Donald Trump and American Populism

This book evaluates the presidency of Donald Trump from a comparative, historical approach to connect his populist style to his predecessors. Trump’s method of communication through social media obviously differs from previous candidates and presidents with populist platforms, but his themes - a disdain for elites, grassroots support, majoritarianism, anti-intellectual discourse, and nativism borrow variably from such figures as Andrew Jackson, Huey Long, Barry Goldwater, and Ross Perot. As such, Trump’s approach to governance falls within a long tradition of populism dating to the 19th Century.Richard S. Conley assesses various aspects of Trump’s career, including the nature of his presidential campaign; his post-campaign rallies; his style of governance and reliance on executive unilateralism; and his longstanding core themes, in order to develop a theoretical framework to explicate Trump’s singular style of populism.