Republican Populist: Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump’s America

Often overlooked, former vice president Spiro T. Agnew is typically a maligned figure in American political history. Largely remembered for his alliterative speeches, attacks on the media and Eastern intellectuals, and his resignation from office in 1973 in the wake of tax-evasion charges, Agnew’s larger impact on the modern Republican Party is significant and underappreciated. It is impossible, in fact, to understand the current internal struggles of the Republican Party without understanding this populist everyman and prototypical middle-class striver who was one of the first proponents of what would become the ideology of Donald Trump’s GOP. Republican Populist examines Agnew’s efforts to make the Republican Party representative of the silent majority. Under the tutelage of President Richard Nixon and a group of talented speechwriters including Pat Buchanan and William Safire, Agnew crafted the populist-tinged, antiestablishment rhetoric that helped turn the Republican Party into a powerful national electoral force that has come to define American politics into the current era.

A fascinating political portrait of Agnew from his pre-vice presidential career through and beyond his scandal-driven fall from office, this book is above all a revelatory examination of Agnew’s role as one of the founding fathers of the modern Republican Party and of the link between Agnew’s people’s party and his fraught party of populists and businessmen today.