Richard Hofstader on Donald Trump: Nothing New

Reading "Alexander Hamilton" and "Fallen Founder" about Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, it is clear there is nothing more nasty about today's politics than we have had through the centuries--from John Adams, who exploded in vituperative diatribes against Hamilton and Jefferson, to the incendiary expostulations hurled against Lincoln. This is what a representative democracy looks like.
In fact, our "democracy" sailed off into despotic waters under John Adams, who was so intolerant of criticism of himself, he made it a crime.  And the hostility toward immigrants of his party, the Federalists was every bit as nasty as Mr. Trump's.

The Alien and Sedition Acts were four bills passed by the Federalist-dominated 5th United States Congress and signed into law by President John Adams in 1798.^[1] They made it harder for an immigrant to become a citizen (Naturalization Act), allowed the president to imprison and deport non-citizens who were deemed dangerous (Alien Friends Act) or who were from a hostile nation (Alien Enemies Act), and criminalized making false statements that were critical of the federal government (Sedition Act).
--Wikipedia

But it is still astonishing to read what Professor Richard Hofstadter wrote in the late 1960's.  He was writing about a mindset prevalent at his time, but he writes to us from the past about someone we know today.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

--The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter