This Time, It’s the Populists Who Are Underestimating Trump

By Philip Klein

Thursday, November 13, 2025

 

Those who were skeptical of Donald Trump’s ability to win the presidency in 2016 have long been tagged as out-of-touch elitists for underestimating his political prowess. But now, it’s the self-styled populists who are underestimating Trump.

 

One thing that’s emerged from the brouhaha over Tucker Carlson’s decision to do a cozy interview with Hitler and Stalin admirer Nick Fuentes, and Heritage’s Kevin Roberts’s defense of it, is that allies of Carlson see this as a proxy fight for 2028. To them, the next election is an opportunity to scrub the vestiges of Reaganism from MAGA and use Vice President JD Vance as a vehicle to revive a Buchananite framework and ride it to victory. Vance, to be clear, has not signed onto this project, and he has plenty of time to spell out his own ideology, though many of his critics and boosters are already debating as if he is sympathetic to this idea.

 

There are two key problems with this approach, however. One, it ignores what Trump actually ran on. And two, it downplays Trump’s unique political talent.

 

A good distillation of the push for a remade GOP came from Gabe Guidarini, an Ohio College Republican Federation chairman who has been loud about it on social media. “A lot of old school conservative groups have tried to keep the economic austerity, foreign policy hawkishness, and compassionate conservatism in the equation by latching on to Trump, but the majority of the Republican Party now believes what Trump actually talked about in 2015,” he told the Washington Examiner. He went on to say that “the ideological underpinning of the Trump movement is repurposed Buchananism.”

 

But this is a rewrite of history. I am not by any measure trying to pretend to be some dyed-in-the-wool, original MAGA guy, but I also have eyes and ears. I covered Trump extensively in 2015. I followed him on the campaign trail, attended his rallies, watched all of the debates, viewed his TV appearances, etc. I also have access to the internet to refresh my memory.

 

While there are certainly shades of Buchanan’s failed presidential campaigns in Trump’s campaign (such as calls to build the wall and strong criticism of the Iraq War), the differences end there. And I don’t even have to go back to 1999, when Trump slammed Buchanan as a “Hitler lover” when flirting with the 2000 Reform Party presidential nomination. In his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump rejected the foreign policy adventurism and democracy promotion ideas of the Bush era, but he never ran as a Buchanan-style anti-interventionist. He essentially ran as a “peace through strength” guy who would be more selective in determining which actions were in the national interest.

 

At a rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, on November 12, 2015 (almost exactly ten years ago), Trump said he would “bomb the s***” out of ISIS. He continued, “I would just bomb those suckers, and that’s right, I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left.” He repeated the message regularly.

 

This past summer, there was an effort by the Tuckerites to portray Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities as a deep betrayal of true MAGA, despite the fact that it had 85 percent support among Republicans. The strong support is not surprising, given that it was very much consistent with his position going all the way back to 2015.

 

In September 2015, Trump wrote an op-ed in USA Today trashing Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and saying he would renegotiate a better deal. He described Iran as presenting an “existential threat” to Israel and the United States. He continued:

 

We will approach other nations and make it clear that we will not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

 

We will use all the tools of power available, hopefully avoiding direct action. But make no mistake, a Trump presidency will demonstrate the will to do whatever is necessary to protect the interests of the United States, Israel and its allies.

 

This was not the Buchananite position. But it was the exact path that Trump pursued this year. He gave Iran 60 days to agree to a deal, and when they did not, he gave the green light for Israel to bomb Iran and then joined in with strikes of his own.

 

In February 2016, I was at a rally in New Hampshire when Trump actually attacked his then-rival Senator Ted Cruz for not being hawkish enough on terrorism, arguing that he was too equivocal about waterboarding in their recent debate. Trump, in contrast, said, “I would bring back waterboarding and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”

 

What those seeking to remake the party are doing goes beyond attempting to rewrite the history of Trump — they are dismissing him in a way that they always accuse their opponents of doing.

 

The insinuation underlying the idea that Trump betrayed the original promise of his movement is that he’s actually not very smart or effective as a leader. In this conception, he is a silly rube who is easily led around by a cabal of neocons and has little ability to exercise agency.

 

More fundamentally, they are neglecting what a political talent he is. My friend Salena Zito, who I feel confident in saying has spent more time talking to Trump and his voters than anybody now arguing about this, is fond of saying that there will never be another like Trump. He is an incredible political performer. His audiences find him entertaining and funny, and he is able to manipulate the media like no politician we have ever seen. He came out of nowhere in 2015 with past positions on litmus test issues (pro-abortion, pro-gun control, pro-socialized health care) that would have disqualified any other Republican candidate. Not only did he emerge from a field of 17 that included once highly touted Republicans, but then he took down the well-funded Clinton machine despite a ton of personal baggage and dozens of statements that would have been career killers for anybody else. I’ll never forget the time I spoke to an ardent Trump supporter at a New Hampshire rally who was initially a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders. He was convinced that Trump would support the $15 minimum wage, even though he never said so. The bottom line is that a lot of people just liked Trump.

 

The idea that Trump rode a wave of anger over immigration, bad trade deals, and foreign policy hawkishness to the Republican nomination and the presidency underestimates him as a political performer. A Pew poll taken in January 2015 asked Republicans to describe their top priorities. Only 29 percent named “dealing with global trade issues.” Much higher was the 60 percent of Republicans who named immigration. However, an equal number named tax reform, 71 percent named “strengthening the U.S. military,” 72 percent said “reducing the budget deficit,” and 87 percent said “defending the country from terrorism.”

 

It is also worth remembering that in the 2016 race, there was a Republican candidate, Senator Rand Paul, who was much closer to Buchanan on foreign policy, and he dropped out in Iowa after finishing a distant fifth.

 

None of this is to mention Trump’s even more amazing feat of being elected in 2024 — which he achieved not despite his 2020 loss, four indictments, two impeachments, and a jury’s finding that he was liable in a sexual abuse case, but because he was able to flip all of those things into an actual advantage by campaigning against fraud and lawfare. That was a political strategy that nobody else would have conceived of or attempted, let alone been able to pull off.

 

There is simply no basis to support the idea that the road to victory for Republicans will be to run Vance with an updated version of Buchanan’s 1996 platform. It is a notion being pushed by Very Online types who are about as in touch with actual Trump voters as establishment Republicans circa 2015 and who are underestimating Trump’s historically unique appeal. A lot of Democrats assumed Obama’s coalition would stick with them in 2016, but it did not. And just last week, we got yet another reminder that Trumpism, like Obamaism, fares a lot differently when Trump himself isn’t on the ballot.