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TRUMPISM, IT WAS EVER THUS  
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Van Gosse
October 18, 2025
Substack [[link removed]]

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_ Trump's brand of thoroughly vulgar and outlandish demagogy, his
politics of racism, cruelty, vindictiveness, and gleeful resentment is
not new, it has deep roots and is deeply, fundamentally American. _

Senator James K. Vardaman stops on the street to converse with the
widow of Confederate General James Longstreet., Personal collection of
Ray Hill

 

Over and over and over, I read, meet, or talk to people who are
shocked by Donald Trump’s relentless trolling, his thoroughly vulgar
and outlandish demagogy. Why, they’ve never seen the like! How could
this be, in a country with a storied constitution and a two-party
system in which partisans rotate in government without attempting to
destroy each other?

This pearl-clutching angst is profoundly ahistorical. American
politics over the past two centuries has been littered with leaders
who practiced Trumpism _avant la lettre_ (a fancy way of saying
“they got their first”). After antiwar activists blocked President
Johnson’s motorcade in 1968, Alabama’s Governor George C. Wallace
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to huge roars of approval that “if you elect me the president…and
some of them lie down in front of my automobile, it will be the last
thing they ever want to lie down in front of!” He went on to win
five Deep South states that November. In June 1951, Senator Joseph
McCarthy
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General George C. Marshall (the most distinguished American military
leader in modern times) a witting Soviet agent in the “great
conspiracy” to “diminish the United States in world affairs, to
weaken us militarily, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in
the Far East and to impair our will to resist evil.”

Their voters ate it up, and we can easily find more recent examples in
both parties. Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo
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elected its Democratic Mayor from 1972 to 1979 after (and because of)
his raiding Black Panther Party headquarters and making young Black
men stand on the street almost naked, in the cold.

The politics of cruelty, vindictiveness, and gleeful resentment has
deeper roots. Peacock-strutting, nose-thumbing performances have
always played well with white voters in the South, whether in 1825,
1925, or the present. Most people who saw the Coen brothers’ _Oh
Brother, Where Art Thou?_ likely thought that Mississippi Governor
Pappy O’Daniel, played by Charles Durning
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was a laughable lampoon. Not so! This character was modeled on the
actual Pappy O’Daniel
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an on-air flour salesman who parlayed his celebrity (“Pass the
biscuits, Pappy!”) into the Texas governor’s mansion in 1938 and
then to the Senate from 1941 to 1949.

The South abounded in colorfully vicious figures like this, including
the South Carolina’s “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman
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Mississippi’s Theodore “The Man” Bilbo
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and, of course, the Kingfish, Huey P. Long
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But my favorite, if I can use that word, is Mississippi’s James K.
Vardaman
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the Great White Chief, as he liked to be known. Look at the picture
above and imagine yourself in some dirt-poor town when he rolls in,
sitting on bales of cotton in his white suit, pulled by a team of
white oxen, hailing the common people. A sight worthy of a Roman
conqueror, and his voters were tickled pink. They sent Vardaman, a man
who exulted in racial terror _(”If it is necessary every Negro in
the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white
supremacy”)_ to the governor’s seat in 1904 and the Senate in
1913.

Of course, none of these men ever caught the gold ring, the
presidency, although Wallace ran very creditably in the Democratic
primaries in 1964, 1972, and 1976. Trump trumps all of them in that
regard. He went straight to the heart of the Republican Party. Who can
forget those debates in 2016, watching him pulverize poor Jeb Bush
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the heir apparent?

So get over yourselves, readers! What we call Trumpism is bred in the
bone, and you fool yourself in foolish ways if you assume it is
predicated on being stupid, ignorant, or uneducated. None of these
white men fit that profile. Like all charismatic political figures,
they forged a direct connection with their audiences in a vernacular
that resonated powerfully. No more of this vacuous tomfoolery, as in
Joe Biden’s repeating rote-like, “This is not who we are.” He
was sadly mistaken—Trump’s brand of politics is deeply,
fundamentally American.

_[xxxxxx MODERATOR - ALSO OF INTEREST: GERRYMANDERING
[[link removed]] BY AZIZ
HUQ (LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS) OCTOBER 23, 2025]_

_VAN GOSSE is Professor of History Emeritus Franklin and Marshall
College and Co-Chair of Historians for Peace & Democracy
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activist, and those vocations are closely linked in both the major
topics that have occupied him: antiwar/solidarity organizing and
electoral politics._

_Subscribe to Van Gosse's SUBSTACK IN THE RED @vangosse447720_

* Donald Trump
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* Racism
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* deep south
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* U.S. history
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