Francis Wilkinson, Columnist

Why Donald Trump Really Is a Populist

Billionaire appointees. Tax cuts for the rich. None of that matters.

February 16, 2017 at 3:45 PM UTC

Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US politics and policy. Previously, he was executive editor for the Week and a writer for Rolling Stone.

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Photographer: Mark Wilson

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The word “populist” is regularly applied to President Donald Trump. Is it because his politics, and policy, tend to be crude and crowd-pleasing? Because he built a political base on division and resentment? Because he strikes poses reminiscent of previous populists, from Alabama Governor George Wallace to billionaire Ross Perot, with a dash of Juan Peron and Andrew Jackson?

“What is Populism?” is the title of a 2016 book by Jan-Werner Mueller, a politics professor at Princeton University and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. I interviewed Mueller, via e-mail, to get his views on Trump, populism and what’s in store. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

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