For Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X, no figure in American history has been more polarizing than Donald Trump, and no politician has had more influence on the Right. However, if you look back to the Boomer generation, the Silent generation and the Greatest generation, there has been one other person who was equally radical, influential, and polarizing, one who found a Right that had become cowardly, soft, weak, and anemic, and who remade and reforged the Right in their own image and bent the traditional Right-wing establishment to their will, and who was that person? That's right, you guessed it, it was none other than Ayn Rand. This short book explores the eerily similar parallels between these two key figures who dominated the history of the Right in the USA, Rand from the 1960s to 1980s, and Trump in the 2010s and 2020s. No two figures have done more to break down and destroy the traditional establishments of the Right and then rebuild them into stronger, tougher, more muscular, more fortress-like institutions than Ayn Rand and Donald Trump. This history book will trace the distinctive and shocking similarities between the two figures, and will even go on to argue that Donald Trump is, in many ways, the one true intellectual heir of Ayn Rand, and that the Trumpism movement is cashing in on the groundwork for the principled radicalization of the American Right which was laid by Ayn Rand, using a foundation of Right-wing radicalism, and a playbook of how to build morale and instill patriotic idealism among the Right-wing base, which had been built by Ayn Rand in an earlier generation.
This book seeks to make sense of the MAGA movement by placing it in a decades-old historical context, which makes it easier to understand its rise and ascendency to dominance in the modern American Right. The radicalization of the Right under Donald Trump is often viewed as a new phenomenon, but this book argues that it began with Ayn Rand and her so-called radicals for capitalism. A must-read for fans of history, politics, current events and political science.