Trump’s anti-worker record confirms he’s not a populist
Message to those in the news media who keep calling Donald Trump a “populist:” I do not think that word means what you think it means.
It’s true that Trump still, on occasion, poses as someone who champions the interests of ordinary working Americans against those of the elite. And I guess there’s a sense in which his embrace of white nationalism gives voice to ordinary Americans who share his racism but have felt unable to air their prejudice in public.
But he’s been in office for a year and a half, time enough to be judged on what he does, not what he says. And his administration has been relentlessly anti-worker on every front. Trump is about as populist as he is godly — that is, not at all.
Start with tax policy, where Trump’s major legislative achievement is a tax cut that mainly benefits corporations — whose tax payments have fallen off a cliff — and has done nothing at all to raise wages. The tax plan does so little for ordinary Americans that Republicans have stopped campaigning on it. Yet the administration is floating the (probably illegal) idea of using executive action to cut taxes on the rich by an extra $100 billion.
There’s also health policy, where Trump, having failed to repeal Obamacare — which would have been a huge blow to working families — has engaged instead in a campaign of sabotage that has probably raised premiums by almost 20 percent relative to what they would have been.
And then there’s labor policy, where the Trump administration has moved on multiple fronts to do away with regulations that had protected workers from exploitation, injury and more.
And the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court deserves special attention. There’s a lot we don’t know about Kavanaugh, partly because Senate Republicans are blocking Democratic requests for more information. But we do know he’s starkly, extremely, anti-labor — way to the right of the mainstream, and well to the right even of most Republicans.
But why would Trump, the self-proclaimed champion of American workers, choose someone like that? Why would he do all the things he’s doing to hurt the very people who gave him the White House?
I don’t know the answer, but I do think that the conventional explanation — that Trump, who is both lazy and supremely ignorant about policy details, was unwittingly captured by GOP orthodoxy — both underestimates the president and makes him seem nicer than he is.
Watching Trump in action, it’s hard to escape the impression that he knows very well that he’s inflicting punishment on his own base. But he’s a man who likes to humiliate others.
Whatever his motivations, Trump in action is the opposite of populist. And no, his trade war doesn’t change that judgment. William McKinley, the quintessential Gilded Age president who defeated a populist challenger, was also a protectionist. Furthermore, the Trumpian trade war is being carried out in a way that produces maximum harm to U.S. workers in return for minimum benefits.
While he isn’t a populist, however, Trump is a pathological liar, the most dishonest man ever to hold high office in the United States. And his claim to stand with working Americans is one of his biggest lies.