e stoked fears of the white working class by appealing to anti-immigrant sentiment. He mixed that with anger toward the political and economic establishment by pointing to NAFTA as a reason jobs were vanishing. His intolerant rhetoric of non-Christian America was considered so dangerous that in response to one speech a liberal commentator joked that it “probably sounded better in the original German.”
Donald Trump? No, that’s Patrick Buchanan.
Buchanan hasn’t been a big feature on the right since the 1990s, and a lot of that has to do with the establishment knowing then how toxic he was. In 1992, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote of his “fascist underpinnings,” insisting that his mix of “nativism, authoritarianism, ethnic and class resentment” and his conversion to “protectionism” put him the classic mold of fascism.
Now, we have another politician bringing on those very ideas, and again it’s rattling the Republican establishment. The conservative journal National Review forcefully condemned Trump’s rise. The moderate one-time Republican ex-mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg vowed to run for president if Trump (among other radicals he doesn’t like) gets the presidential nod.