Trump and the Ayatollah: The Shared Rhetoric of MAGA and the Islamic Revolution

Left: Donald Trump at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference. From Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Right: Rudollah Khomeini in Neauphle-le-Château. From Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Critics of Donald Trump have been scrambling for the last four years to find appropriate historical comparisons that help us make sense of the sheer awfulness, the cataclysmic incompetence, the undisguised racism, and the antidemocratic impulses of the 45th President.

From other terrible US Presidents like Warren G. Harding and James Buchanan, to nationalist strongmen like Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin, to Adolf Hitler himself, exhausted commentators have plumbed the depths of available comparisons.¹ Nothing seems to capture the essence of this deplorable, buffoonish man.

However, there is another, less obvious comparison that may help us understand at least one aspect of Trumpism. Given his blowhard denunciations of ‘radical Islam,’ Trump would likely detest any suggestion of political kinship between himself and the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini. But in terms of economic rhetoric, the two are remarkably similar.

At his inauguration in January 2017, Trump spoke of the 'forgotten men and women' who had suffered under the ‘American carnage’ of the Obama years, particularly fossil fuel workers in places like West Virginia. ‘Trump Digs Coal,’ his campaign pronounced, as he promised to breathe new life into the coal industry and…