George Packer: The president is winning his war on American institutions

Today more than ever, Trump’s outrageous style, unprecedented rule-breaking, and sheer weirdness make him seem a radical discontinuity, a bizarre anomaly who came out of nowhere. Although that interpretation is not entirely wrong, it is not really right, either. Equally true, if not more so, is that Trump is a radical continuity, merely the most florid and successful avatar of a white-populist movement that has built strength and solidarity over more than half a century, mostly under elites’ radar. In that sense, Trump’s base—the base that catapulted him from reality TV to the most powerful office in the world—does not really belong to the Republican Party. In fact, it does not even belong to Trump. Rather, he is renting it—or perhaps it is renting him. Either way, he is not the first in the series, and he won’t be the last.

“We can foresee that unless something changes in American political culture and civil life,” says Dan Carter, a historian and Wallace biographer, “we’re doomed to deal with Trumps, whether they’re this Donald Trump or future Donald Trumps, for the next generation.” Thank George Wallace for that.

Wallace, a four-time presidential candidate and longtime governor of Alabama (both on his own account and with his wife serving as his surrogate), made his national name as an outspoken segregationist in the early 1960s. But, like Trump, he was more an opportunist than an ideologue, embracing segregation only after losing a 1958 gubernatorial race to a segregationist and vowing, infamously, to “never be out-niggered again.” His first presidential campaign, as a Democrat in 1964, fizzled when Barry Goldwater entered the race. In 1968 Wallace ran again. The Democratic establishment had sidelined him, so he ran under the banner of his own American Independent Party and won an impressive 13.5 percent of the popular vote.

In 1972, with the help of new rules that weakened party insiders’ grip on the nominating process, he tried again, this time as a Democrat. He had five primary wins under his belt (including Michigan) and was ahead in the popular vote and the delegate count when, in May at a campaign rally, a would-be assassin’s bullet took him out of the race. Undeterred, he made yet another run in 1976, alarming Democratic insiders who saw him as toxic to the party’s base and a sure loser to President Gerald Ford. By clearing the field for Jimmy Carter to defeat him in Florida, they managed to block him (in the process boosting Carter to the White House).

That was Wallace’s last race, but his politics and constituency, once organized, have proved durable. His message and style resemble Trump’s in so many respects that listing them all is a challenge. True, there are differences. Wallace, unlike Trump, was a genuine populist who hated rich people. He didn’t talk about immigration and trade, which were not big issues in his day, and he was a Vietnam hawk rather than an opponent of what Trump calls “forever wars.” But the similarities are much more numerous and striking.