When Trump unexpectedly won the presidency, it wasn’t just Steve Bannon who took a newfound interest in Andrew Jackson—and Walter Russell Mead. Suddenly, old copies of Mead’s 2001 book, Special Providence, were being pulled off shelves by those who hoped to understand Trump, and Mead’s essays in places like Foreign Affairs and The American Interest and columns in the Wall Street Journal were soon required reading among those Republicans, like the young hard-liner Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who sought to advise Trump and harness his message of economic nationalism and deep skepticism of immigrants and internationalists. (“Insights that have stood the test of time,” Cotton said of Mead, recommending his book to listeners of The Global Politico last fall; the two have become so close that Mead attended Cotton’s 40th birthday party last spring.)
For Washington’s political class, Mead provided an answer to explain the otherwise perplexing populist appeal of the brash billionaire. Jacksonianism, as Mead viewed it, was exactly the historical precedent to explain Trump, marrying grass-roots disdain for elites, deep suspicion of overseas entanglements—and obsession with America power and sovereignty. “He is not the second coming of Andrew Jackson,” Mead said when we talked on the eve of Trump’s first anniversary in office this weekend. “But there was such a hunger in America for a Jacksonian figure that people were willing to project a lot of qualities onto this sort of very unlikely Queens real estate developer who becomes the folk hero of Americans who hate New York and are suspicious of Big Business.”
In explaining the historical antecedents for Trump’s hostility toward free trade, establishment-bashing and embrace of a certain kind of chauvinist nationalism, Mead offered an intellectual framework to understand Trump at a time when others remained simply mystified by the president. Indeed, Mead found Trump’s antagonism toward the fundamentals of the post-Cold War international order; rejection of alliances and allies; and visceral disregard for international institutions and the robust free trade made possible by it all perfectly consistent with the attributes of Jacksonianism he had first described more than a decade earlier.
For “a scholar of foreign policy,” says Mead, who is today a distinguished fellow at the conservative-leaning Hudson Institute, watching Trump’s rise was sort of an out-of-body experience, a once-in-a-career moment “where these abstract typologies that you write about suddenly seems to be happening in front of you.”