modern industrialists drawn to politics and preoccupied with economic threats from Asia and Latin America.

Viewed from this angle, Mr. Trump looks less like a singular phenomenon of 2016, and more like the political equivalent of a comet that crosses the track of an American presidential campaign every few decades.

“We’ve seen everything in Trump before,” said Kevin Kruse, a political historian at Princeton, “but we’ve never seen it all together at once.”

For much of the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump has defied ideological labeling: He has ignored traditional cultural wedge issues like abortion rights and same-sex marriage, and has taken shifting and often contradictory stances on a host of other matters, from military intervention in Syria to the concept of universal health care.

Mr. Trump has brusquely dismissed the charge of philosophical inconsistency. “I’m a conservative,” he said in a speech in May in California. “But at this point, who cares?”

Yet beneath his swerving and scattered policy agenda, he has been steadfastly consistent over time on a few broad inclinations that define his political worldview.

To the extent that he has an ideology, it is a kind of fortress conservatism, taking a bunkered outlook on the world and fixating on challenges to America’s economic supremacy and to its character as a nation defined by the white working class.

Patrick J. Buchanan, who ran for president both as a populist Republican and as a third-party immigration hawk, called Mr. Trump a kindred spirit. “You could call it tribalism,” Mr. Buchanan said. “You could call it ethno-nationalism.”

Since Mr. Trump first toyed with running for president in the 1980s, he has been hostile to foreign trade and immigration and suspicious of international organizations he views as impinging on America’s free hand. He is distrustful of alliances with less powerful countries, which he has characterized as freeloading off America’s wealth and power.

In the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump has suggested withdrawing from NATO and pulling troops back from longstanding bases in countries like South Korea and Germany. His threats are a precise echo of a speech he gave in New Hampshire in 1987, declaring that the United States had been “kicked around” by ungrateful allies in Asia and the Middle East.

In domestic matters, Mr. Trump’s main impulse is toward hard-line law and order. He is indifferent to civil liberties and contemptuous of objections to racial targeting. For decades, he has described the country as harried by rampant crime, and has typically placed blame with different nonwhite communities, including urban blacks, Hispanic immigrants and Native Americans.

Long before he called for banning Muslim immigration and torturing terrorism suspects, Mr. Trump argued for unleashing the New York Police Department to attack social unrest with a mailed fist. He spoke approvingly of the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square. He recently expressed admiration for Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s autocratic president, and Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, whom he praised as tough on terrorism.

He is not the first American businessman with presidential aspirations to be drawn to strongman government: Hearst and Ford, the anti-Semitic car manufacturer who considered a presidential bid in 1924, both maintained cordial and even admiring relations with emerging fascist regimes in Italy and Germany.

Charles Murray, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said Mr. Trump’s autocratic tendencies placed him well outside the conservative intellectual mainstream.

“The word fascist is simply thrown around too easily, and so I don’t want to use that word. But part of Trumpism is the man on the white horse,” Mr. Murray said. “That’s neither left nor right. That’s authoritarian, and it’s really, really scary.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump has any grounding in political history. He has offered perfunctory praise for a few past presidents, like Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln, and his aides cited Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 candidacy as a strategic model for the Trump campaign. But Mr. Trump has named no one as a particular hero or personal source of inspiration, as Mr. Reagan cited Calvin Coolidge, or as Bill Clinton invoked Thomas Jefferson.

Still, Mr. Trump has shown a knack for picking up historical slogans and themes from the nationalist right. When a reporter referred to America First in an interview, Mr. Trump embraced it as a campaign catchphrase. The slogan, which dates to the 1930s, was first popularized by Lindbergh as he warned against being drawn into World War II by what he described as sinister British and Jewish interests.

On the stump, Mr. Trump has invoked General MacArthur as a paragon of American toughness; in a short-lived presidential campaign, the general cast Democrats as controlled by Communists, lacking in traditional American fortitude and utterly outfoxed in international negotiations.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has campaigned on a theme of “Americanism.” The term is vague: Theodore Roosevelt used it to convey a kind of combative patriotism, whereas the isolationists of the 1930s invoked it as a rejection of international entanglements.

For Mr. Trump, it connotes a narrow focus on the economic interests of blue-collar industry, and contrasts with the soft cosmopolitanism of international elites. The country’s economic challenges, he said recently, were the work of “a leadership class that worships globalism over Americanism.”

Roger Stone, a political strategist who has advised Mr. Trump since the 1980s, said the heart of Mr. Trump’s philosophy was his distrust of “globalism.”

In 2016, Mr. Stone has urged Mr. Trump to fully embrace his inborn nationalism. “He’s a throwback to an old-fashioned, Theodore Roosevelt-Ronald Reagan gutsy belief in Americanism,” Mr. Stone said. “On NATO, particularly, on trade, on national defense, he’s been talking about some of these things for 30 years.”

Mr. Trump’s admirers and critics have both tended to treat him as an anomaly in American politics and looked to Europe for antecedents. Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker, recently likened Mr. Trump approvingly to Margaret Thatcher as a figure of the right leading an insurrection against the established order.

Meg Whitman, a Republican who runs Hewlett Packard Enterprise, reached for a different comparison: At a June conference hosted by Mitt Romney, she said Mr. Trump reminded her of the rise of Mussolini in Italy and of Hitler’s National Socialist Party in Germany.

That darker view is shared by some in Hillary Clinton’s orbit. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with extensive ties to Mrs. Clinton, conducted a study of Mr. Trump’s ideology in the spring and concluded that his candidacy was an echo of the European far right. Neera Tanden, the group’s president, said Mr. Trump was “very consistently a national socialist.”

“His signature policies are about the state that works for some groups and not for others,” she said.

For an older generation of American politicians, there is a deepening sense that Mr. Trump echoes ideas that have been raised here, from time to time, and soundly defeated. In the past, a stronger two-party system, bolstered by muscular labor unions and business confederations, had quashed figures like Mr. Trump with ease.

Former Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas, a Republican, said Mr. Trump’s campaign had echoes of George Wallace, whose efforts to win over Midwestern whites were thwarted by organized labor, and of the original America First movement. (Lindbergh, she recalled, had unsuccessfully sought to recruit her father, Alf Landon, the 1936 Republican presidential nominee, into its ranks.)

“When he says, ‘I want to make America great again and I’m going to take America back,’ it appeals to people who feel they’ve lost out,” said Ms. Kassebaum, who said she did not plan to vote for Mr. Trump. “Some of it’s racial. Some of it is immigration. Some of it is the lost jobs they feel shouldn’t have been lost.”

Even some of Mr. Trump’s former opponents have begun to allow that he might be more than an accident of history.

In a little-noticed May speech in Amsterdam, Jeb Bush said that he considered Mr. Trump a reflection of deeper trends. He described American democracy as gravely imperiled by corrosive forces: economic inequality and partisan polarization, the unsettling experience of globalization and a crippling lack of empathy.

Those forces, he said, had taken root “in increments not discernible to the naked eye,” leaving the country more vulnerable than ever to a political eruption.

A traumatic recession, Mr. Bush said, set it off.

“The inability to deal with these great challenges, I think, makes it easier in retrospect to see, on the left, a candidate like Bernie Sanders,” Mr. Bush said, “and certainly in my party, the emergence of Donald Trump.”