John Ganz

you know, your enemies and the bureaucracy and the elites and the liberal elites.

And, you know, you get a lot of people very excited and, and, you know, it's a very bombastic style.

So he envisioned the style.

I would say the policies insofar as there's any kind of coherent background, uh,

a guy named Sam Francis, who envisioned basically a kind of US under a kind of dictatorship, but that was like a developmental dictatorship that was highly protectionist, that would try to protect American businesses, a unilateral aggressive foreign policy, an America first foreign policy.

So that was the kind of people who I saw as being harbingers or prophets of Trumpism.

Now, Trump himself, he saw Pat Buchanan and David Duke running.

He said, look, they're doing well because there's a lot of anger in this country.

And he, for a very long time, had these protectionist instincts.

Essentially, he temperamentally goes along with this ideological program, which is that

The United States' relationship with the world is adversarial, and our so-called allies are trying to screw us.

Immigrants are sucking up our resources.

It's a very zero-sum, hostile, and paranoid attitude towards the world.

And, you know, insofar as a philosophical articulation, these guys do it.

But, you know, you can also just boil it down to certain instinctual or habitual behaviors and beliefs of Trump that he picked up through his life.

He also don't forget.

Trump experienced a near brush with ruin in the late 80s, early 90s.

I think that this intensified his paranoia and his attitude to the world as being an essentially hostile place.

He found his negotiations with the bankers, which ultimately came out quite favorable to him because they could have ruined him, to be very humiliating.

And he...