In the autumn of 1883, a young man from a prominent New York family sat for a portrait that would define his class for a century. Theodore Roosevelt, then twenty‑five years old, was painted in the rough clothes of a Dakota hunter—a costume he had adopted during his ranching years. But the image was carefully calibrated: the square jaw, the pince‑nez, the rifle cradled like a gentleman’s walking stick. Roosevelt was performing the central drama of his class: the aristocratic man of letters who could also ride, shoot, and command. He was a WASP—White, Anglo‑Saxon, Protestant—and he embodied the strange fusion of privilege and ruggedness that the old American elite considered its birthright.
More than a century later, another New Yorker descended from a different lineage stood before a different camera. In June 2015, Donald Trump rode down a golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt, a red tie—the uniform of the businessman. But where Roosevelt’s costume signalled a class that took its dominance for granted, Trump’s signalled something else: arrival. He was not the heir of an old family. He was the son of a Queens developer who had spent his life trying to crash the gates of an establishment that would never fully accept him. And when he finally seized the presidency, he became the instrument of that establishment’s final destruction.
The Protestant establishment—the WASP‑dominated elite that ran American politics, finance, and culture from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s—operated according to a set of unwritten codes: institutional loyalty, noblesse oblige, a preference for private resolution over public scandal, a belief that the best people should govern and that the best people were, by and large, themselves. These codes were never as virtuous as their defenders claimed. They were also, for much of American history, ruthlessly effective at preserving power. The establishment educated its children at Groton and Choate, sent them to Harvard and Yale, placed them in the State Department and the major law firms, and married them off to one another. It was a closed loop—or as close to closed as a democratic society permits.
Trump was never part of that world. He was the son of a man who had built houses in the outer boroughs, a self‑made fortune that carried none of the cachet of inherited wealth. He attended Fordham before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School—an institution that conferred business credentials, not social pedigree. He spent the 1980s and 1990s trying to buy his way into the old establishment: the Palm Beach social scene, the boardrooms of Manhattan, the golf clubs where the old money gathered. He succeeded, up to a point. He was invited to parties. His name appeared on buildings. But he was never accepted. The old WASPs regarded him as vulgar, a man who put gold leaf on everything and whose taste was as loud as his pronouncements. They were not wrong. But they did not understand that vulgarity, in the age of mass media, could be a more potent currency than pedigree.
The WASP Century
The Protestant establishment that Trump would eventually unseat was a product of the Gilded Age. In the decades after the Civil War, a new industrial aristocracy emerged alongside the old mercantile families of the Northeast. These families—the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Morgans—built fortunes that dwarfed anything the old Dutch and English patricians had accumulated. They also built institutions: the great foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), the elite universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, which became the training grounds for a national ruling class), and the foreign policy establishment (the Council on Foreign Relations, the State Department, the Eastern‑dominated diplomatic corps).
This class codified its values in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The WASP ideal was the “strenuous life” that Roosevelt preached: a combination of physical vigour, public service, and moral seriousness. It was a class that produced the Progressive movement, the New DealThe New Deal Full Description:A comprehensive series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It represented a fundamental shift in the US government’s philosophy, moving from a passive observer to an active manager of the economy and social welfare. The New Deal was a response to the failure of the free market to self-correct. It created the modern welfare state through the “3 Rs”: Relief for the unemployed and poor, Recovery of the economy to normal levels, and Reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. It introduced social security, labor rights, and massive infrastructure projects.
Critical Perspective:From a critical historical standpoint, the New Deal was not a socialist revolution, but a project to save capitalism from itself. By providing a safety net and creating jobs, the state successfully defused the revolutionary potential of the starving working class. It acknowledged that capitalism could not survive without state intervention to mitigate its inherent brutality and instability.
Read more, and the Marshall Plan. It was also a class that maintained racial and religious quotas at its universities, excluded Jews and Catholics from its clubs, and viewed the waves of Southern and Eastern European immigration with undisguised alarm. The WASPs were liberal in their politics, often, but conservative in their social assumptions. They believed in government by the best people, and they were confident that they were the best people.
