In the attempt to understand Donald Trump’s rise and place in our national politics, commentators and historians have reached for a number of current and historical analogies, most of them implausible. Some of his enemies hold that he is a “Putinist” and tie him to the rise of illiberal democracy as a threat within the world. Some of his admirers think of him as an Andrew Jackson–like figure. Some of his enemies see in him a figure of American backlash against racial progress, and look at the era of Reconstruction and Redemption.
But, sitting here at National Review, it’s impossible not to think of Nixon. Just as then, now liberals believe the entire psychology of the president can only be explained in the word “resentment.” And just as then, now National Review did not have a warm relationship with the man in the White House. But the most significant parallel is that just as then, now that man — with all his political faults, all his neuroses, and his self-destructive streak — leaves the Republican Party with a different voting base from the one it had before. He has done so, in part, by being heterodox on economic questions, nationalist in orientation, populist in tone, and confrontational with the press. He has done so by being not a typical conservative.
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