All of this, of course, sounds familiar to anyone who’s been watching Trump. “The state or government is thus the political instrument through which the owning class exercises and maintains its power and suppresses the working class,” the Workers’ Party of the U.S. charged in 1935.

“They will do anything to maintain their power. They will do anything. They will say anything. They will spend whatever it takes because they know that if Donald Trump becomes the nominee and ultimately the president of the United States, the days of backroom deals are over. He will only be responsible to the American people,” Trump aide Corey Lewandowski says today. Trump’s talking point is dubious—he himself is an elite, with a long record of exploiting vulnerable workers—but its resonance is real.

Trump has waffled on whether he’d support a higher minimum wage, to the point where it’s impossible to tell what he’d really back (although with a Congress dominated by the Republican Party of today, rather than the one Trump envisions in a decade, any increase would likely be dead on arrival). But he’s argued strongly for infrastructure investment. “We've spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people,” Trump said in December. “If we could've spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges and all of the other problems—our airports and all of the other problems we've had—we would've been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.”

And he’s been a strong proponent of current social-insurance programs, perhaps the point that puts him most strongly at odds with the Republican Party as it exists now. “What I want to do, I think cutting Social Security is a big mistake for the Republican Party,” Trump told Green. “And I know it’s a big part of the budget. Cutting it the wrong way is a big mistake, and even cutting it [at all].”

While Trump doesn’t espouse the radical racial equality of American workers’ parties of the past, the way he speaks about black voters is similar. “The Negroes compose the most exploited and persecuted section of the population of this country,” argued the Workers Party of the U.S., prescribing better economic circumstances as a cure. Trump echoes this, from his two-dimensional view of minorities as essentially concerned about economic well-being and employment to his (now-)archaic use of a definite article: “The African Americans want jobs. If you look at what's going on, they want jobs.”

Globally, Trumpism does not share the goal of international socialist revolution—but, once again, get past that and there are echoes. Above all, the two movements share a deep skepticism of American military involvement and entanglements overseas.

“The economy and politics of the United States depend more and more upon crises, wars and revolutions in all parts of the world,” the Workers Party of the U.S. contended. Today, Trump argues (likely implausibly, but so be it) that he would slash U.S. defense spending, even as he made the military stronger. While Trump’s claim that he opposed the Iraq war before it began has been debunked, his argument about the important of rebuilding infrastructure at home rather than rebuilding nations overseas is essentially anti-imperial. And Trump has expressed deep misgivings about American spending on military alliances like NATO or on behalf of allies, both of which would qualify as imperialist projects under the old rubric.