The New Yorker:

The President thrives on confrontation and demands supplication. Politicizing the economy creates opportunities for both.

By Isaac Chotiner

Jan-Werner Müller is a German historian and philosopher who has written a number of studies of right-wing populism. Müller’s central argument has been that populism should primarily be defined as a movement in which a leader claims to represent a silenced or forgotten—and almost always exclusionary—majority. It is a negative take on populism, which somewhat definitionally situates it as an ideology of bigoted authoritarianism. Others have argued that populism encompasses figures such as Bernie Sanders who speak out against élites without attacking ethnic or religious minorities or seeking to undermine democracy. Nevertheless, in the past decade, many populists who have risen to power—such as Viktor Orbán, in Hungary, and Giorgia Meloni, in Italy—fit Müller’s framework.

I recently spoke by phone with Müller, who is a professor of social sciences and politics at Princeton. I wanted to know what he made of the first months of the second Trump Administration, and how he thought it differed from the first, especially now that Donald Trump’s tariff agenda has upended the global economy. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed whether Trump is less rational than other authoritarians, the historical relationship between far-right leaders and big-business interests, and whether it’s condescending to absolve Trump’s voters of blame for his policy choices.

How is the second Trump term different from the first Trump term?

Some things have remained the same. Other parts are very different. From my point of view, populism is about a leader claiming that they, and only they, represent what they often refer to as the “real people,” which is the very expression Trump used on January 6th when he was addressing his crowd. This has a clearly anti-pluralist impact. A leader cannot simply decide who truly belongs to a people and who doesn’t. His basic approach has not changed.

When an aspiring autocrat comes to power the second time, he is much more dangerous than the first time. We saw this with figures like Viktor Orbán, in Hungary, and Jarosław Kaczyński, in Poland. When they came to power the second time, they had the same basic populist attitude, but they had new personnel and they had a plan. They realized they had to capture institutions as quickly as possible, which is why they tried, for instance, to capture the judiciary. Orbán and other figures, such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in Turkey, practice what some scholars call “autocratic legalism”—in other words, trying to keep a façade of legality, fooling people into thinking that one is actually following procedures as one is packing courts, and so on. I think most observers have understood that, with Trump, there is an element that resembles how he has always done business, which is basically to do something that’s blatantly illegal, and then see how the other side reacts. Are they going to sue? Are they going to cave? Are they going to settle in some form or another? And that has really been different from a lot of these other aspiring autocrats in recent years.
 

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