Did George Wallace pave the way for Donald Trump?

No.

Two sentiments dominate the Washington Post’s reporting these days — hatred of Donald Trump and contempt for white America over its alleged systemic racism. The two come together in this article which claims that Trump is the heir of George Wallace.

The piece is called “The angry White populist who paved the way for Trump.” (Emphasis added) Wallace is that populist.

There’s plenty to criticize about Donald Trump, but the attempt to tie him to Wallace is ridiculous. The view that the Alabaman paved the way for the billionaire is even more far fetched.

Does anyone truly believe that without Wallace’s presidential campaign of half a century ago, Trump would not have won the 2016 election? Maybe the author of the Post’s story, Peter Jamison, believes this, but he fails to make the case. Nor, in a four-page article with nearly one hundred paragraphs, does he even show meaningful parallels between Wallace and Trump on the former’s signature issue of race.

Here’s the paragraph in which Jamison compares Wallace and Trump on substance:

Both Wallace and Trump lamented what they described as America’s vilification of the police. Both complained to audiences incessantly about their news coverage. Both insisted that they were not bigots and boasted of large bases of Black support that didn’t actually exist. Both threatened to make U.S. allies in Western Europe “respect” and repay the United States for billions in defense spending.

Republican politicians have always defended the police during periods in which those who protect the public’s safety were under severe attack. There’s nothing unusual, and nothing racist, about this.

Complaints about media bias are also common among Republican candidates, as they should be, and have nothing to do with race.

Did Wallace ask allies to pay more for the defense of Europe? I’ll take Jamison’s word for it, but would be shocked if Trump’s calls for more robust participation by Europe in its own defense can be traced to any such long-forgotten demands by Wallace. And again, this has nothing to do with race.

Trump has boasted about an amount of black support greater than that which exists. But he inflates the degree of his support from all corners of America. This, after all, is a guy who claims he won two close elections by landslides. Trump’s boasts are a function of his ego and nothing else.

But his boasts about black support aren’t nearly as empty as Wallace’s were. Jamison notes that Wallace insisted during a campaign event in Indiana that “there are many blacks who support me,” yet did not win a single vote in a heavily black precinct in Evansville.

Trump, by contrast, received an unusually high level of support from African-American males in 2020 for a Republican presidential candidate.

The dishonesty of Jamison’s hit piece comes through most clearly in what the Post’s writer declines to mention. Trump supported lenient sentencing legislation that has resulted in the early release from federal prison of thousands of felons, a disproportionate number of whom are black. His support enabled that unfortunate piece of legislation to pass.

It’s inconceivable that Wallace would have backed such legislation in 1972.

Jamison quotes with approval a historian who pronounced Wallace “the most influential loser” of the 20th century. But Wallace is actually one of our least influential losers. He lost on every civil rights issue he raised in his campaign, and eventually repudiated and apologized for his views.

Theodore Roosevelt is my candidate for most influential loser (his 1912 campaign). But even Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist Party candidate, had more of the policies he advocated take hold in America than Wallace did.

America’s rejection of what George Wallace advocated regarding race is one of our signature triumphs of the past 60 years. Jamison, though, was determined to find virulent racism in the places where Wallace’s campaigns did well. He claims to have found it in Evansville, Indiana.

Jamison relies almost exclusively on the views of a black city councilman who says, “you take what the 45th president has said — is saying — I mean you could make that into the 21st century and you have what George Wallace said in 1972.”

Really? Has Trump said “segregation now, segregation forever”? Has he ever opposed school integration? Has he opposed any civil rights legislation?

The city councilman is no more able than Jamison to provide an example of a statement by Trump about race that harks back to anything Wallace said in 1972.

Jamison also visited Macomb County, Michigan, a jurisdiction he describes as “the birthplace of the ‘Reagan Democrats.’” The description is telling. I don’t consider Trump an heir to Reagan, but his appeals to working class Democrats have more in common with Reagan’s than with Wallace’s.

Jamison also undercuts his thesis by pointing to the strong support Trump received in Macomb County from the community of Iraqi Christians (Chaldeans), a religious group Trump has tried to assist in Iraq. In 1972, George Wallace showed no interest in helping persecuted minorities.

The bottom line is this: The issues that boosted Trump to the presidency — loss of American jobs and rampant illegal immigration — weren’t George Wallace’s issues. Indeed, they weren’t anyone’s issues in 1972. They have more relation to late 19th century populism than to the racial populism of Wallace.

If Trump runs again, he will almost certainly attack the teaching of Critical Race Theory in public schools. But the fact that many public schools are teaching children that white America is incorrigibly racist shows the absurdity of the Post’s claim that the spirit of George Wallace lives on anywhere in today’s America, except in small dark corners.