Congratulations to Matthew Fong, overall winner of the inaugural A-level essay competition, run by the American Politics SG (APG) and the Financial Times Schools Programme. This was part of a broader project supported by the Political Studies Association’s excellence and impact funding.
James Priory, Head Teacher of Tonbridge School, said: “Matthew is an ambitious student who takes a strong interest in US politics and brings a keen critical edge to discussion about global current affairs. It is exciting to see him embracing the challenge of such a prestigious competition and we are incredibly proud of his achievement”.
Trump did not invent America’s paranoid politics. He brought it to the White House.
By Matthew Fong
In July Donald Trump refused to sign a popular bipartisan housing bill, holding it hostage until Congress passes an election-overhaul measure he has branded a “national emergency”. The episode is striking not because it is shocking, but because it no longer is. A president bending his party, the legislative calendar and the machinery of elections around a single conspiratorial grievance has become the ordinary weather of American politics.
In 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter gave that weather a name. The American political tradition, he wrote in Harper’s, had long carried a “paranoid style”: a recurring current of conspiracy, aggrieved nationalism and anti-elite resentment that surged up periodically before subsiding. Writing amid McCarthyism and the John Birch Society, Hofstadter found the style disturbing but relegated to the fringes — he certainly did not foresee that it might one day occupy the presidency itself.
That is the puzzle Trump poses. Is he an anomaly – a violator of democratic norms without modern precedent – or a continuation of something deep in the American political consciousness? The honest answer is both, but in different forms. His ideology is old. His reach is new.
Consider the continuity first. Strip away the showmanship and Trumpism is strikingly familiar. “Make America Great Again” exemplifies the “paranoid style”: it insists that authentic greatness has been stolen by a corrupt establishment and can be recovered only by defeating it. The populist claim to speak for the real people against a treacherous elite runs from Andrew Jackson’s war on the national bank, to the agrarian revolt of the 1890s, to Huey Long, whose Depression-era “Share Our Wealth” clubs claimed millions of members. The nativism echoes the Know-Nothings of the 1850s and the immigration panics of the 1920s. Trump invented none of it. As Francis Fukuyama argued in the FT, his 2024 victory is better read as the culmination of decades of accumulated economic and cultural resentment than as a bolt from the blue.
What is genuinely new is not the message but its grip on power. Earlier carriers of the paranoid style were contained — by parties, by the press, by the slow gravity of institutions. Trump has shown that containment to be optional. Two impeachments and four criminal indictments left his support almost untouched; his approval barely moved through scandals that would once have ended a presidency. The Republican party did not tame him; it reorganised itself around him. That is the inversion at the heart of his anomaly: in a typical two-party system the leader serves the party, not the other way round.
The structural ground was prepared long before he descended the escalator. Partisan polarisation has reached its widest level on record, while trust in the federal government sits near historic lows. Into that hollowed-out landscape, social media delivered something no earlier demagogue could wield: Max Weber’s “charismatic authority” — legitimacy drawn from a leader’s person rather than any office — operating at the scale of tens of millions, with the press routed around entirely. Jackson and Long could only have dreamt of it.
Yet structure alone explains too little. 2024 was, as one FT analysis put it, a graveyard of incumbents: every governing party in the developed democracies that held elections lost ground. But the conditions were everywhere and the breakthrough was singular: no other leader forged grievance and charisma into institutional capture at this scale.
The Jackson comparison clearly illustrates the difference. Jackson, too, mobilised resentment and bent a party to his will — but he rose from within an existing coalition and captured structures already in place. Trump arrived from outside, having never held office, and rebuilt the Republican party from beyond its own mainstream. The mechanism of capture was more radical, and the erosion of norms more durable.
So the binary is the wrong tool. Trump is continuous with the American past in ideology and anomalous in the present in reach: a familiar tradition handed, for the first time, the full instruments of the presidency. That is why this week’s spectacle — a head of state treating an election law as a national emergency and the rest of government as leverage — should not be waved away as theatre. It is the paranoid style governing, rather than merely agitating on the side-lines. Hofstadter assumed that institutions would contain any political actor trumpeting the “paranoid style”. The unsettling lesson of the past decade is how much we were trusting that assumption.
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