Trump, Populism, and the Ruling Class – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

The United States is in the midst of a sociopolitical revolution that has propelled Donald Trump and his populist MAGA movement to power during the last decade, but their hold on power is tenuous as the globalist/administrative state “ruling class” they are trying to replace is resisting Trump’s efforts to take away its power and privileges.

This sociopolitical struggle has been waged at least since the presidential candidacy of Ross Perot in 1992 and the subsequent movements behind Pat Buchanan’s bids for the White House, and the rise of the Tea Party movement. It is a clash of elites — a struggle for power — and the outcome of that struggle is still in doubt.

Perot’s populist candidacy and Buchanan’s “America First” campaigns suffered defeats in successive national elections, which is the mechanism by which democracies like the United States select the elites that exercise political power. But the political movements Perot and Buchanan led coalesced first in the Tea Party movement, which made significant political gains in the 2010 midterm elections, and then in the successful presidential candidacy of Donald Trump that sent shock waves throughout the globalist/administrative state ruling class in 2016.

Trump didn’t play by the rules of that ruling class, and he paid for that by being characterized as an illegitimate president, investigated by political opponents within his own government, impeached twice, subjected to lawfare by elements of a legal profession embedded in or that fed off the globalist/administrative state ruling class, vilified by the mainstream media, and persecuted by Democrat and Republican political officials who saw Trump as a threat to their power and privileges.

The globalist/administrative state playbook to undermine and destroy Trump was similar to that used by Richard Nixon’s opponents during the Watergate “scandal,” but Nixon, unlike Trump, shared the elite ruling class’s globalist worldview, though he did initially attempt to tame the administrative state.

Nixon’s persecution by essentially the same elite class that targeted Trump was motivated in part by personal hatreds that reached back to the Alger Hiss–Whittaker Chambers confrontation and, in part, by no-holds-barred politics. Nixon did not lead a political movement, like Trump did (and does), that threatened the power and privileges of the ruling class.

After Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, which included reports and allegations of electoral irregularities in several key states, the globalist/administrative state ruling class that sought to discredit Trump’s presidency and to remove him from office effectuated a legal pincer movement, aided and abetted by a complicit mainstream media, in an effort to bankrupt him and put him in prison.

But this time, the get Nixon playbook didn’t work, in part because Trump and the MAGA movement benefitted from an alternative media that didn’t exist during Watergate, in part because Trump’s political support was not limited to the Republican establishment that had largely and cowardly abandoned Nixon, and in part because Donald Trump would not give up, like Nixon did.

In perhaps the greatest comeback in U.S. political history, Trump triumphed in the 2024 election, and after taking office on Jan. 20, 2025, has acted swiftly to strike back at the globalist/administrative state elites who tried to destroy him. But the elite ruling class that lost the election is not going quietly. The same crowd that sought to destroy Trump is coalescing as a resistance movement in an effort to prevent Trump from taking away their power and privileges.

With MAGA ascendant in the federal government’s executive and legislative branches, the resistance is centered in the “permanent” federal bureaucracy and in blue states, which have opposed Trump’s executive orders and policies related to ending woke/DEI programs, filed lawsuits to prevent funding cuts, and attempted to frustrate the mass deportation of illegal aliens; and the courts, which have annulled some of Trump’s executive orders, imposed nationwide temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions to stop Trump from reorganizing and cutting executive agencies, and attempted to interfere with Trump’s efforts to deport illegal aliens. (RELATED: Dictatorship of Obama Judges)

None of this would surprise Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels, or Vilfredo Pareto, sociopolitical thinkers who studied how ruling classes operated throughout history. What we are witnessing — indeed, have been witnessing since at least 1992 — is a struggle for political power among elites: globalist/administrative state elites versus a populist uprising that culminated in the election of Trump.

The globalist/administrative state elites have ruled the United States since at least the First World War, and their power position greatly improved during and after the Second World War. They accumulated even more power with the enactment of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs.

Trump’s America First movement is a direct challenge to the globalist/administrative state ruling class. If Trump and MAGA win this struggle, it would confirm Pareto’s concept of the “circulation of elites” — the idea that in a democratic country such as ours, one elite class can be replaced by another.

But victory for Trump and MAGA is not inevitable, and the climactic battle in this struggle for power may be fought in the Supreme Court. Which side in this struggle the Court will support is anyone’s guess.

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