How Trump Will Fail

 

Opinion

David Brooks

How Trump Will Fail

Jan. 23, 2025

David Brooks

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/opinion/trump-mckinley-populism.html

 

After a four-year hiatus, we are once again compelled to go spelunking into the deeper caverns of Donald Trump’s brain. We climb under his ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.

 

Over the past few months, and especially in his second Inaugural Address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism. Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals. Who was the immortal Trump cited? William McKinley.

 

You can tell what kind of conservative a person is by discovering what year he wants to go back to. For Trump, it seems to be sometime between 1830 and 1899. “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,” he declared in his address.

 

It’s easy to see the appeal. We were a boisterous, arriviste nation back then, bursting with energy, bombast and new money. In 1840, there were 3,000 miles of railroad track in America. By 1900, there were roughly 259,000 miles of track. Americans were known for being materialistic, mechanical and voracious for growth. In his book “The American Mind,” the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote of our 19th-century forebears: “Whatever promised to increase wealth was automatically regarded as good, and the American was tolerant, therefore, of speculation, advertising, deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources.” So Trumpian.

 

It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones. It was the rugged experience of westward expansion, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893, that had given America its vitality, its egalitarianism, its disinterest in high culture and polite manners. The West was settled by a rising tide of hucksterism — the spirit of the circus master P.T. Barnum more than that of the aristocratic novelist Henry James.

 

It was a golden age of braggadocio, of Paul Bunyan-style tall tales. It was also an age when to be American was to be wreathed in glory. Many Americans believed that God had assigned a sacred errand to his new chosen people, to complete history and to bring a new heaven down to earth. (Kind of like the way God saved Trump in that Pennsylvania field so that he could complete the sacred mission of deporting more immigrants.)

 

Herman Melville captured, without endorsing, the nationalist fervor in his novel “White Jacket”: “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.” Walt Whitman joined the chorus: “Have the elder races halted? / Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? / We take up the task eternal.” There’s no confidence like adolescent confidence, for a person or a country.

 

I can see why this image of a wild, raw, aspiring America appeals to Trump. It is sometimes said that Trump appeals to those left behind, the losers of the information age. And this is a nationalism filled with aspiration, daring, hope and future-mindedness. (It helps if, like Trump, you whitewash a few minor details about 19th-century America from your portrait — like, you know, slavery and Reconstruction.)

 

Maybe the century’s key appeal for Trump is that in those days America was firmly anti-establishment. Across the Atlantic were the old states — Europe. Periodically, Europeans like Fanny Trollope (herself a novelist and the mother of a rather more famous one) would visit America and turn up their noses at the vulgar money-loving people they found here. The English writer Morris Birkbeck summarized his view of the American spirit this way: “Gain! Gain! Gain!” Americans were proud to defy the snobs with their refined manners, class-ridden societies and inherited luxuries.

 

You can draw a straight line from this (semi-mythical) image of America to the movement Trump leads today. He too leads a band of arrivistes, establishment-haters, money-seekers and unreconstructed nationalists. Many Democrats accuse Trump of ushering in an oligarchy, but new-money moguls like Elon Musk have often sided with the populists against the bien pensants. This is not oligarchy; this is what populism looks like.

 

Trump is drawing on themes that have been deep in the American psyche at least since Andrew Jackson became president in 1829. Populist movements, like most movements that represent the dispossessed, tend to be led by men who radiate power, masculinity and wealth. They harness American’s natural distaste for rules, regulations and bureaucratic moralists.

 

The quintessential thing Trump did this week was to announce an artificial intelligence development project of up to $500 billion while also revoking a Biden executive order for A.I. safety. Even Musk says the whole project is mythical hype because some of the companies involved don’t have the money. Meanwhile, weakening the safety control on the technology? What could go wrong?

 

Today’s populist ire is directed not at the European establishments living across an ocean but at the American ones on the east and west coasts. Democrats are mistaken if they think they can rebuff Trump by howling the words “fascism” or “authoritarianism,” or by clutching their pearls every time he does something vulgar or immoral. If they decide to continue the culture war between the snooty elitists and the masses, I think we know how that’s going to turn out.

 

The problem with populism and the whole 19th-century governmental framework is that it didn’t work. Between 1825 and 1901 we had 20 presidencies. We had a bunch of one-term presidents; voters kept throwing the incumbents out because they were not happy with the way government was performing. The last three decades of that century saw a string of brutalizing recessions and depressions that profoundly shook the country. The light-footprint government was unable to cope with the process of industrialization.

 

Many populists were ill equipped to even understand what was happening. In his classic book “The Age of Reform,” Richard Hofstadter writes, “Populist thought showed an unusually strong tendency to account for relatively impersonal events in highly personal terms.” In other words, they thought they could solve the disruptions of industrialization if only they could find the evil conspirators who were responsible for every ill. Their diagnoses were simple-minded, their rhetoric over the top; their proposals, Hofstadter noted, wandered “over the border between reality and impossibility.” Sound familiar?

 

Here’s how America recovered: Populist indignation finally got professionalized. In the 20th century, members of the progressive movement took the problems the populists were rightly angry about and built the institutions that were required to address them effectively — like the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Populists had trouble thinking institutionally; the progressives, who were well trained, morally upright, self-disciplined, disgusted by corruption, intellectually rigorous (and sometimes priggish and arrogant) did not have that problem.

 

There’s a reason the 20th century happened. The United States had to build a stronger central government and a leadership class if it was going to take responsibility — responsibility for the people who were marginalized and oppressed in our own country and, as the century wore on, responsibility to establish a peaceful and secure world order. Americans have a perpetual problem with authority, but for a time — from say 1901 to 1965 — Americans built authority structures that voters trusted.

 

Now we live amid another crisis of authority. Our system has not managed to keep up with the savage inequalities produced by the information age — especially between the college educated and the less educated. Populists are again indignant and on the march. But, as before, they have no compelling theory of change.

 

The colorful menagerie of people who make up the proposed Trump cabinet all have one thing in common: They are self-identified disrupters. They aim to burn the systems down. Disruption is fine in the private sector. If Musk wants to start a car company and it flops, then all that’s been lost is investor money and some jobs. But suppose you disrupt and dismantle the Defense Department or the judicial system or the schools? Where are citizens supposed to go?

 

The history of the world since at least the French Revolution is that rapid disruption makes governments cataclysmically worse. Trump, the anti-institutionalist, is creating an electoral monarchy, a system in which all power is personalized and held in his hands. That’s a recipe for distorted information flows, corruption, instability and administrative impotence. As we’ve seen over and over again down the centuries, there’s a big difference between people who operate in the spirit of disruption and those who operate in the spirit of reform.

 

If I were running the Democratic Party (God help them), I would tell the American people that Donald Trump is right about a lot of things. He’s accurately identified problems on issues like inflation, the border and the fallout from cultural condescension that members of the educated class have been too insular to anticipate. But when it comes to building structures to address those problems — well, the man is just hapless and incompetent.