The Politics of Rage
By 
On the obvious historical antecedent for Donald Trump:
The parallels are not in the men’s personal stories, but rather in the divisive, angry, fearful, anti-elitist, and resentment-laden politics that they used to spark their presidential aspirations. George Wallace won just 13 percent of the popular vote in 1968, but he birthed to this nation the idiomatic language of antigovernment populism — a language that would be utilized by countless Republican politicians over the next four decades. Trump represents the logical culmination of that rhetorical tradition, but perhaps also its final denouement as a politically effective feature of American politics. Trump and Wallace are two sides of the same coin, but one man represents a beginning and the other the end of the line.
Indeed, the similarities, in both style and substance, between Trump and Wallace are profound.
At a time that the federal government’s efforts to expand racial integration were upsetting the foundation of white advantage, Wallace reserved his strongest broadsides for the “theoreticians” and “bureaucrats” with their “federal guidelines” threatening to integrate neighborhoods, desegregate schools, and undermine union seniority. As crime rates escalated across the country, he railed against “pseudo-intellectuals” who excused arson and murder by “saying the killer didn’t get any watermelon to eat when he was 10 years old.” As social mores changed, he complained about the “hes who look like shes” and said of a group of antiwar protesters who’d laid down in front of President Lyndon Johnson’s limousine, “If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car, it’ll be the last car he’ll ever lay down in front of.”
Forty-eight years later, Trump has focused his venom on a new set of political targets: the illegal immigrants, “streaming over the border” who he says are rapists and murderers; and the Muslims he wants to ban from entering the United States to protect Americans against potential terrorism.
It sure is a weird coincidence that Trump would emerge within the contemporary Republican Party.