What Trump and the American Right See in Foreign Autocrats

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When Donald Trump praises foreign autocrats, from Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un to Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, the typical reaction is shock and dismay—and that is just one of the unsettling features of American civic life today that has a more prominent place in our history than most observers would like to think. But in fact, Beverly Gage points out in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, such admiration is not uncommon in American politics. Gage, a historian at Yale, spoke with my colleague, Kanishk Tharoor, about the historical parallels that help us understand today’s fraught politics, as well as what sets this moment apart.

KANISHK THAROOR

Beverly Gage, it’s a pleasure to talk to you.

BEVERLY GAGE

Thanks for having me here.

KANISHK THAROOR

We’re speaking just a few weeks before what promises to be a very momentous election day here in the United States. And there’s this supposed truism that U.S. presidential elections are never about foreign policy, but that’s not entirely true. I think there are many cases in which understandings of America’s role in the world have influenced the outcomes of elections. We can think of Eisenhower in 1952 or Nixon in ‘68, Reagan in 1980, maybe even Obama in 2008, and so on. This election is taking place at what seems like an incredibly fraught moment in geopolitics, with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the rising competition with China. The stakes seem so immense. How do you see questions of foreign policy helping to frame the current election?

BEVERLY GAGE

I think you’re right that the conventional wisdom that voters vote on their pocketbooks or their cultural identities or domestic politics isn’t entirely right. I would say it’s safe to say that voters don’t usually go to the polls looking at the fine points of NATO policy, but I do think that voters have responded on many occasions, first of all, to wars as they’re underway and to a sense of whether or not the U.S. is engaging in a competent way, in a thoughtful way, in a way that resonates with a certain set of values at home, and then they have also engaged with the grand narrative that candidates present about who this country is, how it’s supposed to act in the world.

I think we’re seeing both of those play out here. I will leave it to the pollsters to determine what’s really in the hearts of every voter out there; and whether or not, say, the way that the war in Afghanistan ended, or these very hot conflicts that are going on around the world, whether those are more important or less important than inflation, let’s say. But I do think that we have an election which, actually somewhat unusually for U.S. history, has pretty clear distinctions about how the U.S. is supposed to behave in the world and what U.S. foreign policy ought to be, and I think people care about that. They care about the question of the use of military power. They care about, certainly, the conflict in the Middle East and Ukraine, above all.

KANISHK THAROOR

We published an essay recently by the political scientists Jeffrey Friedman and Andrew Payne that argue that foreign policy does matter in presidential elections, at least insofar as voters perceive candidates to be strong. Do you think either candidate has offered a plausible vision or at least a plausible impression of strength in the world?

BEVERLY GAGE

Well, I think they present really contrasting views of what it means to be strong. Donald Trump’s vision of what it means to be strong has always had a bullying quality, a go-it-alone, tromping around, whether that’s in domestic politics or in global affairs. And I think, obviously, Kamala Harris has a very different and contrasting view of what strength looks like: strength through alliances, strength through a certain kind of restraint, strength through a confidence in what it is that the United States is and what it stands for around the world.

I think one of the things that is really disturbing—on the long list of things that are really disturbing about Donald Trump—has been his very, very consistent view that the United States is done for, that it’s a declining nation, that it’s an embarrassment, that it’s a laughingstock around the world, and that’s just a very, very peculiar position for a presidential candidate to take. That position, I don’t think we have many precedents for in U.S. history.

KANISHK THAROOR

The Harris campaign has styled Trump’s, let’s say, his willingness to speak positively about foreign tyrants as evidence of his unsuitability to be a world leader. Do you think that’s an effective strategy?

BEVERLY GAGE

Well, I guess we’re about to find out if that’s an effective strategy, but I do think what’s really interesting about him as a candidate is not just a kind of “necessary evil” set of alliances with dictators, which is: the United States has a long and complicated history of cozying up to all sorts of dictators, so that is not that unusual in either a presidential candidate or in the U.S. government. I think what is unusual and what really distinguishes Trump is that he is holding them up as figures of affirmative admiration, that Putin knows more about how to be in the world than Joe Biden does, and that is a pretty wild thing to say.

