Trump the Charismatic Populist

The weekend long read: A rebuttal to Damon Linker’s Schmittian misreading

Editor’s note: Last weekend I offered a grumpy take on the Missing Linker’s New York Times column blaming Trump on a hodge-podge of the fevered left’s favorite bogeymen, or something. Along the way I invoked the considered meditations of our Eastern European correspondent Cliff Bates, which he had written coincidentally before the Missing Linker’s column. Here Cliff returns with a fresh commentary directly on the Missing Linker, placing Trump in the matrix of Max Weber’s famous categories in “Politics as a Vocation.” I have some minor quibbles with Cliff’s take here, but I emphasize “minor,” as I agree with Cliff that Weber is often wrongly deprecated, and there is much more to agree with here than fuss over.

This is exactly the kind of extended semi-academic content Political Questions is intended to feature. Feel free to skip if it’s not your thing.

—Steve

By Clifford Angell Bates

In his May 4, 2025 New York Times opinion essay, “These Thinkers Set the Stage for Trump the All-Powerful,” Damon Linker argues that Donald Trump represents the political fulfilment of Carl Schmitt’s authoritarian vision. According to Linker, Trumpism draws from a lineage of anti-liberal political theorists who advocate for a politics of friend and enemy, of sovereign exception, and of executive domination. This reading is provocative and rhetorically potent, but it profoundly misrepresents the character of Trump’s leadership and the source of his appeal. Rather than a Schmittian authoritarian bent on liquidating liberal democracy in favor of executive rule, Trump is better understood as a charismatic democratic leader in the tradition articulated by Max Weber in his lecture Politics as a Vocation.

Clifford Angell Bates

Trump’s style, rhetoric, and political movement are fundamentally populist and democratic—albeit combative and apparently ‘destabilizing’—not authoritarian in the strict theoretical or institutional sense. He draws power not from suspending the Constitution or bypassing democratic processes but from performing a direct, emotionally resonant relationship with a mass democratic public. Trump’s power stems not from an ideology of sovereignty, but from charisma and spectacle—a dynamic that places him in continuity with American figures such as Andrew Jackson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and even Barack Obama, who similarly used their personal appeal and mass mobilization to reshape the political terrain. Trump is a democratic populist disruptor, not an authoritarian restorer of order. To claim otherwise is to conflate rhetorical aggression with structural autocracy.

I. Damon Linker’s Thesis: Schmitt and the Specter of Authoritarianism

Linker’s article attempts to trace the intellectual genealogy of Trumpism to figures like Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and other anti-liberal thinkers who cast doubt on the legitimacy of pluralist democratic governance. Central to this framing is Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty—his famous dictum that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” In Linker’s interpretation, Trump has emerged as a de facto sovereign, elevated by right-wing intellectuals and reactionary populists to a position where he stands outside of and above the rule of law. Trump, Linker argues, is primed to complete a theoretical arc that began with European thinkers disillusioned by liberalism’s proceduralism and moral relativism.

But this thesis falters under scrutiny. Schmitt’s sovereign is a juristic figure: a leader who reconstitutes the political order by stepping outside of it, justifying this exceptional status through a vision of existential necessity. This requires not only power, but also an accompanying ideology—one that aims to redefine the state itself. Trump does not fit this mold. While he regularly flouts norms and engages in inflammatory rhetoric, his governance has been largely reactive, driven by media cycles and popular acclaim, not the implementation of a philosophical or legal-political theory of the state. His administration—chaotic, under-institutionalized, and personalized—hardly resembles Schmitt’s conceptual sovereign, who re-orders the polity in accordance with a unifying friend-enemy logic.

Indeed, what Trump lacks is precisely what Schmitt demanded: a sovereign decision to restore order grounded in a coherent vision of political unity. Trump's politics are fragmentary and responsive; they operate through culture war, spectacle, and branding, not through the imposition of a new constitutional logic.

II. Max Weber and the Charismatic Leader

To better understand Trump’s political mode, one must turn to Max Weber’s lecture Politics as a Vocation, delivered in 1919, in which Weber identifies three sources of political authority: traditional, legal-rational, and charismatic. Traditional authority is rooted in long-standing customs and inherited status; legal-rational authority derives from impersonal laws and bureaucratic structures; charismatic authority, by contrast, rests on the devotion to an individual perceived as possessing extraordinary personal qualities.

Charismatic leadership, according to Weber, often arises in times of political dislocation, when existing institutions fail to meet the public’s expectations or inspire trust. Charismatic leaders do not operate within the institutional framework of politics as usual; they emerge as exceptions to the system, though not in Schmitt’s sovereign sense. Their authority derives from the belief that they alone can speak for and deliver justice to the people. Their rule is intensely personal, emotional, and performative.

