The morning after the Islamic State attacks on Paris, Donald Trump approvingly retweeted the words of one of his supporters: “THE WORLD IS PLAYING EVERYTHING RIGHT FOR TRUMP! EVERY DAY HIS POINTS ARE PROVEN.”  Long before the destruction and death in France last week, Trump’s presidential campaign was following the path of right-wing working class parties in Europe. Over the past decade, these parties have capitalized on animosity to immigration and the perceived threat it presents to Europe’s “autonomy, sovereignty and territorial integrity,” its “postwar economic model,” and its “Christian identity.” This movement appears to be growing in power, and the violence in Paris certainly won’t diminish its strength.  Just as the “disaffected, lower educated/working-class native folks” in Europe “are fueling the rise of the Front National, UKIP and other parties,” similar constituencies are drawn to the Trump campaign in the United States, according to Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a foreign policy think tank:  These are the folks who have lost out, at least in their perception, to globalization and immigration — they feel threatened by cheaper labor abroad and migrants at home.  The terrorist attacks in Paris will deepen the loyalty of voters like this to Trump. Already, there are clear signs that the violence in France has provoked renewed anti-immigrant sentiment in this country, especially toward refugees from Syria.  The ascendance of European far-right parties over the past decade has laid out a tempting path for Trump. The parallels between Trump’s brand of American right populism and European working-class conservatism are striking.  First, both movements demonize immigrants in language that even traditional politicians who share their views ordinarily reject.  “Without any action, this migratory influx will be like the barbarian invasion of the fourth century, and the consequences will be the same,” Marine Le Pen, president of the National Front in France, declared at a September rally in a suburb of Paris.  “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” Trump declared on June 15. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”  Trump and much of the anti-immigrant European right support domestic social programs that provide universal benefits — benefits like Medicare and Social Security, available equally to all citizens, regardless of income or economic status. This separates right populism from fiscal conservatism, which calls for paring back or privatizing services, or means testing eligibility for them.  While Trump is sharply critical of means-tested programs for the poor — “That’s what I find so morally offensive about welfare dependency: it robs people of the chance to improve” — he remains a staunch defender of Social Security and Medicare. Trump told a Republican gathering in New Hampshire on April 18:  Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid. And we can’t do that. And it’s not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now all of the sudden they want to be cut.  In Europe, many right-wing parties have adopted a strategy that has come to be known as welfare chauvinism: support for boosting welfare state benefits for native-born citizens, combined with restrictions on the use of social insurance programs by immigrants.  The economic policy of the British UKIP Party, for example, is in some sense more liberal than the platform of the Democratic Party here. It calls for an additional £12 billion for the National Health Service and £6.7 billion more for “social care” and mental health services. At the same time, however, UKIP’s platform states that  all new migrants to Britain will have to make tax and national insurance contributions for five consecutive years before they will become eligible to claim U.K. benefits.  Trump shares with the European right a tendency to portray conflict as a struggle between the weak and the strong, them and us.  “Most Western leaders are very weak,” Geert Wilders, the founder of the Dutch Party for Freedom, announced in April to the congressional Conservative Opportunity Society in Washington.  After recent elections, Morten Messerschmidt, a leader of the Danish People’s Party, called Helle Thorning-Schmidt “beyond compare the weakest prime minster we’ve ever had” after Thorning-Schmidt was ousted as prime minister of the ruling center-left government on June 18.  Trump loves to use the word weak in reference to his adversaries. Just this year, Trump has described Marco Rubio as “weak like a baby” and Jeb Bush as “weak on immigration”; he has said Bernie Sanders “showed such weakness” in dealing with Black Lives Matter activists; dismissed Ben Carson as “very, very weak on immigration;” and called Martin O’Malley a “disgusting little weak pathetic baby.”  Perhaps most intriguing, Trump shares with many leaders of the European right — including officials of Austria’s Freedom Party, the Dutch Freedom Party and the National Front — an admiration for the hard-line leadership of Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president.  “Putin is now taking over what we started, and he’s going into Syria, and he frankly wants to fight ISIS, and I think that’s a wonderful thing,” Trump told Fox News on Sept. 29. “In terms of leadership, he is getting an ‘A’.”  While most leaders of right populist parties abroad have been ideologically consistent over the years, Trump has been wildly inconsistent, casting doubt on the depth of his convictions on issues from abortion to guns to health care.  In 1999, he declared “I am very pro-choice.” In January this year, he said, “I’m pro-life and I have been pro-life.” Trump switched his party registration from Republican to independent in 1999, then to Democrat in 2001 and back to Republican in 2009.  In 1999, Trump boasted that he was “very liberal when it comes to health care;” in June, he said the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, is “a disaster called the big lie.”  