Populism is a useful frame for understanding Trump’s rise, but it is neither sufficient on its own nor always the sharpest lens available. The debate among political scientists and historians has produced several competing frameworks, each illuminating different aspects of the same phenomenon.
The populist frame, developed most rigorously by theorists like Jan-Werner Müller, treats Trump as an expression of a recurring democratic pathology. On this view, Trump drew on a logic that divides the world into a virtuous, unified “real people” and a corrupt elite that betrays them. The appeal of this framing is that it explains the moral register of his campaign, the relentless attacks on institutions, and the claim that only he could restore what had been stolen. Populism also connects Trump to a global pattern, letting analysts place him alongside Orbán, Bolsonaro, and others in a comparative framework. That comparative reach is the strongest argument for keeping populism in the analytical toolkit.
The problem is that populism, as a concept, does not do much causal work on its own. It describes a rhetorical style and a political logic, but it does not explain why that style found such a large audience in the United States at that particular moment. For that, other frames become indispensable.
The most compelling competitor is the status threat and cultural backlash framework, associated with scholars like Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. On their account, Trump’s coalition mobilized not primarily around economic grievance but around a perceived threat to the social status of white, non-college, largely rural Americans. Decades of cultural change, including growing visibility of nonwhite, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities, combined with elite valorization of higher education, left a large segment of the country feeling displaced, condescended to, and invisible. This framework has more predictive power than populism alone, because it explains the geography and demography of Trump support better than income-based explanations do. Many Trump voters were economically comfortable but socially anxious.
A third major frame emphasizes partisan sorting and institutional dysfunction. Scholars like Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that Trump did not arrive from outside the Republican Party but was incubated by it. Decades of partisan media, primary structures that rewarded ideological purity, and a Congress that had abandoned bipartisan governance created the conditions for a figure like Trump to capture the nomination and the base. This frame is less dramatic than populism but arguably more structurally rigorous.
There is also a tradition, rooted in the work of historians like Richard Hofstadter, that places Trump within a long American pattern of conspiratorial, anti-intellectual political culture. Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” identifies a recurring strand in American life in which political opponents are not merely wrong but actively malevolent. This is perhaps the oldest and most distinctly American of the available frames, and it connects Trump to movements from the Know-Nothings to McCarthyism.
Each frame captures something real. Populism captures the rhetorical structure and the delegitimation of institutions. Status threat captures the sociological base. Partisan sorting captures the systemic conditions that made his rise possible. The paranoid style captures something about the emotional texture and historical continuity of Trumpism. The most complete analyses tend to combine all of these rather than elevating one. Populism is a good entry point, especially for comparative purposes, but it risks becoming a shorthand that substitutes for the harder work of explaining why American democracy was vulnerable to this kind of politics when and where it was.
Academics occupy a peculiar position in the status landscape that populism targets. They are credentialed, institutionally embedded, and heavily invested in the idea that expertise confers legitimate authority. Populism, in its most direct form, attacks exactly that claim. When Trump mocked experts, dismissed scientists, and declared that he alone could fix things, he was not just performing anti-elitism for the cameras. He was delegitimizing the very class of people who would later write papers explaining why he was a populist threat to democracy.
There is a real conflict of interest here that most academic treatments of populism do not acknowledge. A scholar at a research university diagnosing Trumpism as irrational, authoritarian, or driven by status anxiety is also, whether consciously or not, defending the legitimacy of his own institutional position. The framing tends to place the analyst above the phenomenon, looking down at a distorted politics that fails to meet the standards of rational deliberation that, not coincidentally, credentialed experts are supposed to embody.
This shapes the literature in subtle ways. Status threat and cultural backlash frameworks, for instance, can function as a way of pathologizing Trump voters, treating their resentments as psychological distortions rather than reasonable responses to real changes in power and recognition. The academic says: these people feel displaced, and that feeling drives irrational politics. But the displacing forces are real. The condescension is real. The sense that a college degree now functions as a class marker and a ticket to social legitimacy is not a paranoid fantasy.
There is also a selection effect in who studies populism. Political scientists and sociologists at elite institutions are among the people whose status populism most directly threatens. They have strong professional and psychological incentives to frame populism as a problem to be solved rather than a symptom worth taking seriously on its own terms. That does not mean their analyses are wrong, but it does mean the genre has a structural bias worth accounting for.
The academic framing of populism is itself a political move, not a neutral description. Calling something populism, with all the connotations of demagoguery and irrationality that trail behind the word, is a way of discrediting it without directly engaging its grievances. By the time you have classified Trump as a populist, you have already decided that his supporters’ anger is a malfunction rather than a signal.
That said, the critique has limits too. Some of what gets called populism really is cynical and manipulative. Trump exploited genuine grievances without doing much to address them. That academics have a stake in the diagnosis does not automatically make the diagnosis wrong. But it does mean the frame deserves more skepticism than it typically receives from the people most likely to apply it.
Scholars of populism generally fall into three camps: those who see it as a “thin ideology,” those who view it as a political style or performance, and those who treat it as a radical democratic corrective. Their bias usually stems from their underlying normative definition of democracy.
Cas Mudde is a leading figure who defines populism as a “thin-centered ideology.” He argues that populism divides society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: the pure people and the corrupt elite. Mudde suggests populism is not inherently right-wing or left-wing but attaches itself to “host ideologies” like nativism or socialism. His framework is rooted in liberal democracy. He views populism as essentially illiberal because it rejects pluralism and minority protections in favor of a monolithic “general will.” While he acknowledges it can be a “corrective” to elitism, his work often leans toward a defensive posture of liberal institutions.
