The world’s modern populists are discovering a common trait that seems to serve them more than the voters they claim to champion.
When scandal strikes, it’s just fresh evidence of their self-fulfilling prophecy that a shady cabal of “deep state” elites bent on suppressing democracy is out to get them.
On both sides of the Atlantic this week, politicians seemed to ask themselves WWTD: What would Trump do?
In Maine, former Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner blamed the collapse of his campaign over allegations of sexual assault and dating violence, which he denies, on distant party grandees plotting to kill his progressive movement.
In Britain, Brexit leader Nigel Farage quit his parliamentary seat amid questions over his personal financing that he dismissed as an “establishment” ruse. He will put the question of his conduct to “the people” in a special election that has taken on a surreal turn, since his chief opponent may be a man dressed as a trash can.
And in France, far-right leader Marine Le Pen said she will run for president next year wearing an ankle monitor after her conviction was upheld in a case in which Le Pen, her National Rally party and 11 senior members were convicted of embezzling millions of euros of public funds to pay party workers in France. Echoing Trump, Le Pen brands the accusations as a “chasse aux sorcières” — a witch hunt — by state authorities.
The populists’ intoxicating implication is that their own difficulties only prove their case: that they are proposing such a radical reordering of political power that nefarious official forces will stop at nothing to bring them down. In some cases, allegations of wrongdoing can even bolster a populist’s reputation as a breaker of political rules.
It’s not that these populist leaders haven’t tapped into legitimate political sentiment at a moment of global turmoil.
Trump coined his purest definition of his personal populist appeal in his first inaugural address in January 2017, surrounded by the eminences of the nation’s political, legal, economic and national security establishments.
“For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost,” he said. “Washington flourished — but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered — but the jobs left, and the factories closed.”
All modern populists mine a seam of deep public discontent, arguing that globalist forces created a new class of richly rewarded elites who have further stacked the deck. On the right, Le Pen, Trump and Farage also weaponized resentment over immigration. This trio grew their movements for years and shrewdly recognized the potency of insurgent political themes while malfunctioning central governments slumbered.
Democrats are awaiting the heir to Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who used populist economic appeals in his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns that nevertheless built a fervent progressive movement. Platner had seemed a herald of a new generation that could help lead an anti-establishment movement on the left, though his career now seems doomed after he dropped out of the Maine Senate race. He found early success, however, in giving voice to frustration among activists with moderate party leaders. In the process, he sparked debate over the potential of a Trump-style insurgency in the Democratic Party.
The modern populist wave heralded by Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016, which waned with Trump’s defeat in 2020, is now roaring again across the Atlantic with outspoken US support from leaders like Vice President JD Vance. It is being exacerbated by a sense among voters in the US, Britain, France and Germany that centrist establishment politicians who’ve repeatedly vowed to enact change keep failing to deliver.
Yet the quick reflex to distill personal political crises into a cult of victimhood by populist clarions — and their insistence that allegations of wrongdoing represent nothing more than power plays by hidden elites — gives reason for concern about how such leaders use their movements. Are they really motivated only by mending a pervasive sense of despair among their voters? Or are they cynically exploiting disgust with political systems to mask their own failings and to aim for vast personal power?
As Trump has demonstrated, building a narrative of political persecution can provide rocket fuel for campaigns. In 2024, as he faced multiple criminal and civil charges — all of which he denied — and after he was convicted in a hush money case, the president positioned himself as an agent of his voters’ fury against those in power. The move unified the Republican Party behind him and ended its presidential primary race in his favor after it initially appeared that there was limited appetite among the party grassroots for his return to power.
“I am your retribution,” Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2023.
Platner, campaigning as a plain-speaking blue-collar oysterman and Marine Corps veteran, seemed to many progressives like an authentic archetype Democrats sorely needed to dispel their elite metropolitan image. He seemed the antidote to candidates who spoke in the language of liberal position papers as the party struggles to find a political vernacular that appeals to regular Americans.
Like Trump, Platner tried to turn controversies over his personality into evidence of a wider conspiracy to derail a campaign that was perilous to Washington’s monopoly on power. But ultimately, he lacked Trump’s Teflon hide. He said he’d quit the Senate race on Wednesday after a woman told CNN and Politico that he raped her while he was heavily intoxicated nearly five years ago when they were in a casual dating relationship. Platner denies the allegation.
But he rationalized his exit not as a personal moment of accountability but as proof he was too threatening to the powerful to be allowed to succeed. “It’s not the false allegations though that have brought us to where we are. It’s the fact that they are being used by the political establishment to put structural pressure on us,” Platner said in a video announcing his decision. “We live in a political system that is not built for normal people. It is a system built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish.”
But this argument is misleading. Platner’s campaign was not a victim of a conspiratorial plot by the political establishment and the media, even if his adversaries were surely keen to see opposition research used against him. It ended after two women went public with allegations about him, which he denies.
Farage also denies all wrongdoing. The leader of the Reform UK party has been tipped as a possible prime minister after the next general election, which must take place by August 2029. This would be a stunning achievement by an insurgent leader who carved out an image as an everyman who loves a pint down at the pub.
But now Farage is fighting allegations he failed to declare millions of pounds’ worth of gifts from wealthy donors. He denies wrongdoing amid an investigation by Parliament’s standards watchdog.
He’s planning to convince voters in his gritty coastal constituency that a conspiracy is at play. “This will be a people versus the establishment by‑election,” he said in a video. The new vote, Farage said, is a “chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment, to frankly tell them where to go.” Channeling Trump in 2024, he closed by saying: “If I win, you win.”
Like Farage, Le Pen says the French people should have the “final say” on her fate. And like Trump, she’s seeking to portray synergy between her own treatment and a populace she claims has been persecuted by the state’s negligence. “There are many French people who are going through hardships, and we too are going through hardships,” Le Pen said on a prime-time interview on the TF1 television station. “These trials, I believe, have strengthened us.”
Le Pen predates Trump as a populist pioneer and has sanded down the harsher edges of the far-right movement once led by her late father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. She’s set for her fourth attempt at winning the presidency and possibly her best chance of capturing ultimate power in France.
And as CNN’s Melissa Bell reported from Paris, Le Pen has something else in common with Trump: If she wins the election next year, any lingering legal woes could be swept away immediately by presidential immunity.
The coming elections in the UK and France will test whether Farage and Le Pen can emulate Trump’s political escapology.
In that first inaugural address back in 2017, Trump charged that “the establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.”
But a decade later, controversies, scandals and allegations surrounding the new populists are creating a moment of irony as they edge closer to power.
They are accused of using their movements to protect not the people overlooked or harmed by the political and economic establishment — but themselves.