Yet the image of a monolithic WASP consensus has always been more myth than reality. The establishment was riven by internal conflicts: the split between Theodore Roosevelt’s progressivism and William Howard Taft’s conservatism in 1912; the isolationist–interventionist battles of the 1930s and 1940s; the divisions over civil rights and Vietnam that fractured the old liberal consensus in the 1960s. The WASPs who ran the State Department under Kennedy and Johnson were not the same men who had run it under Eisenhower. They shared a class background, but they did not always share a politics.
For much of the twentieth century, however, this elite governed with a remarkable degree of cohesion at the highest levels. The presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt (a Hudson Valley patrician), Dwight D. Eisenhower (a Kansas‑born general who was adopted by the Eastern establishment), and the two Bushes (George H.W. and George W., both products of Andover, Yale, and Skull and Bones) were all, in different ways, expressions of WASP hegemony. Even John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, understood that he had to present himself as a Harvard man, a war hero, a figure who could pass for a member of the club even if his religion kept him from full membership.
But the hegemony was cracking long before Trump appeared. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s all challenged the legitimacy of the WASP establishment. By the 1970s, the old elite was in retreat. The quotas at Harvard and Yale were dismantled. The clubs that had excluded Jews and Catholics began to open their doors. The foreign policy consensus that the establishment had maintained since World War II shattered over Vietnam. And a new political force—the conservative movement, rooted in the South and West, suspicious of Eastern elites, and powered by a fusion of economic libertarianism and social traditionalism—began to displace the old ruling class.
Importantly, the ascent of Catholics and Jews into the American elite was well underway decades before Trump. By the 1980s, Jewish financiers had become central to Wall Street—Goldman Sachs, founded by a German Jewish immigrant in 1869, was by then a pillar of the financial establishment. The Supreme Court had seen its first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis, in 1916, and its first Catholic justice, Roger Taney, as early as 1836; by the Reagan years, Catholic and Jewish justices were fixtures. The neoconservative movement that shaped the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration was led by figures such as Irving Kristol, a Jewish intellectual who had converted to Anglicanism and then, in a characteristically complicated path, to a form of neoconservative Protestantism. The WASP establishment was not replaced by a new Protestant elite; it was absorbed into a more diverse professional class that retained many of its old institutions while changing their personnel.
The WASP establishment did not disappear. It transformed. Its members moved into the non‑profit sector, the foundations, the liberal legal establishment. They became the professionals who ran the Democratic Party and the moderate wing of the Republican Party. But they no longer governed alone. The presidency of Ronald Reagan—a Midwesterner who had been a Hollywood actor, a man whose politics were shaped by the anti‑communism of the Cold War and the boosterism of the Sun Belt—was a decisive break. Reagan was not a WASP. He was the son of a Catholic shoe salesman from Illinois. He represented a new America, one in which the old Eastern establishment was not merely challenged but sidelined.
The Outsider
Into this transformed landscape came Donald Trump. He was not a product of the old establishment, but he was also not a product of the conservative movement that had supplanted it. He had been a Democrat for much of his adult life. He had contributed to the campaigns of both parties. He was a New Yorker, with a New Yorker’s disdain for the social conservatism of the Republican base. What he had, instead, was a genius for self‑promotion and a deep, almost pathological, resentment of the people who had never accepted him.
Trump was not the first outsider to break the WASP mould. Dwight Eisenhower, though a product of the Kansas heartland, had been adopted by the Eastern establishment and governed largely within its foreign policy consensus. Reagan was a more authentic outsider: a Californian who had made his name in Hollywood and whose political identity was forged in the Sun Belt, not the Ivy League. Reagan’s victory in 1980 marked the moment when the centre of gravity of the Republican Party shifted decisively away from the Northeast. What distinguished Trump from Reagan was not his outsider status—Reagan had that—but his willingness to attack the very institutions that Reagan had largely respected. Reagan cut taxes and deregulated, but he did not try to dismantle the civil service or turn the Justice Department into a personal legal defence firm. He worked with the establishment even as he reshaped it. Trump sought to destroy it.
