This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 27th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

To find parallels for the presidency of Donald Trump, it may be instructive to go back to

what historian Anthony Kamegna calls the most important election for

students of history to remember 1840 and the accidental presidency of

John Tyler. Kamegna is the assistant editor of John Tyler.

The Magna is the assistant editor for intellectual history at libertarianism.org.

We spoke this month.

Can you tell me a version of this story that, and I don't know if this violates your core principles as a historian to tell a version of the story that fits both Donald Trump and

Mr Tyler. So I sort of have this developing theory of the Whig presidency and this idea that Donald Trump

is a Whig president with a lower case W, meaning that he is a figure that was propped up by a party organization

without any particular content to him as an individual.

No history within the parties, no particular ideology,

very few identifiable true commitments of any kind.

And so what happens is the population projects on to him whatever they want to see,

and the party bosses project on to them whatever they want to see,

and the wig president... bosses project onto them whatever they want to see.

And the wig president goes into office with the ability to be absolutely whatever they want

or nothing at all and continue letting people imprint upon them.

So you can either have sort of a rogue, almost tyrannical executive, somebody sort of like a Nixon who you know it has rhetorical

commitments at least to conservatives and to the right and so on but then does this

huge amount of growing government expanding

...