United States

Date range: 1980-2020
One challenge with the United States is that its clear history with populism is slightly obscured by the embeddedness of its two-party system. Both parties have traditionally varied greatly from one locality to another, and ascribing either as fundamentally populist is difficult – even are led by presidential candidates who fit the label. Hence, we have looked only at presidential candidates here.

Case notes

Donald Trump

Celebrity businessman and real estate scion Donald Trump ran a populist campaign for the presidency in 2016, after first successfully seeking the Republican Party’s nomination. His campaign centred on a brash hostility to the political class, an abrasive attitude to his opponents, an air of national economic and cultural crisis, and a loose ideological grounding of right-wing nativism and nationalism. Throughout the campaign Trump built off his well-established brand to court media attention through controversial statements (Jacobson 2017, 15), and his clinching of the nomination and presidency – although neither included majorities of the vote – surprised most observers. He went on to lose re-election in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden. While Trump can be placed in a long tradition of American populism (see Savage 2019), he is generally considered to be a departure from the norms of presidential campaigning in recent generations (Appel 2018, 157). As with some others in the literature (Fenger 2018, 193; Schneiker 2020, 2) we’ve elected not to categorise the whole Republican party as populist in the same way Trump was.

Trump distinguished himself with an uncompromisingly ad hominin rhetoric against his political opponents (Mendes 2016, 65; Appel 2018; Nai and Maier 2018, 82) whom he collectivised as a broader “elite” and political “establishment” (Oliver and Rahn 2016, 193; Jensen and Bang 2018, 355). Throughout the 2016 campaign he used the slogan “drain the swamp” to suggest that the corruption of Washington D.C. had become entrenched and systemic (Rudolph 2021, 33), suggested that the “system is rigged against our citizens” in favour of the powerful (Jamieson and Taussig 2017, 624), and claimed in typically populist terms that on “every major issue affecting this country, the people are right and the governing elite are wrong” (Oliver and Rahn 2016, 189). He pledged to be the “voice” of the “American people” against this establishment (Ostiguy and Roberts 2016, 43). In the 2016 election, this antipathy to the governing elite was trained most directly on opponent Hilary Clinton (whom he said should be put in prison for corruption, (Biegon 2019, 527)), but also against high profile members of his own Republican Party, the media and the state, suggesting a holistically anti-political class discourse (OTH_POLCLASS = 3).

Antipathy toward immigration on cultural, economic and security grounds formed a key component of the Trump campaign (Mendes 2016, 65), and was manifested in his policy to build a wall along the Mexican border and force Mexico to pay for it. This anti-immigrant sentiment applied to asylum seekers from Syria, whom he promised to deport if he won (Mendes 2016, 65). He also repeatedly linked the control of immigration with terrorism (Hall 2021) (OTH_IMMIGRANTS = 3). This anti-immigrant stance correlated with an ethnocentric rhetoric that demonised Muslims, Mexicans (seemingly by extension, Hispanics), and other minorities (Jacobson 2017, 20; Biegon 2019, 523; Savage 2019, 409). A few notable examples of this discourse were: his claim that the immigrants being “sent” by Mexico were “bringing crime, they’re rapists” at his campaign commencement speech (Edwards 2018, 185); proposing a ban on Muslims from entering the country; questioning the qualification of an American-born judge to preside over his affairs on the basis that “he’s a Mexican”; and asserting without evidence the conspiracy theory that Muslim’s cheered when the World Trade Centre was attacked on September 11, 2001 (see Jamieson and Taussig 2017; Hall 2021; Savage 2019, 402). Of relevance here is his intense media campaign years earlier alleging that incumbent President Barack Obama (2009-17) was born in Kenya and ineligible for the presidency – something many scholars consider a racist dog whistle given that Obama is African American (Kellner 2022, 81). More broadly, many scholars have also considered Trump campaign rhetoric to tap into deeper anxieties among white voters (Bobo 2017; Ostiguy and Roberts 2016, 44). It is debatable whether all of this should earn Trump a 2 or 3 on our OTH_ETHNIC coding, given that his ethnocentrism was still somewhat implicit and more opaque than more outright ethnic majoritarian populist candidates in Europe and elsewhere. While this could be further discussed, we’ve coded Trump 2 on this scale.

Trump is often considered to have upended the Republican party’s prior association with economic liberalism and free trade orthodoxy (Ostiguy and Roberts 2016, 41), and taken a sharper stance against major American businesses that sent jobs offshore (Edwards 2018, 182; Schneiker 2020, 3–4). While this is some truth to this, it would be a stretch to register this rhetoric on the OTH_ECONOMIC variable as he did not really portray the country’s wealthy and business class as the core of the problem. Claiming to be a billionaire himself, he often praised loyal businesses and repeated neoliberal mantras about the intrusiveness of government regulations. In his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination for example he pledged to make America “rich again using the greatest business people in the world” (cited in Ostiguy and Roberts 2016, 43). Hence while high profile businesses and wealthy figures may have occasionally been on Trump’s 2016 enemies list, the wealthy did not constitute a core “other” to the people in his populist discourse. This remained the case during the first term of the Trump presidency, when he engaged in occasional feuds with the likes of Jeff Bezos or the Koch brothers (Boucher and Thies 2019, 714) (OTH_ECONOMIC =1). In office, Trump pursued more neoliberal economic policies than his campaign suggested.