Jan-Werner Müller, author of What is Populism?, offers a more restrictive and critical definition. For him, the defining feature is not just being anti-elite, but being anti-pluralist. Müller argues that populists claim that they, and only they, represent the “real people.” Anyone who does not support them is excluded from the body politic. His bias is strongly pro-institutional and pro-pluralist. He views populism as a threat to the foundations of democracy because it delegitimizes political opposition. He focuses heavily on how populists govern (mass clientelism and state occupation) to argue that the movement is inherently authoritarian.
Benjamin Moffitt shifts the focus from what populists believe to how they behave. He defines populism as a “political style” performed for the media. He identifies three key stylistic traits: an appeal to “the people” versus “the elite,” the use of “bad manners” (breaking political decorum), and the staging of a crisis or threat. Moffitt’s bias is more descriptive and less normative than Müller’s. He views populism as a symptom of a mediated age where politics is a performance. He tends to be skeptical of “technocratic” mainstream politics, arguing that the populist style often exposes the dry, unresponsive nature of modern liberal governance.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Unlike the scholars above, Laclau and Mouffe (often associated with “Left Populism”) view populism as the very essence of politics. They argue that all politics involves creating a “we” against a “them.” Populism is a tool to unite disparate grievances into a single movement to challenge entrenched power. Their bias is radical and anti-liberal. They believe liberal democracy has become a stale, technocratic consensus that ignores the needs of the working class. They advocate for populism as a necessary way to “re-politicize” society and achieve social justice.
The late Margaret Canovan provided an influential bridge between these camps, arguing that democracy has two faces: the “pragmatic” (institutions and rules) and the “redemptive” (the promise of the people taking charge). She argued that populism is a permanent shadow of democracy that emerges whenever the pragmatic side becomes too distant or bureaucratic. Canovan is often seen as a centrist, but recent critiques suggest she had a conservative, anti-progressive lean. She was suspicious of “elitist” intellectual projects and held a romanticized view of the “common sense” of ordinary people, making her more sympathetic to populist impulses than her peers.
Cas Mudde and Jan-Werner Müller treat Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump as prime examples of the populist threat to liberal democracy. They argue that these leaders use a thin ideology to separate a pure people from a corrupt elite. Müller specifically points to Orbán as a model for how populists move from rhetoric to state capture. He notes that once in power, these figures claim an exclusive moral mandate that allows them to dismantle institutional checks and balances.
Scholars such as Benjamin Moffitt focus on the performance of these leaders. He analyzes how Trump uses bad manners and stages crises to maintain a sense of urgency and direct connection with his base. This perspective treats the behavior not just as a personality trait but as a calculated political style. It explains how leaders bypass traditional media to speak directly to the people.
Critics of the liberal consensus like Chantal Mouffe see the rise of these figures as a response to the failures of technocratic governance. They argue that when mainstream parties ignore the needs of the working class, a space opens for a populist to re-politicize society. From this view, the bias of scholars like Mudde and Müller is their commitment to a status quo that has failed many citizens.
The comparison between Hungary and the United States often centers on the idea of illiberal governance. Gabor Scheiring and other researchers suggest that Orbán provided a blueprint for using democratic tools to weaken democratic institutions by reshaping the judiciary and the media to ensure that the ruling party remains in power indefinitely.
Further Reading:
The People by Margaret Canovan. This book provides a philosophical and historical analysis of the term the people and its role in modern politics. It argues that populism is a permanent shadow of democracy, emerging from the tension between the pragmatic need for institutions and the redemptive promise of popular power.
The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era by Barry Eichengreen. This book examines the economic history of populist movements in the United States and Europe. It argues that populism is a recurring response to economic insecurity and the failure of political elites to address the downsides of globalization and technological change.
Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat: Countering Global Alarmism by Kurt Weyland. This book compares populist movements across several decades to assess their actual impact on democratic survival. It argues that while populists often challenge liberal norms, existing political institutions are frequently more resilient than alarmist accounts suggest.
Populism by Benjamin Moffitt. This book offers a clear overview of the different ways scholars define and study the phenomenon. It argues that populism is best understood as a political style used by leaders to perform a crisis and claim a direct connection with the people against a perceived elite.
The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic by Paolo Gerbaudo. This book describes the shift from the era of neoliberal globalization to a new period focused on sovereignty and protection. It argues that both left-wing and right-wing populism represent a return to the state as the primary site of political struggle and social security.
Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers by John Dean and Bob Altemeyer. This book argues that Trump’s rise depended on a large pool of citizens with authoritarian psychological traits who were primed to follow a strong leader. It draws on decades of research into the “authoritarian follower” personality and applies it directly to the Trump phenomenon. It provides a psychological frame that cuts across the sociological ones.
What Is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller. This short, precise book defines populism as an inherently anti-pluralist claim to exclusively represent the “real” people. It argues that populism is not just political style but a distinctive and dangerous logic. It is the best single starting point for understanding the populism frame and its limits.
Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. This book argues that the Republican Party chose to mobilize voters through cultural and racial grievance precisely because its economic agenda served the wealthy and could not win majorities on its own. It places Trump within a deliberate long-term political strategy rather than treating him as an anomaly or rupture.
