Make America Great ‘Again’

On the night of November 2024, as the results came in, political analysts across the world reached for the same word: unprecedented. They were not wrong, but they were not quite right either. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency was unprecedented in many respects, but the political tradition he represents is older than the republic itself. To call Trump an anomaly is to misread American history. To call him merely a continuation is to misread what happened. The truth is more unsettling than either.

In 1964, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that American political life had long been marked by a “paranoid style”: a recurring pattern of conspiratorial thinking, aggrieved nationalism, and anti-elite resentment that periodically surged to prominence before receding to the margins.

Writing in the shadow of McCarthyism and the far-right John Birch Society, Hofstadter regarded such movements as disturbing but ultimately peripheral to mainstream politics – fringe energies that the institutional weight of American democracy would, in time, absorb and contain. What he did not anticipate was a leader skilled enough to bring that fringe to the centre, and a political environment degraded enough to let him. In 2016, the paranoid style reached the presidency. In 2024, it returned.

That year was also the first since 1945 in which every incumbent party in every affluent democracy that held elections saw its vote share fall. Among all the populist leaders who benefited from that wave, only one – Donald John Trump – genuinely brought his movement to the institutional centre of the world’s leading democracy.

This raises one of the most contested questions in contemporary political science: does Trump represent an anomaly in American political life, or a continuation of its deeper patterns? Two interpretations dominate the literature. The first treats Trump as an anomaly whose disregard for democratic norms, personalist politics, and resilience to scandal deviated sharply from any modern conception of the presidency. The second treats Trumpism as a continuation, arguing that its ideological components, namely populism, nativism, and conspiratorial anti-elitism, have long roots in American political culture.

Both framings are partially correct but insufficiently precise. Trump’s anomalousness lies not in his ideology, which has deep historical roots, but in his institutional reach: his ability to bring a historically fringe political style to the centre of American democracy. Understanding Trump in this way reveals something more troubling than a simple aberration. It reveals the structural vulnerabilities of democratic institutions when subjected to a leader capable of converting latent political energies into organised power.

A Break from Presidential Norms

Trump’s first presidency diverged sharply from the behavioural norms traditionally associated with the office. In their influential study of democratic decline, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that democratic systems depend not solely on formal constitutional rules but on informal norms: the unwritten agreements between political rivals to accept electoral outcomes and restrain the use of institutional power, even when they have the legal right to use it. Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, and the crisis culminating in the January 6th Capitol attack, represented a stress on democratic institutions at their highest level, one without precedent in the modern era.

Equally striking was Trump’s immunity to the mechanisms of political accountability that had previously constrained American presidents. Two impeachments, multiple criminal indictments, and a succession of controversies that would have ended any conventional political career failed to significantly erode his core support. This resilience was not merely a product of partisan loyalty. It reflected the degree to which traditional gatekeeping institutions, including media, party hierarchies, and congressional oversight, had been structurally weakened in a highly polarised environment. Trump did not merely exploit those weaknesses; his political style actively deepened them.

Most significantly, Trump cultivated a form of politics organised around personal loyalty rather than party ideology. The Republican Party progressively adapted itself to Trump’s leadership rather than the reverse, an inversion of the normal relationship between party and leader in a two-party democratic system. By his second term, Trumpism had effectively displaced traditional Republicanism as the party’s governing ideology. These features collectively mark Trump as a distinctive political actor whose behaviour deviated substantially from modern presidential norms. Yet the crucial question remains: was this distinctiveness ideological, or did it lie elsewhere?

The Deep Roots of Trumpism

A closer examination of the ideological content of Trumpism reveals that it is far less novel than its critics often suggest. By directly applying Hofstadter’s framework, Trump’s rhetoric, characterised by conspiracy, aggrieved nationalism, the portrayal of elites as corrupt enemies of the true people, and a politics of resentment dressed in the language of restoration, fulfils the paranoid style to striking precision. The Make America Great Again slogan is structurally Hofstadterian: it implies that authentic American greatness has been stolen or subverted, and that its recovery requires defeating a corrupting establishment.

The populist dimension has equally deep roots. The political theorist Jan-Werner Müller argues that populist movements claim exclusive moral representation of the “true people” against a corrupt and illegitimate elite, a claim that by definition delegitimises all political opposition. This structure recurs throughout American history: in the agrarian populism of the 1890s, in Andrew Jackson’s assault on the Bank of the United States, which he characterised as a tool of corrupt financial elites against ordinary citizens, and in Huey Long’s Depression-era “Share Our Wealth” programme, which mobilised populist resentment in terms remarkably similar to those Trump would deploy eighty years later.

The nativist dimension is equally familiar. Trump’s emphasis on immigration restriction and national identity echoes the Know Nothing movement of the 1850s and the immigration restriction campaigns of the 1920s, both of which arose in response to perceived demographic and cultural threat. Hofstadter’s paranoid style and Trump’s politics are not merely analogous; they are expressions of the same recurring American political tradition.

