President Donald Trump’s critics often accuse him of being influenced by fascist dictators like Mussolini or his more notorious, Austrian-born ally. But the global leader who most shaped our president’s thinking may have been the greatest anti-fascist ever born: Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Ike’s eight years of peace and prosperity in the Oval Office coincided with Trump’s formative years in military school. On issues ranging from immigration and economics to foreign policy, Trump bears a striking resemblance to the great general and president of his childhood.
The two men are particularly aligned on illegal immigration. Both came to office during periods of uncontrolled, economics-driven illegal immigration across America’s southern border.
Upon taking office, Eisenhower immediately launched the most focused immigration enforcement action in U.S. history, deporting somewhere between 300,000 and 2.1 million people in about a year — although, by any account, the vast majority of illegals self-deported. His record is only exceeded by liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt, who likely deported more people over his 12 years in office.
The Eisenhower administration even celebrated its deportation achievement with distinctly Trumpian rhetoric during a June 1953 broadcast over the new medium of television. “We are making fine progress on the program of denaturalizing and deporting racketeers and subversives who violated the hospitality of our country,” said Herbert Brownell, Jr., Eisenhower’s attorney general.
President Trump referenced Eisenhower’s operations in a November 2015 Republican primary debate and promised again last December that, on day one, “We will begin the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than that of Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Trump’s commitment to enforce existing law has ushered in two months of record-low illegal border crossings, with overall numbers down more than 93 percent since he took office.
Journalist Alfredo Corchado, an executive editor at the Puente News Collaborative, told the Council on Foreign Relations on March 26 that human smugglers are now offering “paquetes de retorno” for illegal aliens to return, or self-deport, to their native countries.
Neither President Eisenhower nor President Trump’s foreign policy shies away from brinkmanship, a term Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, defined as “the ability to get to the verge without getting into the war.” In a 1956 Life Magazine article, Dulles revealed he had twice threatened to launch a nuclear strike against China unless Beijing accepted U.S. peace terms on Taiwan.
Likewise, President Trump threatened to respond to North Korean nuclear provocations with “fire and fury” and warned Iranian leaders last month, “If they don’t make a [nuclear] deal, there will be bombing… the likes of which they have never seen before.” President Trump has also notably engaged in economic brinkmanship, threatening U.S. allies with steep “retaliatory tariffs,” then dialing them back to secure better trade deals for American businesses and workers.
Both presidents also leveraged credible military might to establish peace through strength. Tragically, neither Eisenhower nor Trump get the credit they deserve as peacemakers. In a pivotal speech on the eve of the 1952 election, Eisenhower blamed the Korean Conflict on the “political and diplomatic failure of [the Truman] administration” and vowed, “I shall go to Korea” to bring the now-forgotten war to “an early and honorable end.”
Similarly, in his 2024 campaign, President Trump blamed the conflict in Ukraine on Biden’s “weakness,” vowed to end the war, and determined to “stop wars” for the next four years. The Biden-Harris administration’s pledge to support Ukraine “as long as it takes” echoed Ike’s opponent, Adlai Stevenson, who asked in one election speech, “How long can we keep on fighting in Korea, paying high taxes, helping others to help ourselves? There is only one answer: We can keep it up as long as we have to.”
In another theater, President Trump played an historic role in thawing relations with North Korea when he became the first sitting U.S. president to set foot inside the Hermit Kingdom during a June 2019 meeting with Kim Jong-un. Trump’s success at securing a Middle East peace agreement through the Abraham Accords is another noteworthy feather in his peacekeeper cap.
In the Republican tradition, both presidents sought to trim wasteful government spending. Eisenhower even had his own version of DOGE, known as the President’s Advisory Committee on Government Organization, which hunted inefficiencies and redundancies in the federal bureaucracy. Like President Trump, Eisenhower relied on a controversial billionaire, Nelson Rockefeller, as well as first brother Milton Eisenhower and Civil Service Commissioner Arthur Flemming, to oversee the efforts.
But both Trump and Eisenhower were resistant — or downright hostile — to cutting entitlements. Like Eisenhower, who expanded eligibility and added millions to the Social Security rolls, Trump has said he’s “not touching” Social Security and wants to eliminate taxes on the program’s beneficiaries.
In yet another common factor, both men’s political enemies continually underestimated their skills and slandered their competence. In the 1950s, the Kennedys portrayed Eisenhower as “old, out-of-date, and not smart,” said University of Virginia history professor William Hitchcock. “Only in retrospect can we see the talent he brought to the White House.”
Of course, the two presidents lived in different cultures. While Americans of the 1950s remember Eisenhower fondly with the phrase “I like Ike,” today one in four Democrats believes America “would be better off” if President Trump’s assassin had succeeded, according to a poll AMAC Newsline reported last fall.
For a decade, these similarities and points of influence between the last two non-politicians elected president have been hiding in plain sight. During his 2016 campaign, Trump even ranked Eisenhower alongside Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan as “amazing presidents.” Yet virtually no media outlets have reported on the way Eisenhower influenced the MAGA movement, probably because most aspects of 1950s America only scare the radical left.
Most Americans would gladly return to a patriotic era of material progress, a sound economy, and a faith-based culture that instilled strong values in children and formed stable families to raise them. If President Trump can restore America to its strength during the Eisenhower administration, he will indeed make it “great” once more.
Rev. Ben Johnson is an Eastern Orthodox priest and editor at the Family Research Council’s news website, The Washington Stand. His views are his own.
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