Niall Ferguson is a British Historian affiliated with Harvard University and the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He’s the author of a whole bunch of books about western civilization but also writes a column for the Free Press. He’s a fan of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and has been a recent supporter of the UK conservative party.
Today I came across this video of a discussion he had last December in Vancouver. This was part of a series called the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Voices That Inspire. The snippet I saw starts came only about 7-8 minutes into the discussion. It was literally the second question and Ferguson complained that the interviewer was setting him up for failure by asking him to say something positive about Donald Trump in front of a Canadian audience.
But as you’ll see, Ferguson did a pretty convincing job of it. His argument is that Trump is an entirely American figure based in 19th century populism. He goes on to argue that Trump’s rise, or someone like him, was made inevitable by a couple of things which were not working for Americans as a whole. One was the bipartisan decision to allow China to hollow out US manufacturing and the other was the foreign police decision to involve the US in several wars that dragged on for decades. Both of these things, he argues, were detrimental to the life of many average Americans.
He sees Trump as the disrupter who came to challenge these things and as a consequence he thinks the left’s attacks on Trump, comparing him to Hitler or Mussolini, are essentially ignorant of American history both in the 19th century and in the 21st. Here’s a bit of what he said.
I have spent a decade saying how absurd these analogies are and unnecessary. They’re superfluous. Uh they’re category errors. It’s a category error to draw a comparison between the United States in our time and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. It’s just a fundamental misreading of history. Donald Trump is a very United States figure. He comes out of an American tradition…
If you don’t know any 19th century US history, good luck. But if you know some, you’ll know that tariffs were central to American politics in the 19th century. You’ll know that the debates on immigration produced restrictive uh acts beginning in 1882 to limit immigration into the United States. You will know that cheap money uh and skepticism about central banks was rooted in that populist tradition. You’ll see how very very American he is and we don’t need to invoke fascists or Roman emperors to understand him.
To be sure, Ferguson doesn’t come across as a Trump fan. He compares him to both PT Barnum and Nixon, but as a defense against the worst of the far-left, Orange Man Bad crowd’s attacks on Trump it’s pretty good. And his argument about why America re-elected Trump after four years of Biden is absolutely convincing (at least to me).
The segment ends with Ferguson arguing that Canada has really been an afterthought in all of this. Americans just don’t concern themselves too much with what Canada is doing. He argues the only time Canada did matter was when Trump trolled Justin Trudeau about becoming the governor of the 51st state. And, as a result, Canadians took the bait of what was really a joke and went from being on the verge of electing a conservative Prime Minister to electing Mark Carney instead.
Trump was inevitable and Carney was an accident based on some trolling. Here’s the clip.
“As I’m sure you know Canadians feel rather bruised and insulted by Donald Trump”
The Truth about Donald Trump, Mark Carneys win and American History. pic.twitter.com/9kyJk9w0OF
— THE OFFICIAL RECORD (@SatireSquadHQ) February 4, 2026
As mentioned, that was really just the 2nd question in a 90-minute discussion. I haven’t had a chance to watch the rest but if you’re interested, it’s here on YouTube.
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