By Henk de Berg, author of Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying 

He was one of the most successful and most dangerous political performance artists in American history. A hyperactive operator who needed only a few hours sleep per day, a former salesman with a knack for publicity, a vaudevillian role-player whose face could turn from child-like to cruel in an instant, he combined brains with buffoonery, hiding his political cunning behind his populist credentials. Vituperative and vindictive in the extreme, he called his opponents “bugs” and “lice” and seized every opportunity to destroy the careers of supposed traitors and other people in his “son-of-a-bitch book”. His lust for power was all-consuming. He brooked no contradiction, recognized no equals, and crushed anyone standing in his way. To his supporters, he was a hero, the political saviour they had been waiting for. To his critics, he was a tyrant, a despot just this side of a European-style 1930s dictator. You were either completely for him or totally against him: there was no in-between. His reign was a scarily seductive, hyper-controversial and highly divisive, yet continuously sold-out one-man show. 

The description is not, as one might think, of Donald Trump. It is of Huey P. Long, governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and subsequently United States senator until his assassination in 1935.¹ Nicknamed “the Kingfish” after a wily confidence trickster in the radio sitcom Amos ’n’ Andy, Huey managed to gain near-total control of his home state. Upon taking office, he immediately set out to deconstruct Louisiana’s government bureaucracy, dismantling dozens of long-standing agencies, boards, and committees and removing thousands of civil servants. He appointed his staunchest supporters to leadership positions and doled out lucrative sinecures to his family members and friends. Bending the state’s lawmakers to his will through a combination of patronage and intimidation, he held the legislature in his hands – as he put it – “like a deck of cards”. The newly founded Bureau of Criminal Investigation was given the power to make arrests without a warrant. When an opposing state senator appealed to the Louisiana constitution, Huey retorted, “I am the constitution just now”. Yet the majority of the population remained firmly on his side. Though electorally weak in the urban areas, he had strong support among the small independent farmers and merchants as well as among the ordinary country folk, who believed in “Jesus, Joseph, Mary, and Huey Long”.

Even after becoming a US senator, Huey continued to run Louisiana as its de facto leader. A range of newly minted administrative bodies stacked with his cronies – such as the Civil Service Commission and a fully revamped Bar Association – cemented his autocratic power. He tightened his grip on the school system and on Louisiana State University, ensuring the dismissal of any administrator and teacher who dared to criticize him.

Initially supportive of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Huey soon fell out with the president. Asked if he would consider running as FDR’s vice-presidential candidate, he answered, “Huey Long ain’t vice to anybody”. For his part, Roosevelt became increasingly concerned about Huey’s popularity. In the scary atmosphere of the 1930s – he felt – people were “ready to run after strange gods”.

Roosevelt had reason to be worried. Huey’s national profile continued to grow. In April 1935, his face adorned the cover of Time magazine. But only a few months later, it was all over. On 8 September, Huey P. Long was shot by a young doctor, largely – it seems – for personal reasons.² The Kingfish died two days later.

Huey Long’s reign has given rise to several works of fiction, most notably Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men and the eponymous 1949 film based on it, with a brilliant performance by Broderick Crawford as the Huey-like Willie Stark.³ Each in its own way, these works question the belief that – to quote the title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel about a fictional Huey Long – It Can’t Happen Here. They all picture an America in the grip of a populist demagogue with little or no regard for the Constitution, carried to power by self-seeking politicians and an overly trusting electorate.

Can it happen in the United States? Has it already happened?

Donald Trump appears to share Huey’s autocratic tendencies. He has gutted federal agencies while surrounding himself with cabinet members – such as secretary of state Marco Rubio – who seem entirely disinclined to stand up to him even it means going against (what used to be) their convictions.⁴ He has sought to punish and bring in line law firms that at some stage were involved in court cases against him.⁵ Judges who rule against him can expect a torrent of verbal abuse.⁶  Universities like Harvard that refuse to bend to his will get threatened with a withdrawal of federal funding.⁷ His disdain for the press – the “fake media” as “the enemy of the people” – and for its democratic right to criticize him is by now legendary.⁸ His extreme anti-immigration policies show little regard for due process.⁹ The Trump administration is even looking at suspending habeas corpus.¹⁰ When asked if he was bound by the Constitution, Trump replied, “I don’t know”.¹¹ A media bait, perhaps. Yet his political attitude and actions are cause for grave concern. True, Trump is not nearly as close to absolute power as Huey Long – but arguably not for lack of trying.

Huey actually cared about the ordinary people who venerated him, and he did much to improve their lives. He opened up the education system to everyone through the provision of free schoolbooks for children and night classes for illiterate adults. He built countless roads and bridges, while reducing the cost of license plates. He took on the big corporations, repealed the poll tax, and improved the state’s healthcare system. Though he ultimately began to focus more on power than on doing good, his populist slogan “Every man a king, but no one wears a crown” was not an empty promise.¹² In all of this – his biographer Richard White observes – he never played to white-nationalist sentiment: “he made no effort to promote racial equality”, but “he did not resort to racism to build the support of poorer white voters”.¹³

No, Trump is not the new Huey P. Long. But he might well be the first president to put America on a path so dangerous and slippery that this land of the free begins to slide, as Louisiana did, into a distinctly illiberal democracy.

Henk de Berg is a cultural theorist and Professor of German at the University of Sheffield, UK. His most recent book is Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

References

¹The description in the previous paragraph and the information in what follows lean on Richard D. White, Jr., Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long (New York: Random House, 2006).

²The young doctor was Carl Weiss, whose father-in-law, Benjamin Pavy, was about to lose his judgeship due to one of Huey’s electoral re-districting bills.

³The movie won three Oscars, including for best film and best actor. The 2006 remake featuring Sean Penn as Willie Stark is but a shadow of the original. Other fictional treatments include Hamilton Basso’s Sun in Capricorn (1942), John Dos Passos’s Number One (1943), and Adria Langley’s A Lion Is in the Streets (1945), which in 1953 was made into a rather disappointing film starring James Cagney. See Keith Perry, The Kingfish in Fiction: Huey P. Long and the Modern American Novel (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2004).

⁴https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Iyre-qTsds

⁵https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/07/politics/trump-law-firm-crackdown-pro-bono-work

⁶https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/arena/date/2025-03-18/segment/01

⁷https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/05/us/harvard-funding-trump-threats

⁸https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2017/02/19/ip-a-block.cnn

⁹https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/28/trump-immigration-100days-due-process-00307435

¹⁰https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0qgz18glljo.amp

¹¹https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/read-full-transcript-president-donald-trump-interviewed-meet-press-mod-rcna203514

¹²The slogan was borrowed from former US secretary of state William Jennings Bryan. Every Man a King is also the title of Huey’s autobiography, which was published in 1933.

¹³White, Kingfish, p. 244.