Is Trump Really Unprecedented? No. And Neither Is How His Detractors React to Him.
A companion piece to Bias Unlocker × Washington Week with The Atlantic — 5/8/26, which dissects a single episode of the genre this op-ed describes, and to Unpacking Trump Derangement Syndrome, which works through the psychological mechanism behind it.
The Genre
Every few days, someone declares that we are living through something without precedent. A president who lies. A president who attacks the press. A president who governs by impulse. A president whose decisions can only be explained by pathology. A president who threatens the very foundations of the republic.
The certainty is impressive. The history is not.
Andrew Jackson was called a tyrant by the Whig press with a consistency that would embarrass a modern editorial board. Cartoonists drew him as a king trampling the Constitution. Senators denounced him as a danger to the republic. He was, by the standards of his critics, uniquely unfit, uniquely impulsive, uniquely authoritarian. The republic survived him, and historians eventually concluded he had been pursuing a coherent political project the whole time.
Lincoln was called a dictator, a baboon, and a buffoon, sometimes in the same editorial. He suspended habeas corpus, jailed editors, and prosecuted a war that killed more Americans than every other war combined. The press of his day was certain he represented a break with everything that came before. We now build monuments to him.
FDR was treated as a dictator-in-waiting for a decade. Eighty percent of newspaper publishers were against him. The Liberty League, bankrolled by industrialists, existed to portray him as the destroyer of American freedom. He was called a Bolshevik and a fascist, sometimes by the same critic. His court-packing scheme was framed as the end of the republic. His third term confirmed it. He won four times anyway. The same outlets now teach him as the savior of American democracy.
Nixon attracted an entire industry of psychoanalysis. He was paranoid, resentful, driven by demons from his upbringing, animated by hatred of elites. Books were written diagnosing him while he was still in office. Some of it was probably true. Most of it told you more about the analyst than the subject.
Reagan was dismissed as a simpleton, an actor reading lines, a man whose decisions were impulsive at best and dangerous at worst. The smart people knew he would start a nuclear war. He didn’t. He ended the Cold War instead, and there are now shelves of books arguing he had a deliberate strategy hiding behind the easy delivery.
A Pattern that Deserves a Name
The pattern is so consistent that it deserves a name. Every disruptive president gets the same treatment from the same kind of people. He is impulsive. He is dangerous. He is uniquely unfit. He cannot be analyzed in normal political terms because his motivations are pathological. The republic has never faced anything like him.
Trump fits the pattern exactly. What is genuinely new is the volume and the speed. Social media means everyone publishes a theory in real time. Cable news has eight hours a day to fill. And every Friday night, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic assembles five bobbleheads from the same four publications on Washington Week to perform certainty for each other in matching cadences. An hour of overconfident easing elites going berserk and twisting the news, week after week, with the same tone of grave concern they used last Friday and will use next Friday. They have all covered Trump for years. A lot of what that class of journalists has said has not aged especially well — on Russia collusion, on the laptop, on lab leak, on inflation, on the border, on Biden’s decline. The takes cycle faster than they used to. The certainty has not changed.
The Hit Rate
What also has not changed is the hit rate.
He was ridiculed for badgering NATO allies about defense spending. European leaders now openly admit the pressure worked, and the conversation has moved to three percent. He was mocked at the UN for warning Germany about Nord Stream and dependence on Russian gas. The clip aged differently after February 2022. He was told for years that closing the border required comprehensive immigration reform, that nothing could be done without new legislation, that he was naive to think enforcement was a matter of will. He closed it anyway, using authorities that had been sitting there the whole time.
He was called unhinged for taking a Chinese lab leak seriously. He was lectured by every respectable economist that manufacturing could not come back, that the global supply chain was a fact of nature, that tariffs were a relic, that anyone serious about reindustrialization was either ignorant or pandering. The factories are being built. He was called reckless for railing on Venezuela for years. The regime fell, and the migration, drug, and hostile-foothold problems eased at once. He took on Iran after fifty years of presidents who made no progress; we will see where that lands. Greenland is the next test of the same instinct, and the same chorus is calling it deranged.
Each of these positions was treated as proof of derangement at the time. Each has aged into something close to consensus, usually without acknowledgment that he got there first.
The Transactional Smear
Then there is the charge of being transactional, which the foreign policy establishment delivers as if it were a self-evident insult. America has spent eighty years as the world’s leader and policeman, providing security guarantees, freedom of navigation, and a financial architecture that everyone uses, and somewhere along the way the people who benefited most decided that asking them to pay for any of it was vulgar. Trump asked. He asked Europe to fund its own defense. He asked the Gulf states to pay for protection they had been getting for free. He asked allies to stop running trade surpluses with us while sheltering under our security umbrella. The professional class was scandalized. The countries paid up. It turned out the previous arrangement had not been a moral order but a habit, and habits can be renegotiated.
A Management Style, Not a Pathology
This is the part the unprecedented-madman frame cannot account for. If the man is governed entirely by impulse, how does he keep being right about things the experts get wrong? The frame absorbs every outcome without ever being tested. A correct call was lucky. A wrong call was reckless. A reversal was impulsive. Holding firm was stubborn impulsiveness. The label does the thinking so the analyst doesn’t have to.
What gets called impulsiveness is closer to a recognizable management style. Crude top-down direction first, details to catch up later. Set the goal, announce it loudly, force the system to organize around it, adjust as reality pushes back. It is not the way a tenured policy analyst would do it. The style is not perfect. Trump’s own business history has plenty of failures in it. People learn that way. They also get things done that the careful planners spend decades not getting done.
The deeper problem with the unprecedented framing is that it forecloses analysis. If a president is unprecedented, you don’t have to understand him. You just have to oppose him. The framing flatters the people using it because it spares them the work of engaging with what he actually does and why it sometimes works.
QAnon for the Credentialed Class
I have written a lot about Trump. Critically, often. Nobody who reads me regularly can call me a fan boy. That is precisely why this needs saying: the rhetoric about him is more unhinged than anything Trump has ever said or done. The man gives a rambling speech and the response is a thousand essays comparing him to Hitler. He fires an official and the response is that the republic is ending. He negotiates a deal and the response is that he has betrayed the West. The proportions are off by orders of magnitude, every time, and the people producing the rhetoric never seem to notice that their own volume is the story.
It has become QAnon for the credentialed class. Same structure, same fevered certainty, same closed loop of mutually reinforcing signals, same conviction that one is privy to a hidden truth the rubes cannot see. The difference is the vocabulary and the letterhead. Where QAnon had drops and decoded threads, the credentialed version has op-eds and panel shows. Where QAnon saw a deep-state pedophile ring, the credentialed version sees an incipient fascist takeover always six months away. Both communities can absorb any evidence into their frame. Both treat doubters as either complicit or unsophisticated. Both have spent years being wrong without ever updating.
The structural resemblance is the part this piece is about. The psychological mechanism — why the credentialed class in particular is so susceptible, how the taunting flooding bait works on people whose training makes them least equipped to ignore it — I worked through in Unpacking Trump Derangement Syndrome.
What They’re Telling You
The people most certain that Trump is unprecedented are telling you something. They are telling you they don’t know their own history. They are telling you their analytical toolkit consists of one tool, applied with rising volume to every disruptive figure who comes along. They are telling you that the inability to recognize the pattern is itself the pattern.
Trump is not unprecedented. Neither are they. What is unprecedented, if anything is, is how unhinged his critics have allowed themselves to become while accusing him of being the unhinged one.