Updated below, Sunday morning, April 2. Posted Friday morning, March 31, 2017.
It’s hard to lead a populist movement when you’re not a populist
“My people, they love me! Fore!” Photo by David Moir of Reuters. Via Newsweek.
Seems I’ve been reading a lot of political commentary lately lamenting our Mr President Trump’s abandonment of the populism that got him elected. A random sampling, emphasis mine:
“...the first month of his presidency has seen Trump metamorphose from a reality-television-populist-outsider candidate into an actual president who sounds — but, so far, at least, only sounds — like the strongman leaders he has always admired.”---Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine. February 21, 2017.
Trump won the election with significant support from conventional Republican voters, but the animating message of his candidacy was anything but Republican orthodoxy. Instead, it was an anti-establishment, nationalist populism, best articulated over time by Bannon but also instinctively embraced by candidate Trump in his early campaign.---Dan Balz, The Washington Post, March 25, 2017.
The battle in Congress over how to replace former President Obama’s healthcare law is about much more than health insurance. It’s the first legislative skirmish in a larger struggle over what Trumpism, Donald Trump’s presidential agenda, will turn out to be in practice.
Can Trump succeed in remaking the Republican Party in his populist image?---Doyle McManus, the Los Angeles Times. March 12, 2017.
A “populist” president who promised health insurance “for everybody” ended up supporting legislation that would have taken away coverage from 24 million people.---Eugene Robinson, the Washington Post. March 27, 2017.
At least Robinson knows to put populist in quotation marks.
When and how was Donald Trump a populist? He didn’t run as a populist, not that I saw, unless populist has become shorthand for Racist Right Wing Would-Be Tyrant lying and demagoguing his way to an office he intends to use to destructive, divisive, vindictive, kleptomaniacal, and bloody-minded ends.
“Trump’s primary constituency, grounded in the alienations and aspirations of middle-aged and older white working-class voters, is not the same as that of Ryan and establishment Republicans…” writes Dan Balz in the Washington Post, and I’m not singling him out, just using him as representative of what I’ve been reading.
Alienation, I'll accept, though it's putting it mildly. Aspirations? Only negatively. He spoke to their frustrations. He appealed to their anger and fear and hatreds, which he inflamed, and then promised to make it all better---make America great again--- by making THEM pay. Which is what his voters wanted to hear. In interviews, they didn't talk about how their town needed a new bridge or their schools increased broadband. They didn’t talk about raising taxes on the rich. And they sure didn’t talk about Single Payer or Medicare for all.
They talked about THEM. The terrorists and the immigrants and the you know whos forcing their way into OUR bathrooms and making US sell THEM wedding cakes and recognizing THEIR marriages. Supposedly the culture wars were beside the point this election. Trump either didn’t care or he was actually socially liberal on issues like choice and marriage equality. The pundits told us so. Complacent liberals cheered. Finally! We said to ourselves, in a mixture of self-congratulation and relief. Right Wing Evangelicals weren’t fooled. They knew who was the championing their cause. And Hillary wasn’t fooled.
When his voters talked about trade, it was clear they were thinking of Mexico and China, whole countries full of THEM, THOSE PEOPLE!
They wanted a “bull in a china shop”. They wanted someone who would burn it all down. They wanted their pessimism and sense of futility validated in destruction. They wanted THEM punished.
Maybe I just missed the populism in all that racism, know-nothingism, white nationalism, authoritarianism, nihilism, and despair, the way I missed the anti-war message he slipped in while wowing the crowds with tales of shooting prisoners with poisoned bullets, murdering the families of suspected terrorists---that would include women and children, folks---carpet bombing, and bringing back torture. It turns out that I missed a lot this election.
Trump did set himself up as a tribune of the People, but “I Alone” is not a populist message, and it matters who the People are and how they’re defined as well as what they expect and what’s expected of them.
All Trump expects of them is that they let him do whatever he wants in their name, whether or not it’s actually in their interests and to their benefit, while showering him with applause. What they expect of him is that he stick it to THEM and stick it to THEM hard!