Trump’s resentments were not invented for politics. They were the accumulated grievances of a lifetime spent on the outside looking in. He had tried to buy a place in Palm Beach society and been rebuffed. He had cultivated friendships with the old money families—the Du Ponts, the Firestones—only to find that they regarded him as a useful associate, not a peer. He had built his name into a brand, and the brand was synonymous with wealth, but wealth was not enough. The old establishment had other measures: lineage, education, taste, the ability to move quietly among the powerful without calling attention to oneself. Trump had none of these. What he had was the ability to make the establishment’s disdain for him into a political asset.
When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he ran against the very institutions that the WASP establishment had built. He attacked the free trade agreements that the foreign policy elite had championed. He attacked the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the neoconservatives—many of them Jewish intellectuals who had been absorbed into the establishment—had advocated. He attacked the Republican Party leadership, which was still, in its upper reaches, staffed by men of the old class: the Bushes, the McCains, the Romneys. And he attacked with a language that the establishment could not counter. When Jeb Bush, the scion of the most prominent WASP political dynasty of the late twentieth century, was asked about Trump’s attacks on his family, he responded with the establishment’s preferred register: he looked pained and said, “This is a tough business.” Trump called him “low energy.” The contrast was perfect. The old class spoke in understatement; Trump spoke in caps lock.
The Triumph
The 2016 Republican primaries were the moment when the old establishment finally lost control of the party it had built. Trump defeated Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz—a field that represented every faction of the post‑Reagan coalition. He then defeated Hillary Clinton, who embodied the WASP establishment’s transformation into a liberal professional elite. Clinton was a Wellesley and Yale Law graduate, a product of the same institutional pathways that had produced generations of Eastern leaders. She ran as the candidate of continuity, of experience, of the orderly transfer of power that the establishment prized. Trump ran as the candidate of disruption. He won.
The WASP establishment’s response to Trump was instructive. The New York Times, the newspaper of the Eastern elite, ran front‑page story after front‑page story about his unfitness for office. The Washington Post adopted the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness” and dedicated itself to exposing his corruption. The editorial boards of the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books—all products of the WASP intellectual world—denounced him in prose that combined moral outrage with a certain baffled helplessness. They had never encountered a figure like Trump, because their world had trained them to expect that the people who rose to the highest office would, whatever their flaws, understand the rules. Trump did not understand the rules. He did not believe that the rules applied to him.
The establishment’s failure to stop Trump was not merely a political defeat. It was an epistemological crisis. The old class had believed that its institutions—the courts, the press, the Congress, the diplomatic corps—would serve as guardrails, preventing the worst excesses of demagoguery. Trump demonstrated that those guardrails were made of habit, not steel. When the habits were broken, the guardrails bent.
Afterlife
What remains of the WASP establishment after Trump? The institutions remain: Harvard and Yale still exist, the Council on Foreign Relations still meets, the Times still publishes. But they have been transformed. The old class that ran them has been replaced by a more diverse professional elite—one that is no less privileged, in many ways, but that no longer carries the same cultural authority. The WASPs who remain are scattered, their children intermarried with Catholics and Jews and Muslims, their surnames no longer a guarantee of access. Irving Kristol’s journey—from Jewish immigrant’s son to neoconservative intellectual to a kind of secular Protestant establishment figure—captures the paradox: the old WASP world absorbed outsiders even as it faded, creating a hybrid elite that retained the forms of the old establishment without its original ethnic and religious core.
More significantly, the values that the establishment represented—institutional loyalty, a preference for private resolution, a belief in government by the best people—have been discredited. For the millions of Americans who supported Trump, the establishment was not a source of stability but a source of humiliation: the elite that had shipped their jobs overseas, looked down on their religion, and dismissed their concerns as racist or backward. Trump’s rise was a revenge fantasy for these voters, and his presidency was the revenge. He did not merely defeat the establishment; he humiliated it.
