If You Want to Understand Trump’s Appeal, Look at John Gotti

Mother Jones; Jim Bourg/Pool/AP, Daniel Sheehan/AP

When people talk about the most consequential elections of their lifetimes, you don’t hear many of them mention Bill Clinton’s race against Ross Perot and President George H.W. Bush in 1992. In When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, out today, the writer John Ganz finds the early shoots of the Trump era amid the right-wing reshuffling during the first Bush administration. It was an awkward and tumultuous moment in American politics, sandwiched uncomfortably between the mythmaking of the Reagan era and the tabloid boomtimes of Bill Clinton. The book explores the parts of the ’90s that ’90s nostalgia leaves out, through the lens of the right-wing figures who never really won anything—until, decades later, their ideas finally broke through.

Ganz, author of the Unpopular Front substack and co-host of “Unclear and Present Danger” with New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, offers a lively and revelatory tour of the right-wing populist revolt that foreshadowed the politics of today—an insurgency powered by guys like David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Murray Rothbard, and the Washington Times columnist Sam Francis. I spoke with Ganz recently about the antecedents of Trumpism and the right-wing affinity for flashy mobsters.

Let’s talk about Ross Perot. He’s a recurring character throughout the book—I hadn’t realized how strange he was.

Oh yeah.

He was doing what looked like dark-arts surveillance operations against his own volunteers. He didn’t really seem to do any of the campaign things you’re supposed to do. What was the appeal?

Ross Perot, first of all, surrounded himself in this myth of Americana—the Norman Rockwell stuff, all the cowboy stuff. There’s a reason why a lot of people think he’s an oilman, he seems like this very archetypal Texan. That myth was extremely appealing to people. He was in many ways an extremely successful businessman. He appeared to be hyper-competent. And he portrayed himself, through his business savvy and patriotism, as a person who could fix America’s problems—which appeared to many people as insurmountable. He had a certain folksy appeal and he seemed like he was competent and had a can-do attitude. His actual prescriptions could be vague or contradictory, but he excited a lot of people. A lot of people who previously were not particularly interested in politics were attracted to Ross Perot as someone who seemed to be a straight shooter and seemed to buck the establishment and the two-party system, which people were very disenchanted with. And he represented the kind of person who could cut through Washington bureaucracy and red tape. There’s obviously a lot of resonance between that and Trump.

So he wanted to “buy the country back” for the people. Was there any kind of clear animating agenda that people latched on to beyond that?

He used the deficit as a proxy for the condition of the American economy and portrayed the deficit as an existential threat to the American way of life, which you’re beginning to hear a little bit again—but it’s not a huge part of American politics the way it was then. Perot attracted people with very different political views—people who wanted to cut the deficit and thought that was most important, and other people who wanted universal health care. People could project on him a lot of different things. Often his supporters had very vague or even incorrect ideas of what he actually stood for on the issues. It was mostly a matter of his personal charisma, and his standing as a symbol of, on the one hand, a rejection of the establishment, but on the other hand, as something very familiar and American that people really latched onto.

It seems like there was a real craving for an outsider to step in—did he just happen to be that guy?

He’d been floating on the American political scene for a while, had been on the news, and was a major public figure in America. But definitely, he chose the moment well and he could see there was a great amount of discontent and a yearning for a figure like him. There was a lot of popular discontent that he witnessed and that he tapped into. He got almost 30 percent of the vote and did better than any third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. But when he ran again he could never recreate the success that he had.

I hadn’t realized that that whole POW/MIA activist movement was not really grounded in anything. That was a major source of his fame. Was there a kind of anti-Deep State strain to his politics?

I don’t think people called it that then but that was definitely the sense—that there was this conspiratorial cell of the government that was covering up this grave betrayal and crime against the American people. It was a symbol of the humiliation of Vietnam, and the hopes that it could be reversed through this patriotic movement. There was no factual basis for the idea of living prisoners, but the American public really believed it and really wanted to believe it. And this was not a fringe phenomenon; it was something that the mainstream media went along with. 60 Minutes did a story about it. In 1990, Newsweek had a cover story that included false pictures of possible living prisoners in Southeast Asia. It may have started on the fringe but it quickly entered the mainstream. He was associated with that and it was a source of a lot of his popularity as a kind of truth-teller and tribune of that cause.

You’re focusing for the most part on a very specific period of time—the George H.W. Bush era, which was billed back then as the “End of History.” What made you so interested in that time frame?

I found an article by the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard called “Right-wing Populism” that he wrote in 1992. It was his reaction to the failure, [and] the surprising strength, of David Duke’s run for governor of Louisiana at the end of 1991.

Is this the one that starts with “Well they finally got David Duke”?

Exactly. I was reading that in 2017 and I thought this was kind of a remarkable ur-text of Trumpism. And I just thought that was fascinating and it made me interested in the era as a whole. And then I learned more about [Rothbard]—his connections with Pat Buchanan’s candidacy and his connections with Sam Francis—and that was the thing that sort of drew me in. I kept pulling on the thread, and I learned more about the time, and it seemed to have uncanny resemblances to Trump’s run in 2016.


What are those uncanny resemblances?