Foreign states played an important role in the Trump campaign’s conceptualisation of the American People’s opponents. Trump routinely claimed that other countries were ripping America off and free-riding on its generosity (Ostiguy and Roberts 2016, 44). This extended from military alliances like NATO to trade imbalances with Mexico and China and asylum seeker resettlement arrangements. At times this formed a general anti-globalization agenda that pushed back not only on free trade, but on global institutions and rules (Biegon 2019, 529; Edwards 2018). While these foreign and “global” powers were clearly relevant “others” to Trump’s American people, this doesn’t quite extend to the point of local leaders acting on their behalf, and therefore OTH_FOREIGN is coded 2. The military did not feature as an “other” in Trump’s rhetoric (OTH_MILITARY = 1).

While the 2016 campaign pushed back on some economic policies of the American right (see above), Trump’s cultural nativism, nationalism and underlying neo-liberalism clearly make his campaign right wing (LRPOSITION = R). Trump’s brash persona has undoubtedly been central to his campaign’s appeal (Schneiker 2020). A key component of this image has been Trump’s willingness to provide an official interpretation of seemingly every news story and event, often on direct channels like Twitter and call-ins to news programs, creating a personalised and centralised source of political information to his supporters. This occasionally reached comical level when he claimed, for example, that he knew more about ISIS than “the generals” (Hall 2021). By claiming of America’s crisis that “I alone can fix it” his campaign built a saviour complex around his personality and leadership (Lieberman et al. 2019, 2). However as Trump was the nominee of the well-established Republican Party, he should be coded 2 by the definition of our CHARISMA variable. While Trump had occasionally donated to politicians of both parties, he had never served in government in any capacity, and is therefore coded 1 for INSIDER.

The Trump campaign and presidency have pushed significantly against liberal democratic norms in several ways (see Lieberman et al. 2019). As a candidate he questioned the integrity of democratic and judicial institutions, official government statistics on matters areas like labour and immigration, and the impartiality of federal law enforcement organisations (Jamieson and Taussig 2017, 620, 627). At several of his campaign rallies he encouraged supporters to assault protesters (Mendes 2016, 66; Ostiguy and Roberts 2016, 44), and in the words of Mendes “[h]e seems perfectly willing to countenance illegal acts and abandon due process to combat the threats he invokes” (Mendes 2016, 66). He has been extremely hostile to media criticism, and declared that the media was the “enemy of the American people” (Jamieson and Taussig 2017, 638). As with OTH_ETHNIC, the LIBDEMNORMS scale is difficult with Trump, because there’s a good case for him to be coded either 2 or 3. While this could be further debated, we’ve concluded that the above actions shouldn’t quite reach the point of “threatening the democratic order”, and hence he is coded 2. Note that after the 2020 election, whcn Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol Building (where his election loss was being formalised by Congress) seemingly with Trump’s acquiescence, would be enough to code 3 on this variable. However, as it happened before the 2020 campaign we have not considered it in the coding for either the 2016 or 2020 elections.

Not Included

Billionaire Ross Perot’s presidential candidacy in 1992 and 1993 is often considered to be populist, which seems to be for three reasons. First his rhetoric was explicitly pro-“people” in somewhat populist terms. In advertisements, interviews and debates, Perot routinely claimed that ordinary people had been left out of politics, and contrasted this problem with his own campaign which was driven more by voluntary engagement rather than the backing of major parties. Take for example his call to “go back to what this country is supposed to be about. The voters own this country” (Prendergast 2019, 29). Second, Perot styled himself as a true outsider to American political incumbents of both parties, and claimed that his mission as “cleaning out the political barn” (Prinz 1994; Broussard 1995, 62). This was coupled with an anti-politics (Brown 1997) characterisation Washington as “the system” without significant differences between the major parties (Schulte-Sasse 1993), and hence one with a political class in control. Third, his appeal (although his campaign was based on highly programmatic policy proposals about the budget and inequality) was highly charisma based, and his plain -spoken and folksy persona was billed as an antidote to a general crisis facing the county’s economic management (Owen and Dennis 1996, 384; Tonn and Endress 2001, 281).

While there is a claim that this constitutes a kind of populism, we find that his characterisation of the incumbent political order was not actually populist by our definition, and fits more within the norms of “outsider” campaigning by major party candidates in American politics, albeit in a more concentrated form. Perot claimed that he was fighting the “system” but said the failings of this systems to be flawed ideas, estrangement from the real issues of everyday people, and dominated by “paid professionals” (Prendergast 2019, 27). Lacking in this characterisation of the incumbent order was any accusatory anti-elitism that suggested the elite was of any kind of ill-character or corruption, of that the problems of ordinary people were benefiting those incumbents. In fact, Perot claimed that there was too much negativity in political campaigning (Prendergast 2019, 27), and suggested that many of his antagonists in the system were “fine people” (Schulte-Sasse 1993, 95).

References

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