Precursors of Trumpism

This is another post inspired by John Ganz’s very thought-provoking study of America in the early 1990s, When the Clock Broke.

Given his subject matter, Ganz shows considerable restraint in not talking about Donald Trump much at all — Trump’s financial fortunes were in steep decline in the early 1990s, and he had become something of a comedic punch line — but obviously it’s impossible to read a book like this in 2025 without the shadow of Trumpism falling over the narrative.

This is especially true in regard to the 1992 presidential election, which featured three candidates who, in retrospect, were each in their own harbingers of what was to come.

David Duke’s presidential run in 1992 seemed at the time nothing but a pathetic coda to the disturbing story of his sudden rise three years earlier to national prominence, when he won a seat in the Louisiana state legislature, then managed to get into the runoff election for governor with the exuberantly corrupt even by that state’s fantastically low standards Edwin Edwards. (Famous bumper sticker from the campaign: Vote For the Crook: It’s Important).

Pat Buchanan’s surprisingly successful challenge to his party’s incumbent, which won him a prime time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention, that he used to deliver an infamous MAGA speech avant la lettre, was perceived even as long ago as 2016 as a precursor of Trumpism.

Finally, Ross Perot managed to mount, in terms of the national popular vote, the most successful third-party presidential campaign since Teddy Roosevelt.

Duke’s rise to national prominence was in retrospect a warning of how much of an appetite there was in the Republican base for pure uncut racism.

Buchanan’s campaign was a more genteel illustration of the same thing: He stood for a combination of nativist white supremacy and extreme cultural reaction that 25 years later would find its standard bearer in the person of Donald Trump.

Ross Perot is perhaps the most interesting comparator of all. Perot was a paranoid flake who managed to get nearly 20% of the national vote, despite his bizarre withdrawal from the race in July when he was still leading it in a number of national polls. Ganz suggests with considerable plausibility that this may all have been a publicity stunt that went wrong, or that, on the other hand, it could have been a genuine reflection of Perot’s paranoia, which was pretty florid (he was constantly hiring private investigators to snoop on the most important volunteers in his grassroots campaign, plus he went on 60 Minutes and explained his withdrawal by claiming it was because the Bush administration was planning to disrupt his daughter’s wedding, which understandably struck the public as wacky).

Another prophetic aspect of Perot’s campaign was that it was a pure creation of his ability to manipulate the then still fairly new medium of cable/satellite television: His platform to national prominence had been constant appearances on Larry King’s CNN show, where King, an ideological cipher/starfucker journalist, allowed Perot to spout his essentially vacuous populist rhetoric with no pushback. This positioned Perot to launch his campaign on the basis of the claim that what America needed was a successful businessman who wasn’t a politician and could therefore get things done, unlike those corrupt clowns in Washington. What those things were remained almost completely unspecified, beyond Perot’s canny attack on the depredations of neoliberalism, as illustrated by the proposed NAFTA treaty.. Perot’s own fortune was almost a wholly a product of the deeply incestuous relationships between his own company, Electronic Data Systems, and various gigantic federal and state government contracts, but this was the sort of complicating detail that was largely ignored by both the pliant media, which loved a “great campaign story,” and the ever-inattentive American public, which just knew that here was a successful businessman who knew how to get things done, unlike those corrupt clowns in Washington.

Here we shouldn’t overlook that Patrick Buchanan was, despite his status as a consummate DC insider, also a beneficiary of his skill at manipulating modern media, and that indeed CNN, where he hosted the ultimate Both Sides TV forum Crossfire with Michael Kinsley, was also key to his sudden emergence on the national political scene. (On a much smaller scale David Duke also engaged in a lot of canny media manipulation, before the fact that completely open racism was still verboten in the Republican party in the early 1990s sunk him).

Again, Ganz tells these intertwining stories with practically no overt reference to Donald Trump, but readers can hardly fail, one would think, to consider the many suggestive analogies these stories raise, in regard to our current ongoing national catastrophe.