Below is an essay by Charlie Hawkins, Eastbourne College

This essay won the prize ‘Most original essay‘ in the inaugural FT-APG A Level Essay Competition, which was part of a broader project between the American Politics Group the Political Studies Association and the Schools Programme of the Financial Times. This project was funded by the excellence and impact funding of the Political Studies Association.

Praising Charlie Hawkins, Tom Lawson, Headmaster of  Eastbourne College, said:

‘I am delighted that an Eastbourne College pupil won the ‘most original essay’ prize in the FT-APG A-level Essay Competition. Charlie Hawkins’ well-researched piece drew on multiple authoritative sources, including of course the Financial Times, to demonstrate the parallels between Donald Trump’s rhetoric and that of Richard Nixon, among others. Deftly combining theoretical frameworks and apposite examples, his essay was worthy of this prestigious national competition. All our pupils enjoyed the stretch provided by this competition which was ideal for ambitious sixth-formers taking A-level or otherwise interested in politics, focused as it was on exciting topics that stimulated great interest and scholarship in the pupils.’

Does President Donald J. Trump represent an anomaly or reflect a broader strand of thought and action in American politics?

Following the past decade of American politics, a narrative has emerged that the 45th and 47th President Donald J. Trump is a strange anomaly of unorthodox leadership and style. That may be the case when he is compared to Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but in reality, Trump’s policies are relatively normal in the context of wider American history. In this essay, I will be explaining why his approach to politics, foreign policy and immigration policy are nothing new in American politics.

Firstly, in his approach to politics, Trump’s rhetoric makes it clear he is a populist (Noris, 2016). When asked in an interview, Cas Mudde, the political scientist, defined populism as “a thin-centred ideology that divides society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: “the pure people” on the one side and “the corrupt elite” on the other” (Mudde, 2018). Trump fits this description as someone who divides society. He employs an us-versus-them ideology, with the MAGA movement labelling its opponents as ‘corrupt’ and ‘unpatriotic’, and in the framing of Edward Luce in the Financial Times:

“Since Trump descended that escalator in 2015, loyalists have diagnosed critics as suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome”. In line with the president’s core trait, they project their own condition on to others. With Trump, accusation is confession. He calls his opponents corrupt, unpatriotic, dishonest and much cruder things besides.” (Luce, 2026)

However, fellow Republican president Richard Nixon also divided society in his 1968 campaign for the presidency, attempting to appeal to a “silent majority” that backed his Vietnam policy over the demands of protesters and dissenters (Time magazine, 1969). Like Nixon, Trump portrays himself as anti-elite and anti-establishment (Tenorio, 2023). This leads me to conclude that both Trump and Nixon are populists by Mudde’s definition. So maybe Trump is the most populist president the states have seen for some time, but he is certainly not the first.

Mudde believes that populism is “thin-centred”. He believes that “because it is thin-centred, it can be attached to all kinds of ideologies” (Mudde, 2018). This is useful to note because we can also see that Trump is not the only contemporary populist contemporary force in America, with Bernie Sanders being another example. Like Trump, Sanders also fosters an idea of an elite outgroup of corrupt individuals who threaten the American way of life, but in his narrative it is “the oligarchs” who horde an immoral amount of money at the common person’s expense (Talbot, 2015).

Bernie Sanders is also far from the first left-wing populist in the USA. Around 100 years ago, Louisianan politician Huey Long ran a campaign focused on “making the common man feel important” and “blaming elites for the nation’s woes” (Feuerherd, 2017). Indeed, Long was popular enough that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw him as a potential threat, and historians believe FDR may have proposed social security as a way to combat Long’s popularity (Feuerherd, 2017). As such, not only does Trump’s right-wing populism echo that of Nixon, but populism in general is not an anomaly in American politics. It can be found throughout American history on both sides of the political spectrum, and populism has influenced the way the country is run for at least a century.

