How Trump’s Tariffs Fit the Autocrat’s Playbook
Jan-Werner Müller is a German historian and philosopher who has written a number of studies of right-wing populism. Müller’s central argument has been that populism should primarily be defined as a movement in which a leader claims to represent a silenced or forgotten—and almost always exclusionary—majority. It is a negative take on populism, which somewhat definitionally situates it as an ideology of bigoted authoritarianism. Others have argued that populism encompasses figures such as Bernie Sanders who speak out against élites without attacking ethnic or religious minorities or seeking to undermine democracy. Nevertheless, in the past decade, many populists who have risen to power—such as Viktor Orbán, in Hungary, and Giorgia Meloni, in Italy—fit Müller’s framework.
I recently spoke by phone with Müller, who is a professor of social sciences and politics at Princeton. I wanted to know what he made of the first months of the second Trump Administration, and how he thought it differed from the first, especially now that Donald Trump’s tariff agenda has upended the global economy. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed whether Trump is less rational than other authoritarians, the historical relationship between far-right leaders and big-business interests, and whether it’s condescending to absolve Trump’s voters of blame for his policy choices.
How is the second Trump term different from the first Trump term?
Some things have remained the same. Other parts are very different. From my point of view, populism is about a leader claiming that they, and only they, represent what they often refer to as the “real people,” which is the very expression Trump used on January 6th when he was addressing his crowd. This has a clearly anti-pluralist impact. A leader cannot simply decide who truly belongs to a people and who doesn’t. His basic approach has not changed.
When an aspiring autocrat comes to power the second time, he is much more dangerous than the first time. We saw this with figures like Viktor Orbán, in Hungary, and Jarosław Kaczyński, in Poland. When they came to power the second time, they had the same basic populist attitude, but they had new personnel and they had a plan. They realized they had to capture institutions as quickly as possible, which is why they tried, for instance, to capture the judiciary. Orbán and other figures, such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in Turkey, practice what some scholars call “autocratic legalism”—in other words, trying to keep a façade of legality, fooling people into thinking that one is actually following procedures as one is packing courts, and so on. I think most observers have understood that, with Trump, there is an element that resembles how he has always done business, which is basically to do something that’s blatantly illegal, and then see how the other side reacts. Are they going to sue? Are they going to cave? Are they going to settle in some form or another? And that has really been different from a lot of these other aspiring autocrats in recent years.
So you essentially think he is being bolder than these other autocratic figures?
Yes. Clearly, he has gotten a message of impunity from all kinds of actors, including the Supreme Court. We shouldn’t psychologize too much, but it wouldn’t be surprising if he simply feels that he really can get away with more or less anything. Maybe a less obvious point is that some of these other aspiring autocrats really have to care about audiences outside their own country. So think of figures like Orbán and Kaczyński. They invested a lot into fooling the European Commission. Orbán also tried to fool Angela Merkel and Germany for a long time, trying to make people believe that, No, this is still a democracy, we are following the rule of law, and so on. Now, in the case of the United States, there’s no concern whatsoever with what anybody thinks on the outside. There are no international organizations that this Administration remotely cares about.
How do tariffs fit in? Tariffs are often seen as an economically populist policy. And this is clearly a policy that pisses off a lot of the business community, which Trump has been very sympathetic to, and which has rewarded him with a lot of support, especially the second time around.
Populism is not about particular economic policies, from my point of view, so I would never say that tariffs in and of themselves are a sign of populism. Having said that, there might be interesting parallels with other cases and countries. The story about tariffs also comes with a larger cultural narrative, especially in the last few days, which is about the glorification of manufacturing and “real men” who are in factories and produce things, tangible things. That has always been part of the Trumpist package of maybe not ideas in the sense of grand philosophies but certainly cultural ideas. And one sees some parallels here again with Orbán, who has a clear emphasis on saying, Let’s move away from supposedly too much university education, let’s have more apprenticeships, let’s send more people into factories, especially German car manufacturers. That’s really producing something.
And, in a very roundabout way, it might relate back to something called producerism, which historians mention when they talk about populism in the original, American sense, from the late nineteenth century. This is in contrast with finance. Producerism is about tangible things that somebody actually created with their own hands. One can see certain cultural frames that might be deployed here. Orbán had a conscious policy of de-educating his own country by saying, you know, Let’s no longer fulfill the promise of ever more people going to college. Let’s actually have fewer people going, because that’s going to mean less political trouble, less opposition, less discontent.
One thing that I think has broadly been seen as crucial to right-wing populism in the modern era, and was seen as crucial to fascism almost a hundred years ago, is support among business leaders. Do you agree? And do you think that the tariff policy will weaken Trump?
I think the general insight is almost universally valid, and, contrary to the kind of xenophobic prejudice that it’s the great unwashed, uninformed people who one day want to be done with democracy, it is élites who decide to be done with democracy. This was true when Fascists came to power in Italy. We all remember that there was a march on Rome. We often forget that Mussolini himself did not march on Rome at all. He very comfortably arrived by sleeper car from Milan, because Italian élites, including the King, had invited him to give it a shot. If you look at European countries, it’s very clear nowadays that a rise in far-right populism is not just a bottom-up demand. It is some élites and especially center-right politicians who are deciding that they can basically collaborate with these figures or very often copy their rhetoric and thereby legitimate them, make them seem more normal, and eventually then also bring them to power.
This is something that we’ve also now seen in the U.S. Some of these business élites clearly had not imagined that Trump would reject what I think Bill Ackman recently so delicately called “economic rationality.” At the same time, there are very different actors coming together with very different agendas. We should not assume that this is all a homogeneous phenomenon. You had some obviously very traditional business élites who were simply betting on lower taxes and deregulation. Maybe some of them also really didn’t want to be polite to minorities anymore.
