Donald Trump May Break the Mold, but He Fits a Pattern, Too
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.”
.. He spoke approvingly of the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square.
.. 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.
.. 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.
.. Even some of Mr. Trump’s former opponents have begun to allow that he might be more than an accident of history.