The Paranoid Style of Donald Trump

In the early days of the Biden administration, I wrote an essay taking a look at Richard Hofstadter's “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”1 Its relevance was not difficult to discern. Still, I ended on a hopeful note, pointing to Biden's purposefully low-key manner, to his tamping down his own ego; I assumed that he would thereby succeed in tamping down political conflict. I was wrong. It now looks as if the Biden years will figure as nothing more than a speed bump in an era dominated by Trump.

I want to have another go at appraising the American political scene. In that earlier piece I suggested that Trump fancied himself a prophet, presenting himself as a savior or redeemer to his followers. His grandiosity was and is amply apparent. Coupled with it, his sense of grievance: at every turn he has portrayed himself as a victim. Self-aggrandizing and self-pitying, he has peddled his lies all the way to victory.

Have we been here before? The most obvious comparison is with the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s. I begin there, before examining ways Trump is transforming American politics and the American polity. Trump, of course, is not alone: he has henchmen and enablers. I need to assess some of their efforts as well. So I have included a section on Elon Musk and his work at DOGE—the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Though it was a failure, it paved the way or fit nicely with Russell T. Vought's labors to put Project 2025 into effect. Then Trump: Trump 2.0 finds the president unconstrained, pursuing an ethnonationalist agenda to turn those he calls “REAL Americans” against those he insists are not.

Clay Risen, in his new and highly acclaimed book, The Red Scare, drew on Hofstadter's notion of a paranoid style to account for “the easy slide into conspiracy-mongering and disinformation” following the Second World War. Paraphrasing Hofstadter, he wrote: “The paranoid style, from the seventeenth-century witch hunts to the anti-C