In supporting Trump, populists may have made the devil's bargain

President Trump is said to be unhappy with all the attention chief strategist Steve Bannon is getting as the alleged architect of his nationalism. But how is Bannon-style nationalism and populism faring under Trump?

If the reports about billionaire investor Peter Thiel souring on the president are true, perhaps not so well. The Silicon Valley titan is often described as a libertarian, but Thiel's pre-election case for Trump was closer to the politics of Pat Buchanan than "Parks and Recs'" Ron Swanson.

"Just as much as it's about making America great, Trump's agenda is about making America a normal country," Thiel said last year. "A normal country doesn't have a half-trillion-dollar trade deficit. A normal country doesn't fight five simultaneous undeclared wars. In a normal country, the government actually does its job."

After the West won the Cold War, former Reagan ambassador to the United Nations Jean Kirkpatrick wrote an essay titled A Normal Country in a Normal Time, in which she argued "It is not within the United States' power to democratize the world," "the time when Americans should bear unusual burdens is past," and "Most of the international obligations we assumed were once important are now outdated."

That sounds a lot like Trump. It doesn't sound much like his ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.