Can Trump’s 2nd act work for the working class while giving back to his super donors? : NPR

It has long been said that politics “makes strange bedfellows,” but some such alliances are surely stranger than others.

Take, for example, the emerging collaboration of working-class voters with the very, very wealthy in America who have increasingly allied themselves with President Trump.

Who could fail to see a row of billionaires — including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg – invited to sit with the new president’s Cabinet appointees in the Capitol at the inauguration ceremony? Yet network exit polls tell us Trump’s share of the popular vote in 2024 was higher among those with household income of less than $50,000 than among those whose households made more. Among voters with household income above $100,000 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris won rather easily.

Historically, this is beyond anomalous. Household income has been strongly correlated with party preference for generations with the higher income groups tending to be more Republican. “Rich versus poor” has been as common a narrative as North versus South, Protestant versus Catholic or urban versus rural.

But today we are confronted with an alliance between those whom political scientists might call plutocrats and those who are increasingly labeled populists. The contrast is stark, but the symbiosis is unmistakable. And we all await the outcome as the populist in Trump tries to co-exist with his newfound ally Musk, the world’s richest man with abundant clout in the new administration.

Going back to even during colonial times, some writers used plutocrat to describe wealthy men who entered politics to protect their fortunes and those of their class. Where their influence prevailed, the result was sometimes called plutocracy, or the rule of the rich. (Today, it might be closer to rule by the richest.) It comes from the Roman god Pluto, lord of the underworld and the hidden wealth of the Earth, and as that derivation suggests, it has been an epithet associated not just with privilege but with unfair advantage and exploitation.

Far more common and more eagerly embraced is the term populist, which has historically attached to advocates for ordinary farmers and wage earners. Populism has pressed the claims of the less powerful against those of the landowners, the financiers, the industrialists and other species of elite. In successive eras of cartoons and caricature, it has been the “little guy” against the “fat cats.”

Trump has shown a certain affinity with, and owes a clear debt to, many of the little guys — what he called in 2017 “the forgotten men and women.” But he also has shown a certain affinity with and owes an enormous debt to some of the fattest cats of all. Musk alone has been reported to have directed $250 million to the Trump cause during the campaign. How will he and other ultra-wealthy business figures mesh with the Trump who made a show of working a shift at a McDonald’s last fall?

Big names from class struggles past

Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, both scions of an old and prosperous Dutch dynasty in New York, enlarged their vision and political prospects by transcending allegiance to their economic caste. The former Roosevelt warned of “malefactors of great wealth” and the latter drove the moneyed classes to distraction with his Depression-era New Deal and his challenge to their hegemony. (“I welcome their hatred,” he proclaimed to the Democratic National Convention that renominated him in 1936.)

Neither Roosevelt cared that much for the term populist, associated as it was in the early 1900s with smaller and primarily rural movements. The high point for those movements had come in 1896, when an orator named William Jennings Bryan gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention condemning the gold standard for setting the value of the currency. Bryan and like-minded figures wanted to use silver as well, making it easier for farmers and others to pay their debts to banks.

That “Cross of Gold” speech carried him to the Democratic nomination that year and again in 1900 and 1908. But he lost each time. Bryan had briefly been a congressman from Nebraska but was far better known as a newspaper editorialist and a spell-binding speaker who addressed numerous crowds from makeshift stages on railroad cars.

Trump, too, entered politics from a background in the news and entertainment media of his era. And with his small town, egalitarian rallies and appeals to “the forgotten man and woman,” he has revived the term populism in the political lexicon and gone further with it than anyone since Bryan’s heyday.

When Trump won his first nomination in 2016, he was competing for crossover voters with a candidate on the Democratic side, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who wowed big crowds by vowing to govern for “all the people” and “not just the 1%.” Sanders did well among working-class voters and in the most populous states but ultimately had fewer delegates at the 2016 national convention than Hillary Clinton. 

Meanwhile, Trump humbled a huge field of rivals on the Republican side that year, winning primaries and caucuses largely by energizing those who had not voted in recent election cycles. He was not another establishment-credentialed Republican and that was his secret weapon. When he won, his campaign strategist Steve Bannon compared it to Andrew Jackson’s frontier-bred uprising in 1828. Trump went on to hang a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office.

Trump in his first term

But if Trump’s rapid rise as a Washington outsider recalled those of 19th century populists, Trump’s actual performance as president was quite different. In fact it had more in common with the record of President William McKinley, the Ohio Republican who defeated Bryan in 1896 and again in 1900 while defending the gold standard and representing the interests of business and industry.

