Ever since announcing his presidential candidacy, Donald Trump has topped polls, dominated headlines and hovered over the Republican field like a dirigible. Panicked rivals, story-chasing journalists and thrilled supporters have treated him like some momentous (or monstrous) one-off. But he is actually an old thing in American politics—older even than the republic itself. Mr. Trump is the latest incarnation of the Patriot King—the hero who swoops into the political system from the outside to save it from its own vices.  The idea of the Patriot King was the brainchild of a thinker well known to our founding fathers—Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), an English politician and journalist at a time when royal power in Britain gave way to government by Parliament and political parties. As a young man, Bolingbroke seemed destined for great things, but he tied himself to a series of sovereigns (and would-be sovereigns) who left him in the lurch.  Bolingbroke’s political disappointments led him to a second career as a polemicist. In a series of essays and books, he argued that the original sin of English political life was corruption. Party leaders bought elections by bribing voters and bought the loyalty of members of Parliament by giving them government jobs.  Bolingbroke argued that only a public-spirited royal could rise above this dirty traffic. In his most influential book, he named this paragon the Patriot King. High birth would guarantee such a ruler’s independence; he would “put himself at the head of his people in order to govern, or more properly to subdue, all parties.”  Bolingbroke had little impact in England; Edmund Burke dismissed him with a jibe: “Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through?” But he was read eagerly by American colonials, who thought Bolingbroke exactly described the unresponsive establishment that oppressed them. George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson all owned sets of Bolingbroke’s journalism.  The founding fathers didn’t want a king, patriotic or otherwise. But they also didn’t want political parties, which James Madison in the Federalist dismissively called “factions.” When parties inevitably arose, the founders and their heirs quite naturally yearned for some savior who might check them.  For more than two centuries, the most common candidates for the role of Patriot King have been heroic generals. Six have made it to the White House—Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower—and in our day, Colin Powell, Wesley Clark and David Petraeus have been mentioned as possible aspirants.  In recent years, we have seen a new type of Patriot King: the tycoon. In 1992, the data-processing billionaire H. Ross Perot ran for president by invoking some specific issues, such as balancing the budget, but his main appeal was a Bolingbrokean pox on the U.S. political system. “This city,” he said in a speech to the National Press Club, “has become a town filled with sound bites, shell games, handlers and media stuntmen…We need deeds, not words.” Mr. Perot carried no states, but he won almost 19% of the popular vote—more than any postwar third-party candidate.  From 2002-13, the billionaire Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York City, and he is still occasionally mentioned as a potential president by those unhappy with today’s choices. He was nominally a Republican, but his party affiliation was largely a convenience.  Mr. Perot spent some $65 million of his own money on his 1992 campaign; Mr. Bloomberg shelled out an astounding $74 million on his first mayoral run in 2001, topping it with some $85 million on his second and a cool $102 million on his third.  Comes now Mr. Trump, real-estate magnate, TV host and mouth for all seasons, whose appeal flows from his defiance of conventional political norms. He scatters opinions and insults with a free hand and uses his wealth as a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.  The Patriot King is a fantasy that lives on because of our discomfort with parties. Parties are hackish, opportunistic and timid; the two major ones rig the system as best they can. Yet parties are a genuine political innovation, almost as old as the Constitution and an important supplement to it. They organize Congress and facilitate the selection of presidents.  Today’s tycoons are not party men, but Mr. Perot came to grief, and Mr. Bloomberg stayed local. Mr. Trump will learn from their example—or repeat it.  —Mr. Brookhiser is a columnist for National Review and the author, most recently, of “Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln” (Basic Books).
The Republican upstart is just the latest incarnation of the ‘Patriot King,’ the hero swooping in from outside to save our broken politics