Comparing tactics of Trump to Huey Long

The comparison of Trump with Huey as to style and tactics is now so overwhelming as to suggest that someone close to Trump has read quite a bit about Huey. Consider these similarities, provided off the top of my head: 

1. Trump’s slogan (obtained from Reagan) Make America Great Again; Huey’s slogan (obtained from William Jennings Bryan) Every Man a King. 
2. Trump’s nicknames for opponents: Sleepy Joe Biden, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Crooked Hillary; Huey’s nicknames: Feather Duster Ransdell, Turkey Head Walmsley, Whistle Britches Rightor.
3. Their warts-and-all authenticity. Trump, like Huey, eschews a script and thus is authentic, and reacts faster to events. Hillary Clinton’s studied attempts at empathy were successfully skewered on Saturday Night Live. When called out for violating norms, both men doubled down or escalated their advocacy.
4. A consistent refusal to apologize or concede error.
5. A short-term flexibility in tactics without surrendering long-term goals. When Huey got negative feedback, he often delayed special legislative sessions or temporarily withdrew proposals. Trump thought about running for President in 2008, but the feedback wasn’t positive, so he waited until it was. 
6. Trump’s approach to the Mueller investigation and impeachment included whipping up public support just as Huey fought impeachment in Louisiana in 1929 with public speeches to the voters. 
7. Trump’s armed forces have taken over Washington, D.C., Chicago, Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, to deport illegal immigrants (frightening blue state voters). Huey’s national guard raided illegal gambling establishments and briefly took over New Orleans to fight vice and vote fraud (frightening the vice interests). The murders committed by ICE lack any counterpart in Louisiana and indicate that Huey was smarter than Trump.
8. Trump has torn down the East Wing of the White House; Huey had a gang of convicts demolish the Louisiana governor’s mansion.
9. Trump has floated the idea of a dividend check to families funded either by tariffs or savings obtained by DOGE; Huey obtained a refund check for 80,000 Louisiana consumers from a telephone company, whose rate increase he defeated in court.
10. The policies of Trump and Huey to negotiation are similar: fierce denunciations followed by compromises. I suggest that Huey obtained more lasting and beneficial results, but the tactics are the same.
11. They both dislodged neutral or hostile government bureaucrats and installed their followers in as many bureaucratic positions as possible.
12. Trump denied his defeat in 2020 with what social movement theorists describe as a “fortifying myth,” that the election was stolen. Huey blamed his loss in his first gubernatorial contest in 1924 on the rain, which, he said, had prevented 40% of his rural supporters from voting. 
13. Taking stock in private companies was an element of Huey’s Share Our Wealth plan, and now Trump has made the government the owner of a percentage of Intel’s stock and has proposed a sovereign wealth fund that parallels Huey’s idea of a Share Our Wealth corporation.
14. Huey frequently cited the Bible—the provisions that supported his redistribution of wealth policies–in his speeches and Trump relies on right-wing Christians—who oppose gay marriage and transgender-friendly policies–to spread his message. 

I expect any day now to hear a MAGA song that could compare with Huey’s campaign song, Every Man a King, for that is about the only tactic that Trump has not yet borrowed from Huey. 

Their biggest similarity deserves more comment. Trump’s domination of the media was an outgrowth of his experience promoting real estate development projects and his television series, comparable to Huey’s experience as a traveling salesman for four years beginning when he was 16 years old and ending when he started law school. In Huey’s time, radio diminished the power of newspapers, a power that they didn’t recognize was undercut. Many newspapers must have been amazed at how they could pound Huey (and to a similar extent, Roosevelt) without diminishing his popularity. Today, the legacy television outlets compete with cable television and the internet, and they must similarly wonder how they could pound away at Trump without reaching a tipping point that destroyed him. Trump had Fox News, a house organ, to counteract the legacy media, just as Huey had his own house organ, his American Progress newspaper, as well as his numerous circulars, to rebut the big newspapers of his day. 

Huey’s opponent Harry Gamble worried that lies were like a pillow’s stuffing knocked out at the top of a skyscraper, so numerous as to be impossible to rebut. Gamble thought that an honest politician would always be at a disadvantage in a democracy because he would argue only truthful allegations against an opponent, whereas the opponent could respond with a blizzard of lies, not all of which could be rebutted. 

Trump’s energy and time devoted to outlast critics, with various ideas, proposals, or rumors of contemplated actions keeps himself in the news, his opponents on the defensive, and provides new stories that bury old missteps. Whether they are lies or truthful proposals and arguments, a politician who lacks the energy or the time to respond or set up a competing blizzard of proposals and arguments is at a disadvantage. Trump’s use of this principle established his domination of political discourse.

Trump, like Huey, is erratic on a day-to-day basis, in ways that excite the media but get forgotten by the public. When Trump became President in 2017, his first term, he first agreed to meet with the New York Times, then canceled the meeting, and then had the meeting. I doubt that anyone else remembers that, and I only remember it because I thought at the time that Huey was similarly erratic in these forgettable ways. 

A man who built large hotels filled with gold might seem to be one who could restore greatness, just as Huey ensured that he built structures such as the new state capitol or his roads and bridges that impressed even hostile commentators. These provide what advertisers call “reasons to believe” their promises.

Trump’s approach to the presidency is thus a more extreme and modern version of the media-dominant presidencies of Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan. He spends more time on communication (receiving and delivering) than he does studying policy. He sets an unrivaled example for the frequency and reach of his advocacy and has established a new model for how to allocate a president’s time. No Democrat until Gavin Newsom (ten years later) has tried to keep up with him. Biden and other democrats ignored or were incapable of learning and using this lesson before the 2024 election, with fatal results. 

In a future blog, I will comment on Trump’s second term and describe significant differences between Trump and Huey.