Donald Trump: The MAGA President

One day in the future, historians will be struck by the contrast between two contemporary narratives of the Trump era. 

According to one narrative, the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, was a modern-day Caesar—an autocrat who, by ignoring constitutional constraints, aspired to end the American republic. 

According to the other narrative, this same man was a courageous tribune of the people who, by taking on corrupt and predatory elites, saved the republic. 

Which version is right? 

Let’s find out. 

Donald Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in Queens, New York City, the son of a successful real estate developer. 

After graduating from the Wharton School, Trump joined the family firm. A high-stakes risk-taker, Trump’s towers, casinos, and resorts generated remarkable quantities of cash, debt, and litigation, not to mention publicity.

In 2004, the risk-taker gambled on a second career—as the host of the “reality” TV show The Apprentice. It made Trump a star. 

But it was his third career as a politician that ultimately made Trump the most famous person in the world. 

On June 16, 2015, Trump announced that he was seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency. Few people took him seriously. He had dabbled in politics before but had never run for any political office. 

Yet Trump struck a chord with his attacks on illegal immigration from Mexico and unfair trade with China. His unvarnished, unscripted style inspired a new populist political movement with the slogan “Make America Great Again”—MAGA. While the coastal elites had benefited from globalization, many Americans felt left behind. In this brash billionaire, with his viral tweets, they found a champion.

The pundits and pollsters forecast victory for the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. 

They were wrong. 

True, Clinton won the popular vote, but Trump won the vote that mattered, the Electoral College: 304 to 227. 

A fractious coalition between his campaign team, the Republican establishment, and a succession of generals and businessmen, Trump’s first administration often seemed chaotic. But in terms of Trump’s core objectives, it was highly successful. 

On the campaign trail, he had promised to build a “big, beautiful wall” on the nation’s southern border. He succeeded metaphorically. In 2017, in just his first year as president, apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border dropped to a 46-year low.

Thanks to Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, real median household income rose significantly for the first time since 1999—by 10% between 2016 and 2019.

When Trump took office, the Islamic State terrorist organization had overrun large parts of Syria and Iraq. Within two years, it was effectively wiped out.

The Abraham Accords that Trump negotiated represented a geopolitical breakthrough in relations between Israel and the Arab countries.

And by imposing tariffs, Trump pressured China into a trade deal that began to address the economic imbalances between the two countries.

Yet to his opponents, Trump was a would-be dictator. The Democrats even claimed he was a pawn of Russian President Vladimir Putin. When that charge could not be substantiated, the Democrats impeached Trump on the ground that he had pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. The Senate acquitted Trump.

It took a highly contagious virus originating from Wuhan, China, to succeed where Trump’s political opponents had failed.

The COVID-19 pandemic threw the Western world into a panic. America, like most countries, locked down. This expedient did not reduce mortality by much, but it did plunge the economy into a deep crisis.

An incident in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020 further ripped the social fabric. During a routine arrest, a black suspect named George Floyd, a petty criminal and drug user, died while being restrained by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin. Subsequently, Chauvin was convicted of unintentional second-degree murder.

Orchestrated by the group Black Lives Matter, and fanned by Democrats and the media, protests and riots erupted across the country. It was in this feverish atmosphere that the 2020 election campaign took place.

The Democrats insisted on mail-in balloting, ostensibly to avoid spreading the virus. In many states, they got their way; unwisely, Trump discouraged Republicans from casting postal votes. Despite spending most of the race in the basement of his Delaware home, the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, won 81 million votes, 15 million more than Barack Obama had in 2012, to Trump’s 74 million.

Trump was convinced the election had been stolen. On January 6, 2021, he encouraged a large crowd to march to the Capitol. Partly because of woefully inadequate policing, the protest ran out of control. In the aftermath, the Democrats again impeached Trump. When this failed, they unleashed a barrage of criminal and civil cases against him.

But what didn’t kill him made him stronger, figuratively and literally. Trump ran for re-election. Not only did he beat his Republican challengers and withstand a guilty verdict, he survived two assassination attempts.

In November 2024, Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the greatest comeback in American political history, this time winning the popular vote as well as the Electoral College.

The final historical verdict on Donald Trump, the ultimate American risk-taker, cannot yet be returned. Caesar or savior?

I’m Niall Ferguson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, for Prager University.