Donald Trump has slashed his way through the Republican primary field not only by bullying his opponents in his normal gross, often racist fashion, but also by painting them as Bush-era economic royalists who want to cut entitlement programs. This has brought forth another round of fantasy projections of Trump as champion of a new form of conservative economic populism.
Michael Lind congratulates Trump for attacking DeSantis as an entitlements-cutter, and cheers on his battle against Nikki Haley, “the pre-Trumpist tasked with putting the old band of Bush-era libertarians, neoconservatives, and corporate globalists.”
Batya Ungar-Sargon writes, “The average Republican voter is working class and truly loathes the Bush-era version of the Republican Party, which meant tax cuts for the rich, failed wars, and an economic agenda that outsourced jobs to China. Whether they realize it or not, this is why Democrats truly hate Trump.” In an interview, Ungar-Sargon further depicts Trump as a tribune of the working man who is hated by the party elite because of his opposition to conservative economic policy. “Nobody hates Trump as much as the Republican elites who really want to back to like free markets, they really don’t like him,” she claims.
Around the same time these columns came out, however, the World Economic Forum was the stage for a procession of CEOs to praise Trump’s economic acumen. After JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon defended Trump from Davos, Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel hailed him as “a spokesman for the common man.”
When the high priests of economic libertarianism are touting a wealthy executive for praising a president who lavished him with tax cuts and lax regulation, perhaps we should consider the possibility that this alliance is not a populist uprising.
The notion that Trump is at war with the Republican economic elite is one that some conservatives would like to be true. Even the conservatives who don’t want it to be true have very little incentive to say otherwise in public. The GOP has always portrayed itself as a populist party, because portraying yourself as the handmaiden of the wealthy is unpopular. While the right-wing populists today dismiss George W. Bush as a corporate tool, at the time he was an actual candidate for office, Bush was running around clearing brush, driving pickups, and casting himself as the authentic voice of Real America.
It is true that Trump has leaned more heavily into populist economic rhetoric than previous Republicans. Republicans almost always swear they’ll protect entitlements and promise their tax cuts will mostly help the working class, but Trump has gone farther by attacking fellow Republicans as entitlement-cutters.
It’s also true that Trump has shifted his party’s base in a downscale direction, winning more working class support while shedding upscale Republicans in the suburbs. But the level is not the trend — Trump still beat Biden among voters earning more than $100,000 a year and lost to Biden among voters earning under $50,000.
And it is true as well that the Republican elite harbors significant reservations about Trump. In 2016, the focus of those concerns was his reliability as a vehicle for conservative policy. The key thing, however, is that Trump resolved those qualms by governing mostly as a traditional Republican, who prioritized regressive tax cuts, attempted to cut spending on health care for people who can’t afford insurance, and put industry allies in charge of regulation.
Conservative populists like to pretend Trump opposed plutocratic policies. “the Republican Party without Donald Trump is a disaster, morally and politically. It’s endless wars, open borders, and tax cuts for the people who benefit from endless wars and open borders,” writes J.D. Vance, as if Trump’s signature domestic accomplishment was not a massive tax cut for the rich.
Wealthy conservatives would generally prefer the party nominate somebody like DeSantis or Haley. But now that Trump has all but wrapped up the nomination, they are expressing a clear preference for him over Biden.
The reservations Republican elites harbor about Trump center on his unpopularity. Trump lost the popular vote in both elections he ran in, lost the midterm elections in 2018, and played an important role in blowing the 2022 midterm elections. Some Republicans cringe at his racist rhetoric and feel discomfort over the insurrection and his authoritarian rhetoric, though not enough discomfort to actually support Joe Biden.
Trump’s domestic policies, from from repelling the Republican elite, are the thing that most attracts them. And Trump is promising to continue to advance the same traditional Republican agenda in office. He wants another round of corporate tax cuts, another shot at repealing Obamacare, and more of the same regulatory approach. When he is not vowing to use the presidency to punish his enemies, he promises “STRONG BORDERS, A GREAT ECONOMY WITH NO INFLATION, LOW TAXES & REGULATIONS, A POWERFUL MILITARY, ENERGY INDEPENDENCE, & JUST PLAIN COMMON SENSE.” That’s standard Republican stuff.
Trade, of course, is an exception. In his first term, Trump imposed tariffs equal to 0.34 percent of GDP. But Biden left those tariffs in place and has largely tried to coopt the economic national aspects of Trump’s agenda, turning this issue into basically a tie. Trump promises a 10 percent tariff, which would amount to a gigantic (and highly inflationary) change, but seems unlikely to happen for this reason.
When conservative populists imagine Trump as a scourge of the wealthy, they are not thinking about about his policies, but instead have in mind his political style. Trump does communicate in very simple, often crude and bigoted terms. But even though these behaviors are out of fashion, rich people are sometimes dumb and racist.
Trump, moreover, is a confirmed snob. Trump surrounds himself with rich people and treats their wealth as a confirmation of their intelligence — in Trump’s mind, being rich is the best sign of intelligence short of being a brutal dictator. He constantly gushes in public over the elite education credentials of his appointees. No president since at least JFK has been such a sucker for an Ivy League pedigree. (This is in pointed contrast with his opponent, who graduated from the University of Delaware and Syracuse Law School and has always had a prickly habit of needling well-educated advisers.)
The strange nature of the Republican coalition is that its policy agenda is set by a relatively small elite that is fanatically committed to regressive taxation. Some conservatives wish the party would stop spending all its political capital on lavishing tax cuts on the rich. But rather than criticize the party for maintaining this commitment, they choose instead to pretend it’s abandoned it.
The main aspect of Trump, far exceeding his devotion to any policy agenda, is that he is a sociopathic liar who has no interest in policy outcomes at all except to the extent they benefit him personally. Trump understands the party he commands well enough to grasp that the one thing that could cause Republicans to stop defending his corruption and lawbreaking would be to betray them on tax cuts and core economic issues. He might spout populist noises in order to win. But once in office, any incentive to cater to the public over the political allies who he needs to keep him out of jail will disappear.
If conservative populists want to change their party, they should choose a better vehicle than a wealthy criminal.
