A crucial difference between the two.
Phil Klein is right that Trump did not just run as a straight-up Buchananite in 2016 or 2020 or 2024. Phil emphasizes that Trump would advertise the Jacksonian edge to his foreign policy, alongside his Buchananite criticisms of foreign adventurism, whereas Buchanan would sometimes strike a “Come Home, America” tone. Trump did welcome Buchanan’s support and credited him with a lot during the 2016 campaign.
But I think Phil missed the most important and probably the most crucial difference: Trump made deals with pro-lifers, but he ran with the image of a social moderate who is not especially religious. Buchanan in his runs in 1992 and 1996 was widely perceived as the face of the religious right. He was the most anti-abortion.
Taken together, Donald Trump’s political success comes down to the fact that he was a full-spectrum bombastic moderate. On foreign policy, he was not a neoconservative looking to advance American primacy in every corner of the globe at any cost, nor was he a principled Jeffersonian isolationist — both of these seen as “extremes.”
On the free market he was pro-business, but not a doctrinaire free trader or radical small-state opponent of welfare or social security.
On the culture, he was for Americanism over multiculturalism. But he was not going to bring prayer back to schools, meaningfully oppose or threaten gay marriage, or pass major legislation against abortion. However, he was going to make an alliance with social conservatives against the bullying they might receive from progressives networked across NGOs, government, and corporate America.
The crucial swing voter, and the type of voter that has drifted into the Trump coalition, is not a social conservative but has tended to view progressives as the more threatening and bullying force in the culture war recently.
Even on immigration, Trump’s position is really the moderate one, whereas the Establishment’s preference for neglected borders and mass immigration is the extreme position.
Trump’s “extremism” is mostly an extremism of style, of bombast, and of theater. And it often accurately reflects the anger, and exasperation, many American voters feel with ideologues on all sides.