President Trump is far from being a populist

As a descendant of immigrants who raised families on blue- collar union jobs, I appreciated E. J. Dionne’s Labor Day column (“American workers will see through Trump’s con,” Sept. 4). Dionne exposed Trump’s populism as a mere smokescreen for the old Republican ruse: pretend you can create jobs by rewarding the rich at the expense of the middle class and the poor. As Dionne notes, that ruse goes back at least as far as a 1948 radio debate in which Senator Robert Taft tossed nearly identical taxcut rhetoric at his opponent, union leader Walter Reuther.

What makes Trump’s tax- cut talking points remarkable is that he won the election largely by promising to defy the Washington establishment and restore America’s heyday of working class opportunity and prosperity. Instead, we have yet another pitchman for the very corporate- sponsored party line that drove the middle class into decline.

What made America great was real populism. Not hatespewing white nationalists, not immigrant bans, not do- nothing representatives gutting social programs to reward the rich, but those who stood up for workers’ rights and fair wages. Leaders like Walter Reuther, the exemplar of true populism.

Reuther quit school to work as a tool- and- die apprentice when his father was injured in a factory; while still in his teens he talked his way into industrial work at the Ford auto plant in Detroit and went on to revolutionize labor rights as leader of the United Auto Workers union. He walked the walk and had scars to prove it: toes lost in an industrial accident, permanent damage to his arm from an assassination attempt. But he never stood down from his principles.

Taft, the Ohio senator who debated Reuther in 1948, was a president’s son, educated at Harvard and Yale, who represented the epitome of top- down economic elitism: he opposed the New Deal, farm subsidies, labor unions, and nationalized health care. Even that conservative stalwart, however, strayed fromthe party line when conscience compelled him, standing up for public housing and federal aid to states for public education.

Trump will never do for his base what they believed he would do for them.. He is the “laziest and most ignorant president in history,” as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell aptly put it. He did not drain the swamp, he invited it in to the White House, along with several failed economic theories. He cares— as ever— only about himself.

Robin Vaughan Kolderie

Hoosick