Writing in the Financial Times following Trump’s 2024 re-election, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that the result represented a “decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism”, a rejection building across decades of cultural and economic resentment. Trumpism did not invent these grievances; it provided them with a political vehicle capable of reaching national power.

The Conditions That Made Trump Possible

Trump’s rise cannot be understood without the structural transformations that preceded and enabled it. Partisan polarisation, having intensified dramatically since the 1990s, reduced the political costs of norm violation and strengthened voter loyalty to the point where traditional accountability mechanisms lost much of their force. Declining public trust in government, media, and political institutions created fertile ground for anti establishment rhetoric, ground that had been cultivating for decades before Trump entered politics.

The transformation of the media environment is particularly significant. The sociologist Max Weber described a form of political authority he called charismatic authority: legitimacy that derives from followers’ belief in a leader’s exceptional personal qualities, rather than from law or tradition. Unlike authority grounded in institutions, charismatic authority depends entirely on the leader’s relationship with his followers, making it both powerful and structurally fragile.

Social media enabled Trump to realise this at a scale previously impossible. By bypassing traditional journalistic gatekeepers, Trump could communicate directly with tens of millions of supporters, shaping his own political persona in real time and rendering conventional scrutiny partially ineffective. The technological conditions of 2016 made charismatic authority scalable in ways that no previous populist leader, neither Jackson nor Long, had been able to exploit.

John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times observed that 2024 was a “graveyard of incumbents”, noting that the structural conditions enabling Trump’s rise, including economic insecurity, institutional distrust, and cultural anxiety, were not uniquely American. Yet Trump alone, among the populist leaders of this era, succeeded in bringing the paranoid style to the institutional centre of the world’s leading democracy. Structural conditions explain why a populist leader could succeed; they do not explain why this one broke through.

Anomalous in Reach, Not in Ideology

Hofstadter believed the paranoid style was a permanent feature of American democracy, a recurring undercurrent that periodically surged to prominence but was ultimately contained by the resilience of democratic institutions. What his framework did not fully account for was the possibility of a leader sufficiently skilled in charismatic mobilisation, and operating in a sufficiently favourable structural environment, to break through that institutional containment entirely. Trump did not invent the paranoid style; he brought it to the presidency.

This distinction, between the existence of an ideological tradition and its institutional reach, is what makes the anomaly-versus continuation debate feel simultaneously correct and insufficient. Scholars who emphasise continuity are right that Trumpism’s ideological components are not new. Scholars who emphasise anomaly are right that something unprecedented occurred. Both are identifying different dimensions of the same phenomenon.

The Jackson comparison illuminates this with particular clarity. Jackson similarly mobilised populist resentment, attacked established elites, and reshaped the party system around personal authority. But Jacksonian populism emerged from within an existing coalition and gradually captured existing party structures. Trump, by contrast, arrived as a political outsider and constructed his coalition largely through personal political entrepreneurship, transforming the Republican Party from outside its ideological mainstream.

The mechanism of institutional capture was more radical, and Trump’s sustained immunity to accountability mechanisms suggests a degree of norm erosion that Jackson, for all his confrontational style, did not precipitate in the same way.

Trump therefore represents a specific kind of political anomaly: not a leader who introduced unprecedented ideology, but one who gave institutional form and democratic power to a tradition that American democracy had previously managed to contain. His personalist politics, amplified by social media and enabled by structural polarisation, created the conditions under which charismatic authority could operate at presidential scale. The MAGA movement became self-reinforcing: Trump’s authority validated the movement’s identity, and the movement’s loyalty reinforced his authority. What resulted was not simply a presidency but a political coalition whose identity was inseparable from its leader, a phenomenon historically associated with charismatic movements rather than the institutionalised politics of liberal democracy.

The Verdict

The ideological foundations of Trumpism are not new. Populism, nativism, and conspiratorial anti-elitism appear throughout American political history, from Jackson to the Know Nothings to Huey Long. Yet Trump’s anomalousness is real, and it lies precisely where Hofstadter did not anticipate: not in the existence of this political tradition, but in its institutional reach. Trump did not invent the paranoid style; he brought it to the presidency, and in doing so demonstrated that the informal norms Levitsky and Ziblatt identified as democracy’s safeguards were more fragile than many had assumed.

The most precise conclusion is therefore that Trump is both continuous and anomalous, but in different registers: ideologically continuous with longstanding traditions in American political culture, institutionally anomalous in his ability to translate those traditions into presidential power. That combination, familiar ideology and unprecedented institutional reach, is what makes Trumpism historically significant, and what makes the binary choice between anomaly and continuation an inadequate framework for understanding it.