He didn't run as a different kind of Republican. He ran as a different style of Republican. Loudmouthed, rude, foulmouthed, uncouth, and deliberately abrasive. His most ardent supporters---fans, like the sports fans you don't want to find yourself next to in the stands---recognized him as one of their own.
One of their own, but rich. It was important that he was rich. It meant he was smart. Smarter than than the rest of them. And that made his voters smart for supporting him.
There was a lie at the center of that, of course, that he was a smart, savvy, and successful businessman and not a conniving and cunning conman who managed to pocket the dough and get out of town before the marks figured out they’d been taken. The media ignored that for as long as they could but those pesky lawsuits kept making the business news.
But his voters never had a doubt and they identified with his wealth and his celebrity, with his being their superior, and he encouraged them to think of him that way. It wasn’t a case of the people uniting around a Great Commoner. It was the adoring mob falling into line behind a would-be hero king, hoping the glory would rub off.
He talked broadly---bigly---about rebuilding infrastructure, but he never laid out any detailed plans. His only concrete---Sorry---idea was his beautiful wall and the only way that was about creating jobs was that it would keep THEM out so they couldn’t steal any more of OUR jobs.
He said he wouldn’t cut Social Security or Medicare but then agreed to sign Paul Ryan’s budget which has always been a plan to eliminate Social Security and Medicare in order to reduce taxes on the rich to virtually nothing.
He made vague promises about his wonderful replacement for Obamacare, but his voters really only cared that he was going to get rid of it and THEY, THOSE PEOPLE would be punished for their freeloading by losing their “free” health insurance. They understood that when Trump said “Everybody will be covered” he didn’t mean everybody. He meant everybody who voted for him. As far as they’re concerned, the object of repeal is still to punish the freeloaders. They don’t see how they’ll be hurt since most of them have health insurance through work. The only way they want their health insurance improved is by their getting better paying jobs with better benefits. That’s about the only populist thing they voted for, and they voted for that to happen through the sheer force of their hero’s will to dominate. Good new jobs were going to come about when all of THEM were kicked out of the country and no more of THEM were allowed in. That was his jobs program: I alone will stick it to THEM hard!
As for “Drain the Swamp!”, that was just a variation of the old standby “Throw the Rascals Out!” and the rascals are always only members of the other party. Trump’s voters understood that the swamp was in D.C. and it only sloshed over into Wall Street when the Democrats in Washington wallowed about in the waters they muddied with their corruption. The problem was still THEM, THOSE PEOPLE, not the bankers, not the Goldman Sachs types---except the ones who were in cahoots with Hillary. These are people who believe in Obamaphones, who are still convinced that the Great Recession was caused by the Democrats, led by Obama who somehow managed to be president years before he was elected, forcing the banks to give mortgages to poor---cough, black, cough---people who had no way to pay them and what’s more didn’t intend to even try. The gators and snakes in the swamp were taking from the good, hardworking makers to buy the votes of THEM, THOSE PEOPLE by showering them with “free stuff.” Obama and the Democrats were the “establishment” and Hillary was going to continue the theft and corruption.
“Drain the Swamp!” was the call, “Lock her up!” the response.
Other than that he didn’t say much the other Republicans weren’t saying. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: He just said what they all said with more passion, more conviction, more wit, more style, and with more directness and with less dissimulation about the intentions and the desired outcome: more and greater trouble and pain for THEM! And his voters lined up to buy his snake oil and swallowed dose after dose, coming back again and again to the wagon, licking their lips, to buy more.
“Trump won the election with significant support from conventional Republican voters, but the animating message of his candidacy was anything but Republican orthodoxy…” Dan Balz again.
Much has been made of the fact that many people who voted for Trump voted for Obama in 2012. As if that makes them Democrats. And as if that means they aren’t racists. Voting for Obama doesn’t mean you’re not a racist any more than rooting for the Cavaliers because LeBron James is your favorite player means you’re not a racist. It just means you like LeBron James and you liked Obama. The question is who else did you vote for? Hillary lost all those states that went for Obama in 2012, true. And all of those states have Republican governors and state legislatures. Except Pennsylvania which has a Democratic governor now, but he’s relatively new to the job and is still pretty lonely in Harrisburg. So either all those Obama voters didn’t vote in the off year elections since 2012 or they voted Republican. But you’d think that if Trump represented a populist revolt against the entrenched Washington elites, well, if that was the case, then wouldn’t Senators Grassley, Johnson, Portman, Toomey, Rubio, Blunt, and Burr be out looking for jobs?