Trump’s political career fits this model more neatly than any Schmittian framework. His 2016 campaign was not built upon legal argumentation, party orthodoxy, or technocratic expertise. It was built on an unfiltered, affective appeal to voters who felt alienated by elite institutions—media, bureaucracy, party leadership—and who responded to Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp,” “build the wall,” and “make America great again.” Like other charismatic leaders, Trump claimed a special and unique connection to “the people,” a term he used not in a constitutional or pluralist sense, but in an almost mystical one. His rallies, his Twitter feed, and his refusal to speak in “politically correct” tones were all part of the performative apparatus that confirmed his exceptional status to his followers.

Trump's power was never institutional. He governed through television appearances, tweets, rallies, and media spectacle. He was never able to master the bureaucracy or pass lasting legislation beyond tax cuts. His efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, while deeply concerning, were chaotic and failed not because of institutional resistance alone, but because they lacked the disciplined ideological coherence or institutional support that might have enabled a Schmittian break. His authority rested—and still rests—on personal devotion and the politics of identification.

III. American Populist Precedents: Jackson, FDR, and Obama

Trump's charismatic democratic leadership places him within a longstanding American tradition of populist presidents who use personal appeal to overcome or bypass institutional constraints. Andrew Jackson, the “people’s president,” famously battled the Bank of the United States and cast more vetoes than all his predecessors combined. He saw himself as the voice of the common man against corrupt elites and was vilified by the Whigs as a “king” for his aggressive use of executive power. Yet Jackson was not an authoritarian; he was a democratic populist who expanded the franchise and transformed political participation.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt likewise utilized the radio and the power of his personal voice to speak directly to the American people in the midst of economic collapse. His fireside chats bypassed the press and Congress to mobilize public opinion in support of the New Deal, and his attempt to “pack the court” in 1937 was denounced by critics as executive overreach. But FDR, too, was a charismatic democratic leader, not an authoritarian. He worked within democratic institutions while rallying the nation behind his persona and vision.

Even Barack Obama, whose rhetoric was lofty and often superficially “inclusive” (which upon closer examination pointed to divisive paths—remember his ‘clingers’ speech or darker, more partisan speeches), functioned as a charismatic figure. His 2008 campaign promised “hope and change,” aiming to transcend the traditional divides of American politics. His immense popularity rested on an emotional and symbolic appeal that often exceeded the institutional tools of governance at his disposal, but generally offered very few deliverable results. Like Trump, Obama frustrated the technocratic apparatus, disappointed insiders, and relied on his connection to the electorate as a primary source of legitimacy.

These figures all fit Weber’s framework, and so does Trump, albeit with a style and rhetoric more combative and norm-shattering. But style should not be mistaken for structure. To compare Trump to Schmittian authoritarianism is to treat affective intensity and populist drama as equivalent to sovereign exception and legal revolution. They are not.

IV. Populism Is Democratic, Not Anti-Democratic

One of the core problems in Linker’s analysis is the implicit assumption that populism and democracy are in conflict. In fact, populism is a mode of democratic expression—one that arises when citizens believe that formal institutions no longer represent their interests or values. Populists claim to speak for a “real people” against elites, and while this can slide into exclusionary rhetoric or anti-pluralist behavior, it remains a form of democratic accountability, not its negation.

Trump’s appeal is democratic in that it is grounded in mass support and emotional resonance. His followers see themselves as participants in a national movement; his rallies resemble not the rituals of authoritarian command but the revivalist energy of American mass politics. There is little in Trump’s political method that seeks to dismantle democracy per se—his threats to democratic norms are real, but they stem from his desire to harness democracy in his favor, not to reject it wholesale.

This is not to minimize Trump’s dangerous flirtations with electoral illegitimacy or norm-breaking behavior. But these should be seen as extensions of democratic populism pushed to the edge, where charisma overwhelms legality, not as the calculated project of a Schmittian jurist remaking sovereignty.

V. Conclusion: Understanding Trump Through Weber, Not Schmitt

Damon Linker’s effort to place Trump in a Schmittian tradition of authoritarianism obscures more than it clarifies. It overstates the coherence of Trump’s ideology, underestimates the resilience of democratic institutions, and misrepresents the populist, charismatic character of Trump’s political style. Far from being a theorist-king who redefines sovereignty through the exception, Trump is an American populist grounded in Weberian charisma—an entertainer, a disruptor, a symbol, but not a sovereign.

To combat the excesses and dangers of Trumpism, one must not mischaracterize it as something it is not. Trump is not Hitler. He is not Caesar. He is not even Carl Schmitt’s sovereign. He is a democratic populist riding the wave of public disaffection with elite governance. And if there is any lesson from the likes of Jackson, Roosevelt, and Obama, it is that charismatic democratic leaders are a recurring, and often revitalizing, force in American political life, though not without their perils. Understanding Trump through this lens is essential if we are to engage his politics seriously, rather than retreat into abstract theoretical comparisons that obscure more than they reveal.