For decades, Donald Trump has been labelled a populist: a political oddity that somehow defies neat categorisation within conventional liberal frameworks. In some circles, populism has become a catch-all term for anything that does not align with the neoliberal mainstream—even when that term obscures more than it reveals.
As critics themselves have noted, it is often used to describe anything that challenges the prevailing neoliberal consensus, from the radical left to the far right. Another common framing casts Trump alongside authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, and Xi Jinping—a grouping predicated on his apparent disdain for the rule of law and for international human rights norms. Others reach for the label alt-right, a shorthand for the range of contemporary right-wing and far-right tendencies around him.
But these characterisations miss something more fundamental: Donald Trump is not an exception to neoliberalism. He embodies it in its most politically emboldened, socially toxic form.
On the surface, Trump may attack aspects of globalisation and flirt with protectionist rhetoric, especially around trade and tariffs. Yet his core economic agenda unmistakably follows market-driven logic: tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, mass layoffs of federal personnel, closure of public agencies and deep cuts in public spending. These are policies that read like chapters from a real-world neoliberal playbook. The puzzle then is not whether Trump is neoliberal, but how his neoliberal economic programme sits comfortably alongside other defining aspects of his politics: the assault on anti-racist and equality-based policies, the hostility toward diversity and inclusion, aggressive immigration measures, and an obsessive focus on hard borders. Crucially, large segments of the MAGA movement draw their inspiration from overtly racist and conspiratorial worldviews, as was plain in the ideological makeup of the crowd on 6 January and in the influence of Trumpist “organic intellectuals” such as Steve Bannon. One answer to this juxtaposition lies in intellectual history. This fusion of neoliberal economics with elements that dovetail into far-right racialist politics is not accidental, nor is it new. When we speak of neoliberalism here, we are referring not to mainstream centre-right parties that favour market reforms, but to the ideological core that venerates thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek—the defining figures of the Austrian School—as intellectual forebears. This history is illuminated in Quinn Slobodian’s recent book Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Slobodian traces the intersection of extreme anti-state neoliberal thought—especially in its anarcho-libertarian forms—with theories that linked social outcomes to biology and human hierarchies. In his later work, Hayek moved beyond economics into political philosophy and evolutionary theory, opening intellectual space for interpretations that could easily be racialised. Within global networks such as the Mont Pelerin Society, these ideas circulated and found resonance in works such as The Bell Curve, which, despite lacking scientific validity, became influential in right-wing circles as an argument trying to root social inequality in supposed innate racial differences. Slobodian also identifies how these ideological currents shifted over time toward closed borders and anti-immigration politics, linking older traditions of nativism and white nationalism with neoliberal economics. In the case of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), for example, what began as market-focused Euroscepticism evolved into a broader ideological mix that embraced hard-line nationalist policies, alongside scepticism of central banking and an affinity for gold and hard currency—traits shared with their North American counterparts.
The result is an ideological synthesis in which neoliberal economic policy does not stand apart from far-right social politics, but instead coexists with them in a way that helps explain both Trump’s appeal and the rise of similar movements across the West. Far from being opposites, neoliberal economics and nationalist authoritarianism have become strange but potent bedfellows—both resisting policies of equality and popular sovereignty in favour of market primacy and exclusionary identity constructs.
