Donald Trump is wrongly called a populist. He is not a populist. He is a nationalist. There is a difference and it is worth spelling it out.
Populism, as a political term, is closely associated with a left-wing agrarian movement started in the late 1800’s. Called the People’s Party, the Populists fought against Wall Street bankers who wanted to restrict the money supply based on the Gold Standard. They were especially powerful in the South and in West, and they strongly supported William Jennings Bryan, who was most famous for his multiple runs for the White House, his legal advocacy for the teaching of creationism in Tennessee schools and his stirring defense of bimetallism in his Cross of Gold speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention held in Chicago.
Donald Trump is not a regional political figure, representing the narrow interest of southern and western farmers. He is a national figure representing national interests. And he is forging a national American identity in the face of a strong globalist opposition.
Nationalism gets a bad rap from historians. When I was studying history in high school, my professor blames nationalism for World War I. It wasn’t nationalist groups that started that war, though. It was decaying empires, feeble rulers who were genetically damaged by years of inbreeding, and government bureaucrats who were more concerned about keeping their positions than in giving freedom and prosperity to their constituents.
Nationalism is the idea that people can represent themselves and their interests, and not give all of their sovereignty to an unelected and unrepresentative elite. Nationalism is the idea that nations, not monarchies or emperors, are in charge.
American nationalism can and should be a beautiful thing. It is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious, and multi-dimensional, based more on an idea and a devotion to our founding documents than any tribe.
Donald Trump is the perfect American nationalist because he represents, in many ways, the American experience. Son of an immigrant mother, successful entrepreneur, builder, mostly nonpartisan, not particularly denominational in his religious persuasion, not a deep intellectual, a doer more than a thinker.
What Trump understands the wisdom of the common man. He has his fingers on the pulse of the American people. He knows their concerns and he channels them.
He knows that the American people and its business community don’t want to be told how to live their lives by European bureaucrats.
He knows that the people don’t want to get ripped off by Chinese grifters.
He knows that unless we have strong borders, we can’t have a country.
He knows that international trade is important to our exporters and our consumers, but that it must be done fairly and that the American people have not been treated fairly lately.
He knows that we can’t continue to afford to be the world’s policeman and that other countries have to share their burden. He also knows that reflexively wars that costs lives are bad and are to be avoided.
He knows that the American people don’t trust the business acumen of government bureaucrats, that most government spending is wasted on stupid projects, and that our current tax and spend path is unsustainable. But he also knows that most Americans don’t want a radical approach to reform entitlements. After all, Trump is a nationalist, not a libertarian.
In 2018, Trump called himself a nationalist. He was attacked from the Left (predictably) because they took it to mean that he was calling himself a white nationalist. But he never said that he was a white nationalist. Indeed, nobody has a better sense of the average concerns of the average black voter than Trump. He knows that community very well and he also knows what it is like to have the legal system come after you unfairly. Nobody has done more to get black American who were unfairly imprisoned out of prison than Trump. The Democrats call him a racist because they call every Republican a racist.
They also called Trump an antisemite, even though his daughter converted to Judaism. Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem over the objections of the State Department because he not only believes in American nationalism, but also Jewish nationalism.
The globalists attack him because they see that his simple of message of promoting American nationalism can have a cascading impact which will destroy the power of the globalists forever. What will they do at the WHO and the WEF if their acolytes aren’t in charge anymore? Maybe get real jobs?
In any event, Donald Trump is no populist. He is an American nationalist. That is a good thing. He should not back down from defining himself as such.