KANISHK THAROOR

Let’s get into that. Your last essay for us, which is a really wonderfully written piece titled “The Autocratic Allure,” this piece is about a book by the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn called America Last. And in this book, Heilbrunn explores the admiration that many people on the American right in the twentieth century had for dictators and authoritarians, a real cast of horribles, from Kaiser Wilhelm II, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, the apartheid regime in South Africa, and so on. Many observers, and not just Heilbrunn, have connected this tradition to the present with, as you suggested, when some conservatives seem really fascinated by the figure of Putin or indeed by Viktor Orbán in Hungary. What do you think drew those figures in the twentieth century to authoritarians, and Trump and his allies now to the likes of Putin and Orbán? Maybe another way to put this would be, what do we learn about what these figures want for America from their admiration for foreign authoritarians?

BEVERLY GAGE

I think what is really valuable about Heilbrunn’s book is that he makes this powerful distinction between realist geopolitics of one sort or another, which as we were just saying, has often led American politicians of a variety of sorts to have pretty close and sometimes even grudgingly admiring relationships with totalitarians, authoritarians of all sorts. But I think what he’s really interested in is a set of cultural resonances, and those, to me, seem really very powerful and very much a part of what Trump’s doing. So some of that is just a kind of attraction to a world that is hierarchical, where certain people are at the top and others are at the bottom, and you have this kind of vision of a hierarchical society. I think a lot of it has to do with masculinity and this vision of what it means to be a strong man, as we were saying, as well as a strongman.

And then I think you have other factors, like a certain kind of religiosity and a vision of a hierarchical religious state. Then, of course, race is one of the key characteristics. A lot of the figures that Heilbrunn cites in his book were race theorists of one sort or another, as they would’ve been described in the early twentieth century, and of course, the same holds true for gender. It’s a kind of patriarchal vision writ large, not only for the family, but for the nation. So, I think it’s those cultural resonances, which are, of course, also political, that really distinguish this particular right-wing tradition.

KANISHK THAROOR

You make a further distinction in your essay, where you say that where these sympathies were largely fringe for much of the twentieth century, they’re decidedly in the mainstream now. You write, “What distinguishes the present moment from the past is that these ideas have eventually captured a U.S. president”—Trump—“along with one of the country’s two major political parties”—the Republican Party. “The twentieth century was actually quite different from the twenty-first, and it feels as if the United States is now heading into uncharted territory.”

You’re a historian. I imagine you’re often asked to trace both continuity and change. Why do you see so much change here?

BEVERLY GAGE

Well, I think it’s because these ideas have an institutional power as well as a kind of powerful figurehead, and that is both powerful in the American imagination and then also, potentially once again, powerful in the White House, that have given them not just a cultural prominence or resonance, as they’ve had at various points in the past, but a real institutional base from which to begin to realize some of these ideas, and from which to influence lots of other people.

So I think about a figure like Henry Ford, incredibly powerful cultural figure. He is an isolationist in World War I, and then in the immediate aftermath, he’s a kind of peace advocate, but in a very strange way. And he’s, of course, a notorious anti-Semite. And what’s interesting about Henry Ford is that he’s the richest man in the world, or one of them, enormously popular heroic figure, but when he ran for Congress in 1918, he lost. And so he never actually got into the political system in some overt way.

Or a figure like Charles Lindbergh, same kind of story, or even a figure like William F. Buckley in the post-war years, enormously powerful thinker and influencer, as we would call him today, but not someone who ever had organized political power, and that’s what makes this moment different.

KANISHK THAROOR

Is it too large a question to ask what enabled that turn to happen?

BEVERLY GAGE

I would point to a few different things, but these are all just by way of historians’ speculation rather than any fully realized theory. One is certainly the end of the Cold War and the end of many of the forces that sort of pushed the establishment together in some way, particularly around questions of foreign policy, but fueled certain kinds of right-wing politics, also served to provide a check on those right-wing politics around something like civil rights, the idea that the Cold War really pushed the country to remain within certain boundaries or to make certain kinds of changes. That’s one piece I would point to.

Then, in some ways, I really think we’re talking about the declining power of the political parties as institutions. And there’s a funny thing that’s happened, in which the country has become much more partisan, but the parties are much less institutionally powerful. I think a lot of that goes back to some of the reforms that came out of the 1970s in particular, like the way that we choose our presidential candidates now. Until the 1970s, you simply could not have gotten a figure like Trump at the head of a major political party because he didn’t have an institutional base, he wasn’t an insider, and it was all about making the party convention work for you. That had problems, but it also provided certain checks, and one of those checks was preventing an outside demagogue from coming in and sweeping through the popular primary and then capturing the party.

KANISHK THAROOR

We’re talking about the American right, but I wonder to what extent you can find on the left a similar kind of tradition, maybe not in scale, but certainly in orientation. You can think of figures like Henry Wallace in the 1940s, who was, you could say, was guilty of a certain level of Soviet apologia, down to leftists in the present who offer apologies for Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela or Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and so forth. Do you see anything equivalent to what we’ve been discussing occurring on the left as well?

BEVERLY GAGE

Well, again, I think there are left traditions. So, there’s an anti-militarist tradition. There’s a certain form of isolationism. There’s an anti-war tradition on the left, and all of those things have been quite powerful at various times and sometimes have actually had some overlap with the right, even a left-wing, anti-statist tradition of varying sorts, but I don’t think that we have seen anything in the left-liberal spectrum like what you’re seeing now on the right, largely because of this question of who holds power.

You can point to relatively powerless, left-wing campus protesters who might be making some of the arguments that you’re referring to, or in the 1930s and ‘40s, you could certainly find people in the Communist Party who were apologists for Stalin. You could certainly find that into the ‘50s and even into the ‘60s and ‘70s in some cases, but those were not people who held a whole lot of significant political power. I mean, even Henry Wallace, it was an important campaign, but he got almost no votes.

KANISHK THAROOR

2.4 percent, right?

BEVERLY GAGE

Exactly.

KANISHK THAROOR

You’ve gestured at this a little bit, but the counterargument to Heilbrunn’s accusations from Trump’s allies and maybe indeed Trump himself, is that they’re actually being realists, and that’s certainly how they characterize their positions on Ukraine, how many people would explain Cold War–era policies of cozying up to dictators, the idea that they’re dealing with the world as it is, not as liberals would want it to be. Do you find that credible?

BEVERLY GAGE

I think there is a certain element of credibility to that, which is to say, I don’t think they are in any danger of succumbing to grand visions of American ideals or of nation-building or of democracy-building, which are sometimes virtuous and are often things that have led policymakers astray, certainly in recent years. But I think where it doesn’t resonate is exactly in the places that Heilbrunn is talking about, which is, you’ve got these incredibly powerful cultural, social, political affinities, everything from the global anti-trans alliance. Is that realism of a sort? I don’t think so. Particularly around questions of race and gender and religion and all of those pieces, which is really the source, I think, of Trump’s admiration for some of the figures we’ve been talking about.

KANISHK THAROOR

Right. You made this point that many of the grievances of the U.S. right today—wokeness, the deep state, LGBTQ issues, and so on—are also preoccupations of foreign autocrats like Putin and Orbán in Hungary, and they’ve made those messages central to their regimes as well. How do these ideas circulate, and why are they so powerful in very different contexts?

