In the opening weeks of his second term, Trump has wielded a populist mandate and used it almost entirely to advance the interests of the rich and powerful. The opening weeks of Trump’s second term have been perhaps the most frenetic and consequential in more than half a century. Over the course of just two weeks, he effectively ended the country’s foreign aid program; all but shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; announced the transformation of Guantánamo Bay into a concentration camp for immigrants; empowered the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to slash budgets and fire employees at will; and watched as the Senate appointed the most extreme Cabinet in recent American history. In the coming weeks, Trump and Musk may very well act on pledges to cut more than a trillion dollars in spending and gut the Department of Education, along with God knows what else. All these actions could credibly be described as revolutionary.
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.
Indeed, the early weeks of his presidency suggest that those who have obsessed over his takeover of the Republican Party have missed half the story. Yes, Trump had undoubtedly twisted the GOP into his own image. Today it is more openly authoritarian and dominated by bigots, cranks, and crackpots than ever before. But Trump has changed, too. His rhetoric is still populist—he rails against elites at every opportunity—but little else is. Trump no longer embraces policies that boost competition, disempower corporations, and help workers. Instead, he has increasingly embraced long-standing Republican priorities—slashing the federal bureaucracy, gutting regulations, and providing handouts to massive corporations. Donald Trump may have expanded the Republican Party’s share of working-class voters, but his success with them has hardly resulted in a populist revolution. Instead, the early weeks of Trump’s second term represent the return of the Republican austerity politics that he railed against in 2016.
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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