He's back. (Jim Watson/Pool/AFP/ Getty)


January 21, 2025   5 mins

When Martin Van Buren was inaugurated in March 1837, the weather was gentler than the icy terror that descended upon Washington yesterday to welcome President Trump back to the White House. But there were other remarkable similarities that might help us understand Trumpism as a historical reality that has precedents — and provide an antidote to the liberal hysteria that still swirls around it.

On both occasions, the federal city was filled to capacity. “Beds! beds! beds!” was the general cry in 1837. Many visitors had spent the previous night sleeping rough, in barns and markets and even barbers’ chairs. And so it was in 2025, with even mid-market hotels charging upwards of $1,500 per room. Both inaugurations were similarly marked by the irreverence and boozy rowdiness typical of populist movements, Jacksonian democracy in Van Buren’s case, Trumpism yesterday.

Watching the swearing-in remotely, from the Capital One Arena, I chuckled at the partisan fandom. Prominent Democrats drew boos from the crowd, while Republicans got applause. But when Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, appeared side-by-side, the crowd booed. “Wait, what did poor Mike Johnson do?”, I asked my companion. Then, as if collectively regretting their drive-by booing of the innocent Johnson, most of the arena audience refrained from booing or cheering when members of both parties showed up together on the jumbotrons.

Trump, inevitably, received roars of approval and standing ovations. Not much at first, when he was strangely subdued and his delivery halting. But as he gathered steam, so too did the audience. The greatest clamour of approval came when he pledged to make it the “official policy of the United States government” to recognise only two genders: male and female. Other crowd favourites included “Drill, baby, drill”; his vow to “take back” the Panama Canal; and, of course, his crackdown at the border.

“The deepest historical echo yesterday had to do with political coalitions.”

It turns out that doing popular things can make for good politics. Democrats today don’t seem to grasp this banal truism, but their own party’s Jacksonian founders did, whether it was dismantling the Second Bank of the United States, an institution that had come to be hated by much of the public for the imperious role it played in the early republic’s politics (even as it fulfilled important economic functions); or imposing the first legal limitation on the length of the workday; or expanding the democratic franchise to white men without property.

Trump’s instincts hew much closer to those of Jacksonian Democrats than his own party’s intellectual class, and he has no problem proclaiming the popular. Precisely because progressivism has come to be associated with paper straws, congestion fees, and diminished expectations, Trump gains the upper hand simply by promising good things to come, even as some of his brain-storms veer into the preposterous — such as a military invasion to bring Greenland under American control.

Yet the deepest historical echo yesterday had to do with political coalitions. To wit, “Jacksonism” — the worldview associated with Van Buren’s predecessor and ex-boss, Andrew Jackson — raged against “the money power” that oppressed workers and farmers. But his coalition also included grasping entrepreneurs, local bankers, slave-owning planters, along with other interests who were by no means opposed to capitalism, but saw in Jackson a chance to make the system work better for them.

And so it was with Trump. On the one hand, Trump in his Inaugural Address attacked the “corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair”. On the other, he invited to the dais business leaders such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose firms took once the lead in promoting the corporate “wokeness” reviled by Trump’s base.

More than a mere dais seat, Elon Musk has been presented with his own government department, to which the Tesla and SpaceX boss hopes to recruit a team of “small-government crusaders”. He says he aims to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget —surely impossible without cutting those entitlement programs that Trump and the Republican platform have promised never to touch. So we are left wondering which Trumpism will prevail: the one that explicitly appeals to trade unionists (as the President also did in his address), or the one that (for now) adores Musk as a (Roman) demigod?

But for one day, at least, the American Right’s various factions pressed pause on their bickering to celebrate Trump’s remarkable comeback saga: from January 6 through the barrage of indictments and convictions of the past four years, he has made it back to the summit of earthly power. But the tensions will erupt soon enough. Already, Congress’s TikTok ban and visa programme disputes have divided the movement’s populist base and Silicon Valley funders.

Judging by the inauguration, the latter are everywhere in the new Washington. They were at every fringe event, dinner, and party that I attended. Trumpism now contains within itself a downscale base that sings “glory, glory, hallelujah!” and yearns for restoring industrial jobs, and an affluent element that promotes longevity through plasma transfusions and who would automate most jobs out of existence.

Can these two competing impulses be synthesised?

Here, the Jacksonian example isn’t so helpful. While Jackson, Van Buren and their ilk did indeed smash the Second Bank of the United States, this redounded mostly to the benefit of their business allies; the workers and smallholders in turn were handed a brief depression and a surge in inflation caused by a surfeit of wildcat bankers, followed by decades during which the United States suffered from a much higher rate of banking crises than comparable industrial powers with more centralised financial systems. But for all its flaws, the hated administrative institution did help discipline the flow of credit.

There are, however, more successful reform models in the American political tradition. Particularly germane is what the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr dubbed “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends”: a willingness to ally with and use big institutions and wealth, whether public or private, in service of the Jeffersonian vision of a competent, modestly propertied citizenry — the American Dream, if you like. Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, FDR, Eisenhower, and JFK all echoed this to varying degrees, with varying degrees of success.

But such an approach would require a willingness to discipline Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk, including by mobilising public opinion against them. The state must lead business, even if business leaders are allowed great closeness to state power and invited to participate in politics. FDR, for example, warned firms against defying his labour and competition reforms: “There is no group in America that can withstand the force of an aroused public opinion.”

At the Commander-in-Chief Ball on Monday night, where the majority of guests were members of the armed forces and their families, the cheering, whooping, and military-style “Hooahs!” for Trump and his team were deafening. “Welcome back, President Trump, your warriors had missed you,” declared a Medal of Honor recipient from the podium. “He’s just with us,” an Air Force man told me. “I don’t care about this or that policy. He has our backs.”

At least for now, Trump has that dangerous “force” of public opinion on his side to an extent that wasn’t the case the first time he was elected — and that hasn’t been the case for a Republican president in a generation. As one official who had served in the first Trump administration told me, “Every 40 years or so, the Jackson spirit comes back to stir things up in this country. The question is what you do with it.”


Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

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