Historian Walter Russell Mead has become the favorite Trump whisperer for everyone from Steve Bannon to Tom Cotton. Mead sits down with Susan Glasser to explain the historical antecedents for Trump’s hostility toward free trade, establishment-bashing and embrace of a certain kind of chauvinist nationalism.

Mead also offers an intellectual framework to understand Trump at a time when others remained simply mystified by the president’s antagonism toward the fundamentals of the post-Cold War international order; rejection of alliances and allies; and disdain for international institutions and the robust capitalist world of free trade made possible by it all. 

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