“Yes, I am Batman.” – Donald J. Trump, August 15, 2015



They were the unmistakable faces of right-wing populism in America. He was a billionaire with the common touch, whose rough-hewn vocabulary was rich in slang and invective. The fact that he was one of the richest men in America didn’t prevent him from becoming the voice of the ordinary person. He liked steak and potatoes rather than fancy French fare, and was more at ease with roughnecks than high-society types. He’d gone bankrupt more than once, but that just reinforced his reputation as a fighter, a tough guy who could handle himself in a world of sharks and killers. A big, bulky mesomorph, this billionaire was also a he-man who didn’t have time for the genteel euphemisms of politicians and bureaucrats. His slogan was “America first”—which meant a muscular, unilateral foreign policy that included torturing and killing the enemies of the United States. His greatest worry was that the vigorous strength that made America great was waning.

She was among his closest allies: a spunky gal who shared his faith in old-fashioned American values. She fought against officious bureaucrats, corrupt union bosses, and pointy-headed intellectuals. She loved guns, grit, and hard-working ordinary Americans; she celebrated truckers and small-business people. Her distinctive trait was her stream-of-consciousness monologues, peppered with the phrase, “you betcha.” She attached herself time and again to wealthy, powerful older men, including the billionaire, who acted as her mentor.

The people I’m describing are not Donald Trump and Sarah Palin, but rather two comic-strip precursors: “Daddy” Warbucks and Little Orphan Annie. They were created by the cartoonist Harold Gray in 1924, in the “Little Orphan Annie” comic strip, which he continued to work on till his death in 1968. Gray’s illustrated feature was an iconic part of American popular culture, and inspired a musical that is still produced in countless schools throughout America every year. But Gray’s comic strip had a political impact as well as a cultural one. Gray was a rock-ribbed Republican who hated the New Deal and the Great Society. He used “Little Orphan Annie” as a vehicle for developing a form of right-wing populism that both prefigured and influenced tropes and arguments adopted by actual politicians. At the height of its popularity, “Little Orphan Annie” appeared in hundreds of newspapers and was read by prominent Republicans like Clare Boothe Luce, Jesse Helms, and Ronald Reagan.

At the heart of Gray’s comic strip is a parable about the alliance between the poor and the rich against the welfare state and parasitical political elite—an alliance that prefigures the phenomenon of Trumpism in American politics. Annie is a poor orphan who wants to improve her lot in life by hard work, but is constantly harassed by evil social workers trying to hold her back with child labor laws. Annie is rescued from the machinations of the nanny state (and other evils, like gangsters) by the pugilistic billionaire Daddy Warbucks, who is, as his name indicates, a wealthy arms dealer.