Trump Is Pat Buchanan With Better Timing
While a recession had technically ended in March of 1991, unemployment was stuck at 7 percent, and the rut was felt deeply in New England. When I went to New Hampshire late that year to cover the presidential race, every store in a once-thriving Manchester shopping mall was shuttered; only the unemployment office and the welfare office were open. The advertisements that filled local newspapers were not for products or stores; they announced foreclosure auctions.
Into this state strode 53-year-old Pat Buchanan, a cheerfully pugnacious conservative who had spent his adult life shuffling between the political world—speechwriter for Richard Nixon, communications director for Ronald Reagan—and the media, where he wrote columns and was a frequent face on TV shows ranging from the McLaughlin Group to Crossfire to The Capital Gang. He came to announce a primary challenge to Bush:
He would take on his own party’s incumbent, attacking from the right. Go back to it now and what’s striking is how much his message, delivered on December 10, 1991, in Concord, offered a remarkable preview not so much of that year’s race, but of what would drive the appeal of Donald Trump in 2016.