Donald Trump can seem like a political anomaly. You sometimes hear people describe his connection with his base in quasi-mystical terms. But really, Trump is an example of an archetype — the right-wing populist showman — that recurs across time and place. There’s Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Boris Johnson in Britain, Javier Milei in Argentina. And there’s a long lineage of this type in the United States too. So why is there this consistent demand for this kind of political figure? And why does this set of qualities — ethnonationalist politics and an entertaining style — repeatedly appear at all? John Ganz is the writer of the newsletter Unpopular Front and the author of the forthcoming book “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.” In this conversation, we discuss how figures like David Duke and Pat Buchanan were able to galvanize the fringes of the Republican Party; Trump’s specific brand of TV-ready charisma; and what liberals tend to overlook about the appeal of this populist political aesthetic. This episode contains strong language.