Which century do you think these stories occurred in? One politician called for Black Americans to be sent to Africa as a means of maintaining white supremacy. Another taunted his own (American) opponents that they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

It’s hard to tell the difference, isn’t it? But the venom both men spewed came in what we would like to believe were entirely different eras. Story number one occurred in the 20th century when Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo suggested manumission as a solution to “uppity” African Americans demanding equal treatment in the South. The second quote was former President Donald Trump venting his rage at four congresswomen of color for criticizing his program. Clearly, the days of explicitly racist rhetoric and ideas in the American political arena are far from over.

Trump shares more with Bilbo, as well as with Bilbo’s Mississippi predecessor James Vardaman. Rhetoric from these individuals bears an eerie resemblance. Vardamn proudly referred to his supporters as “rednecks”; Trump said he “[loves] the poorly educated.” Bilbo denounced “international well-spoilers”; Trump raged against “globalists.” Trump incited political violence; Vardaman said “If it is necessary every Negro [sic] in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.” All three men, and countless others since Reconstruction, styled themselves populists defending the dignity of poor white men–and white men only.

But it is their Alabama successor George Wallace who was Trump’s true kindred spirit. Wallace arose as a presidential contender on a wave of extreme white racism, which had crested in response to the Civil Rights movement and riots in Northern cities. Crucially, Wallace had a following in the North as well as the South. Indiana was one of his best states. Like Wallace, Trump is a populist bigot with national reach. He plays on the resentments of working-class whites threatened by racial progress and operates at somewhat of a remove from the political system. Trump wanted to created an independent “Patriot Party.” Wallace actually ran on an “American Independent Party.”

Thus, Trump continues a long strand of white-supremacist populism that originated in the South but went national as social progress undermined the status quo that many whites had taken for granted. He sprinkles a bit of economic centrism into his politics, as did Bilbo, a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But on policy, he is for the most part an orthodox right-winger. Trump cut taxes for the rich by $1.9 trillion. Vardaman introduced a regressive sales tax when he was Governor of Mississippi. Populism is, after all, more of a political style than a coherent program, and most of its exponents are charlatans.

It’s too easy, and even perversely comforting, to regard Trump as more of the same, however. He also brings an authoritarianism imported from Europe that America has not seen before, even in our darkest days of suppressing multi-racial democracy. He wants to ransack private institutions that convey information corrosive to his cause. He has a media network in Fox News that goes far beyond the partisan newspapers that backed people like Bilbo and Vardaman; it more closely resembles Soviet state media. And he became the first American president ever to contest the peaceful transfer of power, attempting to erect a ballast of autocracy in the heart of American government.

Trump is both a continuation of the worst political traditions in this country and an outside actor determined to obliterate the institutions that held those traditions in check. He is an outlier. But he is not a so-called “black swan,” a freakish phenomenon flashing into existence against all odds. The forces of authoritarianism are gathering strength in America. If it’s not Donald Trump in 2024, it could be Tucker Carlson. What’s old hasn’t died, and what’s new should never have been allowed to flower.