Trump’s base was Republicans. Republicans, Right Wing Republicans, Rabid Right Wing Republicans, Rabidly Racist Right Wing Republicans, and outright Nazis. He went begging for the Right Wing Christianist vote and got it by promising he’d defend their “religious liberty” to practice their bigotry at work specifically and in public generally against their preferred THEMs, gays, uppity women, and non-Christians, particularly those with brown skin who prayed to Allah and were out to impose Sharia Law as the law of the land.
There was no hint in his promises of the Christian gospel of social justice that informed the populism of William Jennings Bryan because the Christianists don’t want any of that. Their version of Christianity is punitive and exclusive and, not incidentally, joyless. The point is to keep people compliant and uncomplaining in their misery until God gets around to ending the world and the Saved go to heaven and the rest of us go straight to hell.
During the campaign his supposed populism provided a convenient way to look at him without having to see him for what he was. It was a convenient way to look at the people who were voting for him without having to see them for what they were. Instead of Republicans animated by the usual mix of racial and religious and cultural animosities and the desire to keep their taxes low while reserving all the benefits of a liberal government for themselves and their kind alone, the media saw only hard-working Blue Collar Joes and Janes---they didn’t know there were Farmer Bills and Farmer Beckys among them until after the election, but then they were diligent about adding them to the mix---the regular folks who were hurt by the Great Recession and whose troubles and pains the elites in Washington were ignoring. The regular white working folks.
Say it and say it again: not all working people are white, not all white working people voted for Trump, not all the white people who voted for Trump were working class.
We were all hurting. Ninety-nine percent of us were. Most of us didn’t decide the relief for our pain was in the snake oil being sold by a racist madman.
The notion that he was ever a populist was like the notion that he would “pivot” and the notion that he was reaching out to African Americans, a useful fiction for the political media who needed to deny what he obviously was in order to justify their fawning and apologetic coverage of him.
“See, we aren’t just making a mockery of our journalistic principles for the ratings and because we want his celebrity to rub off on us! He’s a real deal candidate of the people, and the people must be served!”
They also needed to justify their hostile coverage of Hillary whom they were determined to punish for having the temerity to run for President when she should have known she didn’t have their permission and blessing and doubly-punish her in advance for winning, which they assumed she would do. They contrived the narrative of the Roguish Man of the People versus the Cold, Calculating, Probably Corrupt Elitist Brewer of Bitch Beer and stuck with that until the debates revealed both for what they were and then they rushed to return to it the day after the election in order to cover the new President as something and somebody far different from what he quickly showed himself to be.
His supposed populism was and continues to be useful for the Bernie Woulda Won Leftists. It confirms that they were right all along. The People wanted a populist, and if they weren’t going to get from the Democrats, then they were going to go looking for one in the form of Donald Trump. That made the populist Bernie Sanders the man of the hour. He was the right candidate for time and the times, and his voters the future of the party, which is why the Democrats ought to put them in charge now as a reward for their having been so right and righteous.
It also helped them portray Hillary as evil and corrupt. She doesn’t appear to have a populist bone in her body. If she’s ever felt a pull that way, she’s resisted it the way a former smoker resists a proffered cigarette. She’s a good, old-fangled technocratic liberal with a conservative conscience. She could not bring herself to promise to deliver the whole bill of goods because it all has to be paid for and the money’s not there. Whatever the merits of populism, its fatal flaw has always been that the promises never come with a plan to pay for them. “We’ll get the money, somehow,” is left implicit or said out of the side of the mouth in a mutter. People pick up on it, though, and what they gather, correctly, is that “somehow” means their taxes will go up. But populism is what the People wanted, and in not being a populist Clinton was against the People and therefore she must be for the banks and the hedge fund managers and the Military Industrial Complex! Why, she’s worse than Trump!
What it is, really, this idea he was a populist and still is, if only he’d realize it, is wishful thinking. If Trump’s a populist, then he can’t be...well, Trump, and if he’s not Trump or that Trump then we don’t have a racist madman in the White House. What’s more, it means we don’t have an electorate that includes 62 million people who were fine with putting a racist madman in the White House.
But there he is, and there they are, the more than one third of the voting population who still approve the of the job he’s doing.
In the week since the Republicans were forced to beat a retreat on the AHCA, leaving Trump standing there blinking in indignation and disbelief like he’d just been hit with a pie, everything I’ve seen he’s said and tweeted is expressive of his spite, hurt feelings, and wounded pride, and none of it shows any sign he’s considering returning to his populist roots. He’s said he’s going to let Obamacare die. He’s threatened to sabotage it if it doesn’t die soon enough on its own. He has not talked about replacing it with anything let alone with a populist plan of his own or even a more populist version of Paul Ryan’s plan. Today he’s promising to wage political war on the Freedom Caucus not just for thwarting himself and Paul Ryan, but for threatening the whole “Republican agenda.” That would be massive tax cuts for the rich.
He’s building his wall. The mass deportations have begun. It’s not his fault the “so-called” judges keep blocking his Muslim bans. But he’s killing lots of people in the Middle East and he's signed an executive order taking rights and protections away from LGBT people, so there’s that.
Their only complaint is that he’s not hurting enough people fast enough.
A terrible human being got himself elected president by appealing to the worst in his voters. He was helped by political journalists and pundits who refused to see him as a terrible human being despite his forty year history of being a terrible human being. Too many of them still refuse to see him for what he is. They keep holding out hope there’s there's a good, sensible, competent, honest. and truly populist even secretly progressive Donald Trump waiting for his chance to shine.
Not going to happen. He's him. He'll always be him. He’ll never be a populist, and populism isn’t what his voters want. It's tyranny by a minority that thinks it's the majority because they're everybody who counts. It's mob rule, a mob riled up and rallied by their man on a horse, brandishing a golf club in place of a sword. It is He, Trump, and he alone will lead them.
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Phoning in an update: What I said above about Trump voters believing in Obama Phones? From Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times yesterday:
I came to Trump country to see how voters react as Trump moves from glorious campaign promises to the messier task of governing. While conservatives often decry government spending in general, red states generally receive more in federal government benefits than blue states do — and thus are often at greater risk from someone like Trump.
Ezekiel Moreno, 35, a Navy veteran, was stocking groceries in a supermarket at night — “a dead-end job,” as he describes it — when he was accepted in WorkAdvance two years ago. That training led him to a job at M&M Manufacturing, which makes aerospace parts, and to steady pay increases.
“We’ve moved out of an apartment and into a house,” Moreno told me, explaining how his new job has changed his family’s life. “My daughter is taking violin lessons, and my other daughter has a math tutor.”
Moreno was sitting at a table with his boss, Rocky Payton, the factory’s general manager, and Amy Saum, the human resources manager. All said they had voted for Trump, and all were bewildered that he wanted to cut funds that channel people into good manufacturing jobs.
“There’s a lot of wasteful spending, so cut other places,” Moreno said.
Payton suggested that if the government wants to cut budgets, it should target “Obama phones” provided to low-income Americans. (In fact, the program predates President Barack Obama and is financed by telecom companies rather than by taxpayers.)
The column is full of Trump supporters who voted for Trump because they expected him to punish THEM---
Judy Banks, a 70-year-old struggling to get by, said she voted for Trump because “he was talking about getting rid of those illegals.”
---and are now stunned to find out they are part of THEM:
But Banks now finds herself shocked that he also has his sights on funds for the Labor Department’s Senior Community Service Employment Program, which is her lifeline. It pays senior citizens a minimum wage to hold public service jobs.
“This program makes sense,” said Banks, who was placed by the program into a job as a receptionist for a senior nutrition program. Banks said she depends on the job to make ends meet, and for an excuse to get out of the house.
“If I lose this job,” she said, “I’ll sit home and die.”
Read the whole thing, In Trump Country, Shock at Trump Budget Cuts, but Still Loyalty.
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