BEVERLY GAGE

One thing that I would say is that none of these are particularly new ideas. Maybe the particular articulation of anti-trans or particular ways of describing wokeness, the language and the trappings, might seem relatively new, but these are deep and lasting ideas about racial and gender hierarchy, about the power of a centralized state, that have never gone away. And I think one of the interesting things was that what is also a historical phenomenon is the ability of liberals in particular to forget this over and over and over again and to assume that certain pernicious ideas have been put to bed. Nobody would say such things. Nobody would do such things, constantly declaring victory and then being shocked once again when a figure espousing these ideas not only emerges on the stage, but turns out to have a big popular constituency.

Because, of course, if you think about it, one context: the Ku Klux Klan and the massive resistance movement against civil rights in the 1960s in particular, what happened? The United States passed civil rights legislation. We had formal desegregation. All sorts of things occurred to make real progress on civil rights, but the people who joined those organizations and who believed those things didn’t suddenly evaporate.

I used to run the Grand Strategy program here at Yale, and this was one of the big places where I saw deep resonance between a kind of geopolitical question of grand strategy and a domestic political question, which is: once you win, what do you do with your opponents? And I think that’s a very powerful question in a post-conflict situation, but it’s a question that domestic politicians don’t seem to think much about. Once you’ve won, you’ve won, and they’ve disappeared on some level. And of course, that’s never really the case.

KANISHK THAROOR

The figure you often cite as the precursor to this Trumpian era—you call him the spiritual progenitor of this era—is Senator Joseph McCarthy. Why is that?

BEVERLY GAGE

Well, I think that McCarthy really created a new political style in the United States that had earlier resonances, but also I think he’s the best analog to Trump in our history. Of course, he didn’t become president, so that’s a big difference. Usually, when people talk about McCarthy these days, they’re talking in some general way about anti-communism and about the Red Scare, but McCarthy actually occupied a very particular position within that politics. Everyone in the 1950s with any legitimacy in American politics is an anti-communist.

But McCarthy’s role was to be this kind of slash-and-burn figure, and people in the 1950s often described him very much in the same terms that people today describe Trump. He went for the big lie. He went for the headline, and when he made the headline and people called him out on it because nothing he said was true, he either ignored them or he just moved on to the next big lie, and everyone scrambled to respond to that, and to fact check him, and to denounce him, but he was the one in control of the news cycle. He was described as a demagogue. And when people talked about McCarthyism in the 1950s, that’s really what they were talking about. They were talking about this kind of “big lie” form of showy demagoguery that was also about a kind of aggressive and punitive targeting of your political opponents, humiliating of your political opponents, threatening your political opponents with jail time or exposure or whatever it might be, and that all just seems very, very Trumpy.

And of course, they had a friend in common: Roy Cohn, who was McCarthy’s counsel, another notorious figure of the American right, who was also Donald Trump’s kind of counselor and mentor.

KANISHK THAROOR

McCarthyism grafted the major geopolitical tension of the time—the Cold War, fears of communism—onto domestic politics. Do you see any kind of parallel for that dynamic today?

BEVERLY GAGE

Well, I don’t think that we have any issue today that has either the cultural or political power that communism had in that moment. I think we have division around geopolitics and geopolitical conflicts of varying sorts, so I think there are variations of McCarthyite strategies. Certainly, we saw that with campus presidents and campus protesters this last year, in which you say one thing, it gets blown up, there’s a kind of rush of outrage, and then people are losing their jobs. They’re afraid to say things. So, that has some resonance with this earlier period, but I think nothing today has the same power of mobilization or the same power of consensus-making, in some sense, that communism did then.

KANISHK THAROOR

To reach toward another historical parallel, we are exactly a century removed from the Johnson-Reed Act that severely restricted immigration for about three decades in this country. It was an act that was motivated by the most pernicious forms of race science and anti-immigrant hysteria. Senator David Reed, one of its proponents, was also an avowed fan of Mussolini. Now, we have Trump, one of the most powerful men in the world, former U.S. president, inveighing against immigrants, talking about how they have bad genes and are poisoning the blood of American society. You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the 1920s and the interwar period. In what ways does it help us understand our present moment?