The old WASP class had a long tradition of noblesse oblige—the idea that privilege came with responsibility, that the rich and powerful owed something to the less fortunate. This tradition was always more rhetorical than real, but it did produce some of the great achievements of American public life: the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Trump represented the repudiation of noblesse oblige. His ethic was not service but victory. He did not believe that he owed anything to anyone who could not help him. And in this, he was the perfect representative of a new Gilded Age—one in which the old restraints on wealth and power had been stripped away.
The Irony
The irony of Trump’s triumph over the WASP establishment is that he has, in his own way, become a kind of establishment himself. Mar‑a‑Lago is now the unofficial capital of a new elite—a collection of billionaires, lobbyists, and media figures who have built their own world, with its own codes and hierarchies. Trump’s children have married into old money (Jared Kushner, the son of a real estate developer, is not a WASP, but the Kushners have become a kind of dynasty in their own right). Trump himself has become the patriarch of a political family that rivals the Kennedys or the Bushes in its dominance of the Republican Party.
But the difference is telling. The old establishment’s power was based on institutions: the universities, the foundations, the law firms, the diplomatic corps. Trump’s power is based on personality: his own, and the loyalty of a following that treats him not as a president but as a movement. The institutions he attacked have been weakened, but they have not been replaced by anything resembling a coherent alternative. The Republican Party is now a vehicle for Trump’s will. The conservative movement that once provided intellectual ballast to the party has been sidelined. The media that once set the terms of political discourse now compete for the attention of a fragmented audience.
This is the world that Trump made. It is a world without a ruling class, in the old sense—without a shared set of values, a common educational background, a network of institutions that produce a governing elite. It is a world of warring tribes, each with its own media, its own facts, its own version of reality. The WASPs who once governed, for all their flaws, at least believed that there was such a thing as a national interest and that they were the ones qualified to define it. Trump has no such belief. He believes only in his own interest. And in that, he is the perfect expression of the country he now leads—a country that has lost faith in its institutions, its elites, and itself.
The End of an Era
The decline of the WASP establishment was a long time coming. It began with the immigration waves of the late nineteenth century, accelerated with the New Deal’s incorporation of Catholics and Jews into the Democratic coalition, and reached a kind of completion with the election of John F. Kennedy—a Catholic who proved that the presidency no longer required Protestant credentials. By the 1970s, the WASP monopoly on power was broken. What remained was a set of habits and institutions that continued to shape American life even as the people who ran them changed.
Trump did not break the WASP establishment. It was already broken. What he did was shatter the illusion that something had replaced it. The liberal professional elite that took the WASP’s place—the meritocrats who staff the universities, the foundations, the media—never commanded the same cultural authority. They were resented by the same working‑class and middle‑class voters who had resented the WASPs, and they were vulnerable to the same charge of being out of touch. Trump did not need to create this resentment. He only needed to channel it.
The old WASP establishment had a phrase for people like Trump: “not our kind.” They meant it as a dismissal. But in the age of Trump, “not our kind” became a badge of honour. The voters who sent him to the White House were also not the establishment’s kind. They were the descendants of the immigrants the WASPs had tried to exclude, the inhabitants of the regions the establishment had neglected, the believers in the religions the elite had patronised. They did not want to join the old clubs. They wanted to burn them down.
The golden escalator at Trump Tower was a long way from the Dakota hunting grounds of Theodore Roosevelt. But the two men were connected by a thread: both were performers of a kind of American masculinity, both were masters of the media of their age, and both, in their different ways, embodied the contradictions of the class they represented. Roosevelt was the last WASP president who could claim to speak for the establishment. Trump is the first president who rose by destroying it. The era that began with Roosevelt—the era of WASP hegemony, of Eastern establishment dominance, of a ruling class that believed in its own virtue—ended not with a bang but with a man in a red tie riding down an escalator, announcing that he was going to make America great again. It was a promise that the old America was already gone. The new America had not yet been built. In the space between, Trump made his fortune, and his presidency, and his lasting mark on the republic.
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