“Today we are not transferring power not from one administration to another, or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people,” Trump said, minutes after becoming the forty-fifth president. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
In one sense, this was nothing new for Trump, who had won the Republican nomination and then the presidency in 2016 by seeing off two dynastic members of the political establishment—he humiliated Jeb Bush in the Republican primary before upsetting Hillary Clinton in the general election. For the last decade, Trump has been telling voters that they had been abandoned by a political establishment he would systematically destroy.
Trump’s brand of populism has always been intertwined with the extreme, xenophobic immigration policy that has been the centerpiece of his political project from its inception. In 2016, his campaign’s central promise was the construction of 2,000-mile wall on the country’s southern border. It was a costly, stupid idea—hundreds of miles of fencing already existed and most undocumented immigrants arrive through legal points of entry, like airports—but a potent metaphor for his larger project, which was built around the return of protectionism and isolationism. By closing off the country, he would free up billions of dollars that were being spent on foreigners or in foreign wars, rebuild the country’s manufacturing sector, and lift up its struggling workers. At the same time, he would crack down on rapacious drug companies, protect clean air and water, and spend a trillion dollars rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Trump took over the Republican Party by promising to reorient it completely away from the business and elite interests that had dominated for decades and toward the workers he said had been abandoned by the leaders of both parties.
As he declared victory early on the morning of November 6, Trump argued that he was now leading a multiracial working-class movement. “This campaign has been so historic in so many ways. We’ve built the biggest, the broadest, the most unified coalition,” Trump said, before listing a host of racial and demographic groups who had backed his candidacy. “We had everybody and it was beautiful,” he concluded. “It was a historic realignment....”
Fifteen years ago, that transformation would have been unimaginable; without Donald Trump, it likely would have been impossible. But here was clear evidence that the populist moment Trump had launched a decade earlier was stronger than ever. In the days and weeks following Trump’s victory, talk of the “realignment” was everywhere, for understandable reasons. Democrats, already grappling with the failure of a decade of anti-Trump messaging, now had another even bigger problem to deal with: If their party’s support among the nonwhite working class continued to slip, it was doomed. For much of the press, this prospect served as the latest—and arguably most profound—example of a decade-long failure to understand Trump’s appeal to regular people. For Republicans, Trump’s capture of these voters transformed an otherwise unremarkable victory—a plurality of the popular vote and the tenth-largest Electoral College margin of victory since 1960—into a historic mandate. The populist moment Trump had heralded a decade earlier had finally arrived.
Trump has wielded a populist mandate and used it almost entirely to advance the interests of the rich and powerful.
Few, however, could be credibly described as “populist.” In fact, Trump and Musk are currently engaged in one of the biggest works of deception in American history, claiming the mantle of the working class as they tirelessly work to advance their own interests. As his hold over the Republican Party has grown and his share of the working-class vote has increased, Trump has become less and less populist.
Today, nearly all of Trump’s speeches are centered on his own petty grievances and fixations, which are increasingly detached from the lived experience of his audience. His economic populism, meanwhile, has all but disappeared, in favor of hot-button culture war issues that have been the bread and butter for a plutocratic Republican Party for years. Trump is now as likely to talk about an issue almost no one personally deals with (trans women playing girls’ sports) as he is to attack a corporate establishment that now largely supports him. Indeed, the opening weeks of Trump’s second term have been spent with the administration’s fire firmly aimed at federal workers who are being fired by the thousands. A decade ago, Trump rarely spoke about the deficit and pledged to protect entitlement spending (a promise he later broke). Today, his administration has pledged to at least a trillion dollars in spending and is currently preparing to gut Medicaid to pay for another corporate tax cut. In many ways, the early weeks of Trump’s second term have as much in common with campaign promises made by Mitt Romney in 2012 as they do with those made by Donald Trump in 2016.
A decade ago, when Trump was regularly attacking Romney on the campaign trail, he predicted that his political movement would soon transform their party. He was right. The emerging working-class Republican majority is one of the most consequential political developments in a decade. But that doesn’t mean it’s a workers’ party now.
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