It’s not just an attack on conservatives, it’s an attack on the Republican establishment as being a part of an unaccountable elite that doesn’t have the interests of mostly white, middle-Americans at heart. And what was needed was a kind of charismatic figure who could go over the heads of the media elites, “short-circuit” them as [Rothbard] said, menace them, and talk directly to the masses. This was how he and his cronies differed from conservatives. They called themselves “radical reactionaries,” or “right-wing populists,” or “America Firsters.” But they conceived of their politics as something different from American conservatism in the same way that I think Trump represented a break from the conservative establishment. He was very much the figure they were hoping for but just did not exist in that form.

I think of Jesse Helms, for whom Francis sometimes wrote speeches, as someone who could have been in office any time from 1880 to 1980. David Duke was literally part of the Klan. These are old American tropes. What made guys like Francis and Duke different from the previous generations?

Sam Francis had a clear conception that American conservatism, the American right, and the white-supremacist right often viewed local power as the key to preserving the hierarchies they wanted to preserve. States’ rights and anti-majoritarian institutions like the Senate and the Supreme Court were the major centers of power that they could count on to defend the social order that they depended on. Francis’ observation basically was that there was nothing to conserve anymore and what the right had to do was seize the power of the presidents and use it as a battering ram to dismantle the liberal stranglehold over politics and culture. He dismissed what he considered to be a sentimental attachment to certain parts of the American conservative tradition and said we need a populist Caesarist presidency in order to effect the counter-revolution. So, in a way, he is more modern in his conception of politics and power. 

He doesn’t believe, like conservatives do, in Burke’s “little platoons” and that local notables will keep society in place. He says this is all behind us. That battle is lost; we need to shift emphasis to something more radical. That’s not a holding action, but actually a counteroffensive, and the presidency is the way to do that. Francis has an explicitly strongman authoritarian concept of the presidency which he weds to right-wing causes. And obviously, David Duke comes out of the—if you want to call it—the Nazi tradition, which has similar beliefs about charismatic leadership. I think that’s the difference. They may have looked favorably on states’ rights and regional interests, but basically they viewed it as a national issue and a national campaign.

I’m reading this through the lens of, these are the losers of the End of History. Did guys like Francis think of themselves as losers? Did they think they had lost?

Well, Francis thought conservatives were losers and thought that he had the winning formula— or a potential winning formula. He referred to the conservative movement as “beautiful losers” and thought the more muscular approach could win where they’d lost. He definitely thought of himself as a dissident voice, but I don’t think he viewed himself as a loser exactly—I don’t think he felt sorry for himself. He believed he was articulating the vision for a new right-wing American politics, which in some ways has come true. He viewed conservatives as betraying a truer right-wing politics, and he thought they were losers and always would be losers—but if they listened to him they would win again.

I always thought of the Reagan era as a conservative dream. What left these people so angry?

The country was unrecognizable to them. They felt that basically American civilization was going down the tubes. There was a racial component of that—whites were no longer gonna be such a dominant majority in the country. They also just believed that American culture had become hopelessly multicultural and liberal and they didn’t have the word but they would have loved to use it—”woke.” There was a sense of dispossession. This also relates to their own position within the conservative movement. A lot of these people did lose the kinds of positions of prominence during the Reagan era that went to neoconservatives and also more moderate voices in the GOP. They felt that they represented the true American right and had been passed over.

“Economic anxiety” got thrown around so much in the early Trump years that it became a joke. But it’s hovering over this period. You have someone like Randy Weaver—the Ruby Ridge guy—who was working at John Deere in Waterloo, Iowa, and kind of becoming a right-wing Luddite while all his colleagues were being laid off. Do you have this crackup that you’re writing about if you don’t have banking deregulation, offshoring, and the farm crisis?

The debate keeps going back and forth whether or not it’s white racial resentment or whether or not it’s economic anxiety. I think that it’s both and those are always complex intertwined issues. People arrive at these politics from different directions, but obviously, the sense that opportunities are shrinking for your group and others are getting more of the share of it has both an economic and racial aspect, or it can have a racial aspect. These things are in complicated reciprocal relationships with each other, and it’s very difficult to reduce it to one or the other. If I had to pick, I would say yes, these things don’t happen without the awkward redistribution of wealth that happens in the Reagan era and the kind of destruction of the basis of the American economy that used to support the middle class.

The part that really sang to me—and maybe this is New York bias—was the chapter about the mob boss John Gotti and Rudy Giuliani’s first campaigns for mayor.

It’s my favorite chapter.

What was it about Gotti that resonated with people?

I think he represented a nostalgia for an earlier way of life. He also represented a kind of rejection of an establishment that seemed to have failed people. All of the kinds of myths about American society seemed to be bullshit It was a meritocracy, there’s political equality—they all kind of seemed like nonsense to people, and this racketeer’s vision of things where you get yours and take care of your own seemed a lot more appealing to people and realistic. And he was entertaining and fun and gregarious and people were drawn to him as a celebrity. So I think he was a mixture of nostalgia for an old order that he represented, and their dissatisfaction with the way the country was going. And he also represented an alternate vision of society that wasn’t represented by liberalism, or really conservatism for that matter. It is that society is just a series of rackets and you’ve got to get in on one and get close to a boss who can help you out. And you need protection.

I think that that’s extended very much up to the present day with people’s interest in Trump. His criminality, his kind of mafioso act, is not something that people hold against him. Some people hold it against him, but his supporters find it attractive and appealing. There is an obvious parallel between that and the present.