2024

[B]eing entrenched is a problem for populism. Populism declares that there is a totalizing antagonism between the people and the establishment. Its raison d’être stems from the claim that elites leading the media, the government and educational and scientific institutions operate in opposition to the interests of the populations they are meant to serve. Some populists cast the difference between the two camps in terms of identity, claiming that “elites” and the “people” are fundamentally different human types. Racism can grow in this environment, but even it can be a secondary tool, a means of stylizing a deeper drive in the populist imaginary: namely, the claim that the oppositions between elites and the people are irreconcilable. For that reason, gradual reform, compromise and moderation will not do. Populism lurches toward revolution and the complete explosion of the establishment.

That’s why political success menaces the populist. How can populists justify managing the very elite institutions they were meant to destroy?

Populists may respond to this riddle by painting their enemies in the establishment as residing outside of their reach, such as when Hungarian president Viktor Orbán claims to be fighting against the European Union and Western liberalism. Some, like the Sweden Democrats, may be lucky enough to be kingmakers for a governing administration without being formally a part of it, allowing them to shape policy while posing as outsiders. Enfranchised populists may claim that the forces they fight against are so embedded in institutions that elected politicians can’t (yet) reach them, and thus that the cause of rebellion must continue even after an electoral victory. Narratives about a deep state running the U.S. government during the first presidency of Donald Trump are an example of the latter.

These are attempts at mitigation rather than cures, however. If, for example, a deep state allegedly remains in control even after a revolutionary takeover, populism’s supporters may deem political action futile and disengage. Elected populists are thus forced into a world of gamesmanship, negotiation, compromise and management. They often become conservers, conservative even—not in the palingenetic sense of resurrecting a lost golden age but merely, and more boringly, through their incentive to maintain the world in which they flourish. Max Weber famously argued that bureaucrats will seldom cross the institutions they run, because with time their personal power and prestige depend on those very institutions.

Such is the condition for many populists throughout the world today, in what we might call an era of post-populism—an era during which yesterday’s revolutionaries now cling to the status quo, where radical “Make America Great Again” gives way to paranoid “Keep America Great.” Elected populists (and particularly reelected populists) now find themselves tasked with instilling a durable mythology that will allow supporters to maintain their commitment to the cause even as it changes.

At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.

“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”

The staffers present—and, within hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname “was never discussed and this is materially false.”)

Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat. […]

In conversations with nearly a dozen of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat.

At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown—and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.