In the case of guns, in 2000 Trump affirmed his support of an assault weapons ban, but in 2015 he promised that as president he would guarantee that “the Second Amendment will be totally protected.”  In an effort to place Trump in an international perspective, I asked Herbert Kitschelt, a professor of international relations at Duke, for a more encompassing view of Trump:  A populist leader ventures to establish a personal, intimate relationship with his followers, unmediated by political organizations. Populists have an aversion against organizations and are conspiracy theorists. Consider when Trump invokes that he is in “no one’s pocket” financially. His aversion against the Republican Party establishment. This idiom of the little guys against the machines, with a heroic leader coming to the rescue of the powerless underdogs, is a procedural template in politics that has, of course, inspired many political movements, particularly in times of crisis and economic decline: Think of Latin American populism (especially Juan Perón in Argentina in the 1940s), but also European fascism (Hitler, Mussolini), to Hugo Chávez in the 1990s and 2000s.  Kitschelt added, however, that he associated Trump most closely with Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister of Italy:  You have there the same swagger of the self-made billionaire, even if they are not self-made, the womanizer suggesting unlimited sexual prowess and appetite, the slayer of organizational dragons, the Manichean contrast of good and evil, as well as the substantive programmatic vacuity.  Right behind Berlusconi, “I probably would nominate Vladimir Putin,” Kitschelt said.  Daniel Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard, also mentioned Berlusconi:  As you likely know, his success was rooted in no small part in bragging about business success, a macho swagger, justifying his campaign based on how rich/successful he is. Berlusconi emerged as the Italian party system was collapsing. What this says about our party system is interesting to reflect on.  Asked to name comparable figures in conservative populist movements, Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute also cited Perón, among others:  You can certainly see some Jean-Marie Le Pen in Trump, both the focus on immigration and the grandiosity. Maybe a better analogy is strongmen in our hemisphere — Juan Perón? There is some Perot there, but that is imperfect. More than a touch of Rush Limbaugh and Father Coughlin.  At the moment, according to data compiled by RealClearPolitics, Trump holds a one point lead among Republicans nationally, 24.3 to 23.3, over Ben Carson.  Robert Ford, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Manchester in England, noted in an email that:  The Trump insurgency draws on exactly the same demographic — older, blue collar, white voters with few educational qualifications — that UKIP does. In the British context we call these the “left behind” voters — left behind by both cultural, economic and political change, with values out of step with mainstream liberal elites, worsening job prospects and a growing perception that mainstream politics no longer represents or responds to their views.  As Trump has maintained his lead, the fear that he could win has grown among establishment Republican leaders.  What happens if he does?  Three months ago, Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant, wrote on CNN’s website that the “failure of Republican leadership to do more than say ‘no’ ” had “opened the door to Donald Trump’s ascension.” Despite Trump’s rise in the polls, Castellanos did not believe he could win the nomination.  More recently, Castellanos wrote: “Unhappily, I’ve changed my mind.” After noting Trump’s earlier drop in the polls, from Sept. 19 to mid-October, Castellanos argued that since then Republican voters had  returned, finding no acceptable alternative who could match Trump’s bad-boy strength and his capacity to bring indispensable change. Fearing they have only one last chance to rescue their country, they found no one else as big as their problem.  In a prescient Aug. 21 article widely circulated on the right, “Are Republicans for Freedom or White Identity Politics?” Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist, an innovative conservative website, warned that the Trump campaign had the potential to transform the Republican Party, from “a coalition that is broad, classically liberal, and consistent with the party’s history” to “a coalition that is reduced to the narrow interests of identity politics for white people.”  Evan Osnos, in an Aug. 31 New Yorker article, “The Fearful and the Frustrated,” captures the almost accidental way Trump discovered how to mobilize a segment of the Republican electorate.  Richard Spencer, a promoter of “white racial consciousness” and president of the National Policy Institute, told Osnos that he did not believe “Trump is a white nationalist,” but that he reflects  an unconscious vision that white people have — that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there. I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon. I think he is the one person who can tap into it.  Jared Taylor, a white “racialist,” told Osnos that Trump  would repudiate any association with people like me, but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit.  There is no doubt that Trump is a gifted opportunist in the way that the best salesmen and politicians usually are. He has shown a profound ability to grasp the professed needs and (partially) hidden desires of his audience — in this case angry white voters, some of whom may not have been fully conscious of the us-versus-them agenda underlying their politics until Trump gave them voice. By now, though, they know what he means when he says he wants to “make America great again” and they like what they hear.
Donald Trump shares a lot of common ground with the leaders of anti-immigrant parties in Europe. Their aggrieved supporters have a lot in common, too.