Who could’ve predicted (in fact, a lot of people did) that Donald Trump’s alleged working-class populism would turn into bog-standard right-wingery once he took office? The first two big legislative pushes of this administration involve kicking millions of people off their health insurance and a budget proposal to gut programs that help vulnerable people and invest in the country’s future. What happened to infrastructure? What happened to renegotiating trade deals to bring back good-paying manufacturing jobs?
I don’t know if this is because Trump is too lazy and uninformed to push for a truly “populist” agenda or because he just doesn’t care, but it’s increasingly clear that he will betray at every turn the voters who helped put him over the top. Maybe things like the Muslim ban and the border wall are meant to be sops to the aggrieved white working class, while attacking PBS and the NEA can be sold as sticking it to the liberal elites. This provides the cover for funneling vast amounts of wealth to the already wealthy (and doing precisely zero to address the supposedly urgent problem of the national debt).
In practice, rather than some genuinely new ideological configuration, Trumpism is basically just combining the worst impulses of the existing American right: a pseudo-libertarian slash-and-burn approach to government programs meant to help the less well off and a draconian approach to immigration and foreign policy that panders to nativism and xenophobia. Good times.
A Thinking Reed 