BEVERLY GAGE

I think it’s one of the most important past touchstones, certainly for immigration politics today, but for much broader political questions, too. In 1924, and I think many Americans still don’t quite realize this, but from 1924 all the way to the 1960s, immigration into the U.S. was heavily, heavily restricted, and it was restricted according to a kind of hierarchy of desirability. And that hierarchy of desirability had a lot to do with race. So the 1924 act basically banned immigration from Africa and Asia, parts of the Middle East, heavily restricted it from Southern and Eastern Europe, where all the Jews and the Catholics were, and favored immigrants from Northern Europe, though gave them quotas too. And it was a dramatic change.

So I think one of the things that’s interesting about it is that it came out of this period of really dramatic, and in some ways, kind of historically unprecedented in other countries, mass immigration. That was the story of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the U.S. So it wasn’t a response to nothing, in the same way that I think the anti-immigration politics today is also not a response to nothing, which is to say we are back at immigration levels that look a lot like what they did in the early twentieth century, that people are coming from very, very different parts of the world, but percentage-wise, they’re almost comparable. So, it would be a little surprising if there was no reaction to that whatsoever.

This is, of course, a particularly pernicious reaction, and it has a lot of resonances, not only with the kind of race hierarchies that were so important in 1924, but I think an underappreciated part of the 1924 law was that those were also supposed to be parts of the world where dangerous radicals and terrorists came from. And that was a lot of what that politics was about too. Around those questions of political subversion or terrorists sneaking across our borders, that was pretty important in the ‘20s, although you were talking about communist revolutionaries or anarchists from Italy, etc.

KANISHK THAROOR

Tied to this panic about migrants, there’s also a lot of rhetoric from Trump and his vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, about elites. This is something we hear also in Europe as well, but also both on the right and the left in the last decade, we’ve seen a rise in railing against the elites, whatever that might mean. Often, the most strident critics of the elites are people who are inextricably tied to those very economic and cultural classes, and so we see a slew of Ivy Leaguers in the United States or Oxbridge grads in the UK bashing the elites today, much in the way, as you’ve pointed out, William F. Buckley did in the 1950s. Do you see something new in today’s politics of anti-elitism or is it just another chapter in an old story?

BEVERLY GAGE

It was funny. As I was reading the Heilbrunn book, I started writing in the margins. Partly because I teach at Yale, I would circle when some pernicious right-wing figure came out of Yale. But I found that I was circling things every two or three pages in that book. Yale, Harvard, Columbia, all of these elite institutions that are not only producing figures of the right, but that are producing men who make their careers based on denouncing the very institutions, at least in higher education, that shaped them. And it’s a very consistent type. It’s a rather peculiar type, and I think it’s all over our politics now. We have J.D. Vance, and Josh Hawley, and Vivek Ramaswamy, and Trump himself, who is an Ivy League–educated figure. He went to Penn. I would say that a little bit of what’s different in this moment, if anything, is that there are so many of them that it’s becoming so central to the politics.

In Buckley’s day, that was a jokey, insider-outsider position to take. Buckley simply could not abide Yale and all of these corrupt elites there, and yet he came here and talked all the time. He left his papers to Yale. It was like there was a kind of, “I’m a provocateur within.” Whereas now, I don’t really think that that is the case anymore, and I think the power of that kind of anti-elite sentiment has grown much more significant. It’s much more central to the mainstream of the Republican Party. Now, that’s not Donald Trump. I think that’s Ronald Reagan. He was the avatar and creator of the modern form of that kind of politics.

KANISHK THAROOR

I wonder if we could widen the aperture a bit and look beyond the United States. History obviously is a very contested ground in U.S. politics right now—just look at the fallout of the Times’ 1619 Project, which incurred and continues to incur the wrath of a lot on the political right and elsewhere too.

