Trumpism, It Was Ever Thus
Over and over and over, I read, meet, or talk to people who are shocked by Donald Trump’s relentless trolling, his thoroughly vulgar and outlandish demagogy. Why, they’ve never seen the like! How could this be, in a country with a storied constitution and a two-party system in which partisans rotate in government without attempting to destroy each other?
This pearl-clutching angst is profoundly ahistorical. American politics over the past two centuries has been littered with leaders who practiced Trumpism avant la lettre (a fancy way of saying “they got their first”). After antiwar activists blocked President Johnson’s motorcade in 1968, Alabama’s Governor George C. Wallace declared to huge roars of approval that “if you elect me the president…and some of them lie down in front of my automobile, it will be the last thing they ever want to lie down in front of!” He went on to win five Deep South states that November. In June 1951, Senator Joseph McCarthy called General George C. Marshall (the most distinguished American military leader in modern times) a witting Soviet agent in the “great conspiracy” to “diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us militarily, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East and to impair our will to resist evil.”
Their voters ate it up, and we can easily find more recent examples in both parties. Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo was elected its Democratic Mayor from 1972 to 1979 after (and because of) his raiding Black Panther Party headquarters and making young Black men stand on the street almost naked, in the cold.
The politics of cruelty, vindictiveness, and gleeful resentment has deeper roots. Peacock-strutting, nose-thumbing performances have always played well with white voters in the South, whether in 1825, 1925, or the present. Most people who saw the Coen brothers’ Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? likely thought that Mississippi Governor Pappy O’Daniel, played by Charles Durning, was a laughable lampoon. Not so! This character was modeled on the actual Pappy O’Daniel, an on-air flour salesman who parlayed his celebrity (“Pass the biscuits, Pappy!”) into the Texas governor’s mansion in 1938 and then to the Senate from 1941 to 1949.
The South abounded in colorfully vicious figures like this, including the South Carolina’s “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, Mississippi’s Theodore “The Man” Bilbo, and, of course, the Kingfish, Huey P. Long. But my favorite, if I can use that word, is Mississippi’s James K. Vardaman, the Great White Chief, as he liked to be known. Look at the picture above and imagine yourself in some dirt-poor town when he rolls in, sitting on bales of cotton in his white suit, pulled by a team of white oxen, hailing the common people. A sight worthy of a Roman conqueror, and his voters were tickled pink. They sent Vardaman, a man who exulted in racial terror (”If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy”) to the governor’s seat in 1904 and the Senate in 1913.
Of course, none of these men ever caught the gold ring, the presidency, although Wallace ran very creditably in the Democratic primaries in 1964, 1972, and 1976. Trump trumps all of them in that regard. He went straight to the heart of the Republican Party. Who can forget those debates in 2016, watching him pulverize poor Jeb Bush, the heir apparent?
So get over yourselves, readers! What we call Trumpism is bred in the bone, and you fool yourself in foolish ways if you assume it is predicated on being stupid, ignorant, or uneducated. None of these white men fit that profile. Like all charismatic political figures, they forged a direct connection with their audiences in a vernacular that resonated powerfully. No more of this vacuous tomfoolery, as in Joe Biden’s repeating rote-like, “This is not who we are.” He was sadly mistaken—Trump’s brand of politics is deeply, fundamentally American.
[Portside moderator - also of interest: Gerrymandering by Aziz Huq (London Review of Books) October 23, 2025]
Van Gosse is Professor of History Emeritus Franklin and Marshall College and Co-Chair of Historians for Peace & Democracy. He is an historian and an activist, and those vocations are closely linked in both the major topics that have occupied him: antiwar/solidarity organizing and electoral politics.
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