Want to understand Trumpism? This is the book you need

Telegraph

24-05-2025

The 2016 election wasn't the first occasion on which Donald Trump had considered running to be president of the United States. He seriously played with the idea in the run-up to the 2000 election too. Oprah Winfrey might have been his running mate.
Trump was a member of the Republican Party back then, but not a happy one. In October 1999, aged 53, he bolted to join the upstart Reform Party because he thought the GOP was becoming 'too crazy'. But he also feared that the frontrunner to be the Reform presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, was mad. 'It's just incredible that anyone can embrace this guy,' Trump said at the time. 'He's a Hitler lover. I guess he's an anti-Semite. He doesn't like the blacks, he doesn't like the gays… He would only get the staunch Right wacko vote.' It didn't escape Trump's notice that David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, wanted to join the Reform Party. Trump left it again in February 2000, after mere months.
Trump, in the 1990s, was politically heterodox. Over the decade, he donated equally to the Democrats and the Republicans. He supported Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He held liberal positions on abortion and healthcare. But he was also sceptical about immigration and free trade; his longest-held political conviction was that America was being ripped off by other countries. And on the latter issues he found himself politically aligned with Buchanan, who had been Richard Nixon's speechwriter in the late 1960s and coined the phrase the 'Silent Majority'.
Buchanan features among the leading characters in When the Clock Broke, a spry and superbly written book on 1990s American politics by John Ganz. It's the best account I have ever read on the origins of Trumpism. I confess that I didn't come into the book with great expectations: my knowledge of Ganz was largely confined to seeing him being rude to random Right-wing people on X, and knowing that he had a Substack account dedicated to the study of fascism. But this is a substantial work of intellectual history. Trump haunts almost every page, and Ganz's passionate engagement with personalities and ideas he clearly deplores – he's fiercely Left-wing – is invigorating.
Part of the reason why it works is that Ganz shares with the people about whom he writes the conviction that America is in crisis. 'American democracy,' he writes, 'is often spoken of as being in peril.' He agrees, adding: 'Others point out that democracy never fully existed in the first place' and 'this book also agrees with that thesis'. (He merely disagrees with them on what to do about it.)
The book's argument is clear and convincing: understanding American politics in the early 1990s is key to understanding Trumpism today. During that period, a group of maverick intellectuals and politicians, from Duke and Buchanan to Ross Perot and Murray Rothbard, waged war against the conservative establishment. 'For them,' Ganz writes, 'the 1980s represented a betrayal: they understood Ronald Reagan as the champion of the economic interests of and cultural values of white Middle Americans, but [the latter] now seemed worse off than ever.'
The country was in dire straits. The streets were plagued by crime and drug use. Recession and unemployment crippled hard-working families. Political correctness in universities and the media demonised American culture and history. Ross Perot became the 'populist billionaire', winning over 18 per cent of the vote in the 1992 election on a platform of reducing the national debt and slashing bureaucracy.
Sam Francis, one of the intellectual figures behind this reaction to the conservative establishment, wrote that 'the New Right is not a conservative force but a radical or revolutionary one.' True, they were revolutionary in one sense, but they were arch-conservative in others. Some of them described themselves as the Old Right, and contrasted themselves with the neo-cons who often, as Ganz writes, were 'formerly liberals who had only recently fled the Democratic Party out of disgust for the New Left and fear of the Black Power movement.' Buchanan and his ilk considered them to be newcomers who 'were barely conservatives in the first place'.
The New Right, by contrast, were essentially paleocons who 'traced their lineage to the isolationist, pre-war America Firsters'. They anathematised a range of things, from 'the New Deal' to the 'Great Society'. They despised mass immigration, free trade and foreign interventionism, all of which had become emblematic of the Reagan -Bush GOP from 1981 to 1993. (Reagan famously gave amnesty to almost three million illegal immigrants in 1987.)
The person who embodied the out-of-touch conservative establishment more than anyone else was George HW Bush, Reagan's vice-president from 1981 to 1989 then president himself from 1989 to 1993. He was patrician by blood and upbringing; he had been raised in New England, had been educated at private schools and at Yale, and had gone from plum job to plum job, becoming director of the CIA, ambassador to the UN, and eventually the man in the Oval Office. It was no surprise that Buchanan referred to Bush as 'King George' – which, for obvious historical reasons, may be the worst insult one can bestow on an American leader.
Bush's tax hike in the early 1990s, after promising he wouldn't raise them – 'Read my lips', and so on – was a particularly egregious betrayal. Buchanan said of Bush: 'He is yesterday and we are tomorrow. He is a globalist and we are nationalists.' In 1992, Buchanan demanded a wall along the border with Mexico and a five-year moratorium on legal migration. He won 37 per cent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, and declared in a speech there: 'When we take America back, we are going to make America great again, because there is nothing wrong with putting America first.'
The rest of the 1990s would, however, prove a great disappointment for these insurgents. Perot did much worse in 1996 than he had in 1992. Buchanan also tried to run on a GOP ticket again, but was unable to capture the same level of support and enthusiasm as he had four years before. Francis and Rothbard remained relatively obscure. And, of course, the Reform Party did poorly in the 2000 election. In retrospect, 1992 was the high noon for these particular renegades, at least on an individual level. Yet their ideas and convictions would come back with a renewed force in the mid-2010s, and dominate the Republican Party today.
'On the one hand,' Ganz writes, the influence of Francis on the 21st-century GOP is abundantly clear. 'There's a conception of the party as a national populist movement on behalf of the Middle American working class led by a Caesarist president to smash the power of the 'globalist' professional and managerial elite.' And then there's the influence of Rothbard, who had 'a radical libertarian project of administrative state demolition beyond a populist façade'. In other words, Buchanan was John the Baptist to Trump's Messiah. Thirty years on, the Republican party is no longer the party of Reagan and the Bushes: Trump rules unopposed. When the Clock Broke is a brilliant explanation of his rise.