But history has also featured quite prominently in recent nationalist and authoritarian projects elsewhere. I’m thinking of, say, the supposed neo-Ottomanism of [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan in Turkey, of India under Narendra Modi, its interest in reviving the notion of Hindu civilizational identity. You see something similar in China as well under Xi Jinping, Putin’s desire to resurrect the Russian empire of old, and so on. Societies are always reshaping the way they understand their shared pasts, but is there a reason why we seem to be looking behind us so much these days?

BEVERLY GAGE

Well, I think it’s related to the rise of a certain kind of nationalism more broadly. Nationalism has always been, at least in part, about creating a historical narrative about why these people should be in this polity and these people should be excluded, and why that’s the right and natural thing to do. So I think history, in some ways, is a kind of methodology of nationalism, and that’s one reason we’re seeing so much history now.

I think it’s also, to return to the U.S. context a little bit and the stories that I know best, but we’re also, I think, in a moment of deep confusion, where certain narratives that had a lot of power in the past, historical narratives, have broken down in one way or another. The narrative of American progress, which had good parts and bad parts, but was the narrative of the United States for a whole lot of its history, is, I think, a narrative that people don’t have a lot of faith in anymore. So, there’s a lot of searching for other ways of understanding history. I think groups in the United States that are trying to make their claims on the nation, whether in terms of reparations or inclusion, are also busy excavating their own pasts in order to make those claims.

So, I think that a historical story is often a political story, and it’s a story that is about access to a certain kind of power. And there’s a lot of instability right now, and so people are really looking back to find these claims. I would also say many people are, I think, asking, “Do we live in the worst moment?” and desperately seeking examples from the past that will either be confirming or reassuring. I want to assure everyone that we do not, in fact, live in the worst moment. There are many, many worse moments in human history, but I think there is a kind of emotional volatility to politics today that people are being propelled to look for examples to ground themselves in what’s happening.

KANISHK THAROOR

You’ve actually brought us to where I wanted to close today, which is to touch on your recent essay in the Atlantic, where you lament how American liberals and also those on the left are wary of embracing American history for some of the reasons you’ve suggested, and of using its origin story, and have ceded its symbols to the right. You actually quote an essay that the historian Jill Lepore wrote for us five years ago in Foreign Affairs, when she wrote, “Writing national history creates plenty of problems, but not writing national history creates more problems, and those problems are worse.” You’ve sketched why that has happened, but how would you like to see that history reclaimed or that narrative represented to people now?

BEVERLY GAGE

That essay was sort of a preview of 2026, which is going to be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and so is going to be, whether people know it or not yet, a period of lots of historical hoopla and national self-searching and fireworks and whatever, but it’s all still in formation. And one of the things that has been really disturbing to me over, I’d say, the last ten to 20 years, is the way that so many symbols of the United States and especially of the founding era have been claimed by and are now coded as right-wing.

Trump rallies, American flags are everywhere. People are decked out in them, as if that’s the only thing that the American flag means. So, that essay goes into lots of examples from the past where people from the left deliberately crafted and chose certain parts of the American political tradition to make their case that actually they own the United States. And I think in our moment, it’s not only that the historical symbolism has been taken up in what I think are partisan and distorted and disturbing ways, but it’s also that there’s a little bit of hesitation and allergy to even trying to think about what you might celebrate at all.

So when I was writing that article, and I went around talking to people and mentioning it and saying, “Ah, 2026 is coming, big celebration of America,” and they go like, “Oh, no, I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to celebrate anything.” I think there are a lot of terrible things that have happened in American history and a lot of reasons why people feel that way, but as a politics, as well as a matter of history, I just don’t think that it is either accurate or productive, and I would like to see some sort of reimagining of what these symbols mean and of finding a usable past out of the American story.

KANISHK THAROOR

On that note, thank you so much for your time. It’s always so great to learn from you and to hear from you.

BEVERLY GAGE

Great. This was fun.