When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he was seen as a "populist" right-wing politician railing about free trade and immigration to push an isolationist worldview, all of which was out of step with what we knew as the modern conservative movement up to that moment. Sure there had been a rump group of paleoconservatives, like Pat Buchanan, who had staged a couple of fringe presidential campaigns in prior decades. The independent candidacy of millionaire Ross Perot had raised some of the same issues and appealed to many of the same voter concerns. But it was Trump whose TV celebrity and flamboyant personality managed to take those ideas straight into the mainstream of the Republican Party.
Trump's populism was (and is) extremely shallow, however.