Donald Trump’s foreign policy is also not anomalous in US politics, and fits well within the ‘madman theory’ of foreign policy. Taegen Goddard’s Political Dictionary defines madman theory as a strategy that tries to convince opponents that a leader is unpredictable and potentially irrational (Goddard, 2024). This approach is designed to make otherwise empty threats sound plausible, allowing the leader to make more effective threats if their demands are not met. When it comes to foreign policy, it is very hard to predict what Trump will do next, and this is intentional. According to the BBC, he has “made his own unpredictability a key strategic and political asset” (Little, 2025). A good example of this is Trump’s campaigning as a candidate who would not start any “forever wars” (Borger & Roth, 2026). This made Operation Absolute Resolve, in which US forces captured Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro much less predictable, ensuring Venezuela was less prepared. The idea that Trump can and will make spontaneous and unpredictable decisions like this then made his threats of taking Greenland seem more worrying for Europe, prompting them to take him more seriously (Foy & Ruehl, 2026). Indeed, as Financial Times reporting documented in early 2026:

“EU capitals are considering hitting the US with €93bn worth of tariffs or restricting American companies from the bloc’s market in response to Donald Trump’s threats to Nato allies opposed to his campaign to take over Greenland.” (Foy & Ruehl, 2026)

This is quite the departure from the foreign policy of Biden and Obama. Obama described his “Obama doctrine” foreign policy as “don’t do stupid sh-t” (Yglesias, 2015) and Biden dedicated himself to restoring the “multilateral order” which he believed was wrecked by Trump (World Politics Review Editors, 2024). So, Trump’s policy could be easily mistaken for anomaly if only recent American history is taken into account.

However, this not the first time we have seen madman theory used by a President. Again, there are similarities between Nixon and Trump. Nixon famously used madman theory to his advantage. He wanted the Soviet Union and North Vietnam to see him as a “madman, capable of any irrational deed” (Office of the Historian, 2011). If his enemies feared him, they would be more willing to negotiate on the USA’s terms. That being said, it is important to recognise that Nixon’s policy does seem to have been much more carefully planned as a part of Nixon and Kissinger’s Realpolitik foreign policy (Time, 1973), when compared to Trump, whose actions can often appear spontaneous.

Yet, Trump has more similarities to past Presidents than just madman theory, and is from the first President to be invested in the affairs of South America. President Theodore Roosevelt, in fact, believed that it was the USA’s right to intervene in any American nation in the case of “chronic wrongdoing”, according to the Roosevelt corollary of the Monroe doctrine (Ferguson, 2026). By declaring a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe doctrine, Trump has explicitly placed himself and his actions within this historical lineage (Ferguson, 2026).

Furthermore, Trump’s recent efforts in the Middle East are strikingly similar to the events of the George W. Bush administration. President Bush invaded Iraq out of fear they were developing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, with the liberation of the Iraqi people from dictatorship as a bonus (George W. Bush Presidential Library, 2026). In 2026, The Trump administration claimed it was bombing targets in Iran to help the Iranian people overthrow their government and to destroy the dangerous weapons Iran is building (Ordoñez, 2026). History repeats itself, sometimes very quickly.

Lastly, on the topic of foreign policy, even in a world where Trump had decided to remain uninvolved in foreign conflicts as he promised, such narratives are not new to American politics. President Herbert Hoover was an anti-interventionist who did not want to see America involved in foreign wars. Even after he left office he opposed US involvement in World War Two (Russelo, 2011). In fact, the idea of American isolationism can be traced as far back as the Presidency of George Washington, who said in his farewell address that America should “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” (Washington, 1796). So, it would be wrong to say Trump is anomalous in his foreign policy.

Finally, turning to immigration policy, historical through lines can be seen. Trump makes it crystal clear that his administration is anti-immigration (The White House, 2025), with mass deportations causing widespread protest in many American cities, and particularly in Minneapolis. However, other modern presidents have also organised mass deportations. The Biden administration deported 270,000 immigrants in a 12-month-period (Guardian Staff and Agencies, 2024). Between 2009 and 2015, the Obama administration deported 2.5 million people (Marshall, 2016). So, Trump is not an anomaly in the fact he carries out mass deportations, but it could be argued that he is an anomaly in how he carries out his deportations. Unlike Biden and Obama, the immigration and customs enforcement agency (ICE) under President Trump targets all undocumented immigrants for potential deportation (Haddock & Roy, 2026). Arrests of illegal immigrants are much more public, often being shared on social media, with two incidents involving the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents attracting widespread attention (Haddock & Roy, 2026).

However, a similar approach to deportation has occurred before. In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback deported a million people, thousands of which were American citizens mistaken to be illegal migrants, from the US to Mexico using aggressive tactics (Toft, 2023). It is, then, very easy to compare Trump’s modern deportation campaign to Eisenhower’s tactics.

In conclusion, the idea that Trump’s rise is an unprecedented, never-seen-before anomaly in US politics is a myth that has come about because of the stark contrast created when he is compared to his immediate predecessors, Biden and Obama. When analysed against the wider scope of US history, we see that it is more accurate to describe Donald J. Trump’s politics as the return of a traditional and familiar style of American presidency.

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