Trump may recall Bryan’s magnetic power over his followers, but his policies seem quite consciously modeled on McKinley. In his most recent campaign, Trump lavished explicit praise on the “great” William McKinley and his protective tariffs, which Trump insists dictated terms to U.S. trading partners and made America rich.

 Although long out of fashion with most economists and blamed for trade wars and depressions, tariffs have retained a strong fascination for Trump.

McKinley was quite popular with the Republican Party of his day, dominated as it was by the ultra-rich railroad, financial and manufacturing interests of the “Gilded Age.” So it was almost eerie when Trump in his second inaugural address decreed that Alaska’s Mount Denali would again be officially Mount McKinley. The tallest peak in the U.S. had been Mount McKinley before President Obama changed the name to the one preferred by most Alaska native tribes. The timing of this latest switch is certainly notable given Trump wants to restore McKinley’s reliance on protective tariffs on imports as a means to replace income taxes and help make America great again.

McKinley’s time in office also included the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of colonial territories such as the Philippines and other islands. Trump referred to this idea in his second inaugural address as well, saying the U.S. “will once again consider itself a growing nation,” one that “expands our territory.” Trump has proposed such an expansion: adding Greenland and perhaps Canada – and part of Panama as well.

Trump improvises his own populist narrative

Trump had built his political following over a quarter century not as a champion of the economic elite from which he came – the son of a real estate mogul and product of private schools – but rather on familiarity to a media audience. He was a high-profile businessman and tabloid celebrity in Manhattan in the 1980s and 1990s. His first foray into presidential politics was made early in the 2000 cycle in what was called the Reform Party.

It was the creation of another businessman-candidate named Ross Perot, who ran two presidential campaigns in the 1990s. Perot was a billionaire when that term still inspired awe. But he campaigned as the independent voice of the common folk, stressing his plain Texan talk. He soared in the early polls in 1992, bringing out voters who made modest livings with less than a college degree and had felt unseen by most convention candidates for president.

When Perot decided not to run a third time in 2000 he turned over his movement to a wide assortment of unconventional candidates competing for his mantle. They included pro wrestler and Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura and, for a while, Trump himself. But it was not yet Trump’s time. He stepped back and conceded the field to Pat Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon who had become a media star on TV talk shows and then challenged the first President Bush for the GOP nomination in 1992. Buchanan’s campaign motto in 2000 was “America First.”

Trump became a media star in his own right with a primetime hit – the network TV “reality show” The Apprentice (and later The Celebrity Apprentice). Now known to a far wider audience, he used his fame and Twitter account to popularize a fringe theory about then-President Obama being foreign born and thus ineligible to be president. Even after Obama had released his official long-form birth certificate from Hawaii, Trump persisted in promoting the “birther” myth. He did not back off that claim until after he had become the official GOP nominee in the late summer of 2016, at which time he took credit for settling the controversy.

But Trump’s willingness to champion this and other fringe theories connected him to a hardcore of voters such as those who told pollsters they believed Obama was a Muslim throughout his tenure as president. Trump first broke out from the GOP pack late in 2015 after calling for a “complete ban” on Muslims entering the U.S.

The governing philosophy

Once in office, having surprised most political prognosticators and perhaps even himself, Trump in his first term pursued a relatively familiar list of Republican priorities. His main legislative achievement came in his first year with the passage of an enormous tax cut that was popular among Republicans generally but that greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth. Of at least equal importance was his appointment of more than 300 federal judges, including three members of the Supreme Court. Joining with three conservatives already in place, these three were able to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that established a right to abortion nationwide.

As Trump’s second term unfolds, the issues most likely to be vigorously pursued may be those where the interests of his populist base can be braided with those who sat in billionaire’s row on Inauguration Day. Here the renewal of the 2017 tax cuts is an area of commonality, as is the promise to shrink government. But conflicts could arise over other potent parts of the 2024 agenda. There was friction over H1-B work visas that Trump’s core populists consider anathema but that his backers in the tech world depend on. It was a battle between the Bannon and Musk wings of Trump’s movement.

But in a sense Trump needs both wings in order to accomplish not only the government changes he has proposed but the full measure of retribution he seems to want. Musk may have already made his main contribution with the super PAC that pumped a reported $250 million into the Republican effort in 2024. Or he may be a war chest unto himself as the next phases of political wars arrive.

We may only be at the beginning of an era in which certain political figures can serve what are plausibly called populist causes by calling on the resources of the ultra-rich.