I saw the future exactly 30 summers ago while on assignment in Iowa. I just didn’t know it.
But that future — the mobilization of angry voters, the aggressive rhetoric, the twin senses of resentment and rebellion — was on full display in a van in north-central Iowa. Out the window were corn and soybean crops as far as the eye could see. In the front passenger seat was Patrick J. Buchanan, who had made the transition from commentator to presidential contender. I was in the back, taking notes and, amid this fusillade of grievance, hardly aware of the greater import of what I was witnessing:
A media figure planting the seeds of a vast transition in the nature of the Republican Party in fertile soil. Talk of disdain for the elitists of the East. Contempt for the Washington establishment. Concern about gender issues in schools. Worries about unchecked immigration. Opposition to abortion rights. Criticism of affirmative action. Support for tariffs.
All those themes came out in the 36 hours we spent together in 1995, when Buchanan was challenging Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas for the GOP presidential nomination. All those themes today come under the heading of Make America Great Again. All those themes render Buchanan something of a political prophet while casting Dole as a figure from a remote past — a fresher version perhaps of fellow Kansan Alf Landon, the 1936 GOP presidential nominee, but an antique figure nonetheless.
So much for the theory the MAGA creed sprung from the mind of Donald Trump the way Athena did from the forehead of Zeus. It has been there all along, and it has been there for a long time.
“These ideas have been knocking around American politics for years,” said Barbara Trish, a political scientist at Grinnell College who has witnessed the changing nature of Iowa’s political parties. “This isn’t the first time these issues have been voiced, but Buchanan packaged them and was a precursor to Trump. The times may be different, but the language is the same.”
There are strains of Trump in many populist characters of America’s past — William Jennings Bryan, the three-time unsuccessful Democratic presidential nominee; Huey Long, the Louisiana governor and senator; Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest of the National Shrine of the Little Flower; and Charles Lindbergh, the aviator-turned-isolationist. Former Gov. Paul LePage of Maine, now a Republican candidate for the House, has often described himself as “Trump before Trump.”
But though trace elements of the Trump viewpoint might also be identified in Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama and Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, none of these earlier figures combined the elements that Trump has corralled into a political movement the way Buchanan did three decades ago.
Buchanan was plowing the ground for the Iowa caucuses; he came stunningly close to Dole, following the veteran lawmaker, the personification of what today is called the Washington swamp, by a mere 3,226 caucus tallies. In his Iowa campaign, Buchanan emphasized the themes later identified with Trump, paying no mind to agricultural price supports, commodity markets, weed control or till-planting in soil ridges, the kinds of issues Eastern politicians try to fake when they are in the Hawkeye State. (The suggestion by a Democratic candidate in that election cycle, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, that Iowans plant Belgian endive won him no votes, and plenty of derision.)
“There is nothing wrong and there is everything right with trying to bring Judeo-Christian values to bear on American politics,” Buchanan said during our time together. “And there is nothing wrong and there is everything right with trying to clean up the filth that is poisoning our popular culture and threatening the future of our children.”
It is the redemption of the axiom of the French essayist Charles Peguy (1873-1914) that “all begins as mystique and ends as politique.”
My voyage into the future with Buchanan was eight months before the 1996 Iowa caucuses and 20 years before Trump descended the gold-rimmed escalator. But the themes, the rebellion and the passion were there in full flower on the Iowa plains. So, too, was a receptive audience.
“He’s saying all the things we want to say,” Ione Dilley, at the time the president of the Christian Coalition in Iowa, told me. “He not only says them, he believes them.” She died nine years before Trump became president and began saying the things his supporters want to say. But his ascendancy would not have surprised her.
While Dilley and her compatriots were thrilling to the notion that Buchanan might topple the most devout GOP establishment figure of the time — Newt Gingrich called Dole the “tax collector for the welfare state” — Trump was fending off financial disaster in the form of a $916 million loss in his federal tax return. While Buchanan was inveighing against immigration in his 1992 campaign, Trump was on “Late Night With David Letterman,” complaining that “the politicians killed the real-estate industry.”
Over the years, both men were touched by antisemitism charges. Buchanan was cited by the Anti-Defamation League for espousing “racist, antisemitic, anti-Israel and anti-immigrant views.” Trump was criticized for dining with the antisemitic figure rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and for, as the ADL put it last month, “employing an antisemitic trope” in speaking of “shylocks” at an Iowa rally.
Buchanan joked about how a confusing Florida “butterfly ballot” in 2000 led 47 voters in a Jewish enclave to mark their ballots for him in error. Trump weaponized antisemitism, using it as a cudgel to batter American universities, including Harvard, over their alleged indifference to the safety and comfort of Jewish students on campus.
Thirty years ago in Iowa, once a swing state that has since swung resolutely Republican red, Buchanan spoke of the appeal of his ideas.
“I’m the authentic conservative and … I can campaign with conviction and fire,” Buchanan said in that visit to Iowa. “I can reach people’s hearts.”
He ended up reaching a segment of Americans. With the same issues and rhetoric, Trump reached more than 77 million of them.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
