There is little doubt that if U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term feels like an upheaval, it is by design. As far back as 2018, Steve Bannon, Trump’s onetime top strategist, talked about how the White House would “flood the zone with shit” to overwhelm the media. Trump’s new team has honed the old flood plan into the art of the tsunami. There are more executive orders than ever before, jaw-dropping reality TV moments in the Oval Office, norms busted until one can’t remember they existed, and the upside-down world of allies treated like enemies and dictators like buddies.
The mind boggles. How should one make sense of Trump 2.0? Pundits often deploy one of two arguments to think about him. The first is to call Trump unprecedented, as if he is somehow sui generis. Though every leader is unique at some level, I struggle with the idea that Trump alone is without comparison. It is also worth noting that he is as much a creation of our reactionary times as he is the person most shaping it. If ours is the era of backlash—against globalization, against trade and open borders, against racial and gender equality—then Trump is merely the man who told us what’s going wrong, not the person with a better plan.
The second school of thought on Trump tends to draw on a historical analogy of some sort. Trump is Julius Caesar, a man who became Rome’s dictator for life two millennia ago, until his assassination. Or Trump is Mao Zedong, who orchestrated China’s wide-scale Cultural Revolution. Closer to our present day, Trump could be a populist strongman like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan or India’s Narendra Modi. Or he could be the man to usher in a kleptocracy, like Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Trump also echoes across U.S. history: He has praised William McKinley’s late 19th-century tariffs and tried to emulate them, while his foreign policy has often been compared—unsatisfactorily, I think—to Ronald Reagan’s.
All of this is terrific fodder for debate, as you’ll see in this issue’s cover package, “The Historical Presidency.” We’ve enlisted nine historians and thinkers to play the game of comparing and contrasting Trump with figures in history, with some surprising results. Ramachandra Guha, a historian and biographer of Mohandas Gandhi, found that the best historical parallel to Trump was a man from our present: former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “Through their artful and disingenuous way with words,” Guha writes, “these elitist cosmopolitans were able to effectively seduce people of a very different class.”
Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University professor and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, compares Trump to Richard Nixon, who blew up the global monetary system in the 1970s and thrust Americans into a decade of inflation. Could the uncertainty of Trump’s tariffs create a similar dynamic?
And of course, we examine the obligatory references to Caesar, who broke the law limiting his power when he led a legion across the Rubicon. This analogy, historian Donna Zuckerberg writes, “tells you more about the person making the comparison than it does about either of the leaders involved.” When invoked by the left, she argues, it signals unease with Trump’s erosion of norms. But the right can see it as a willingness to destroy a system that isn’t working.
I hope you’ll enjoy the collection, which takes in comparisons from around the world and which we hope to continue as a series.
Lastly, a special mention of a provocation by historian Christopher Clark, who argues that “modernity is disintegrating before our eyes.” Has civilization peaked? If he’s right, it’s a dispiriting thought. For once, I very much hope you’ll disagree with an essay we’ve published.
As ever,
Ravi Agrawal
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