Trump isn't a populist, he's the exact opposite

Donald Trump is a populist president. I’ve heard that time and again over the past few years, but is it really true?

Does Trump belong in the same category as politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have spent years denouncing the double standard that empowers the wealthy and politically connected — at the expense of the average citizen?

Their message, of course, is nothing new: It’s long been a hallmark of populist appeals to the common man and woman. Such appeals have roiled the political waters from time to time, but their advocates have seldom succeeded in ascending to power within an existing system of government. Usually, they only manage to do so when things have gotten really bad. So bad, in fact, that they’ve reached a tipping point that ushers in a full-scale revolution.

Populism relies on a feeling of disenfranchisement to fuel a “rage against the machine.” But in order to succeed, that rage must be strong and pervasive enough to offset the machine’s “big three” advantages.

• Wealth (and access to it)

• Political connections

• Institutions and traditions

That’s a lot to overcome.

Boom or bust

Populism isn’t built to succeed within the bounds of the establishment, because the establishment itself is its target. If the anger isn’t intense or widespread enough, a populist movement won’t be enough to create significant change within a system of government; if it’s too intense and widespread, it will topple that system altogether. It’s all or nothing, with a very narrow tightrope in between.

Have populist movements such as Sanders’ presidential campaigns and the #MeToo movement created some level of change within the system? Yes. Have they created the degree of change that their advocates envisioned? No.

And whether the change they do create is lasting remains to be seen. Populist movements, some backed by a candidate (Sanders, Ron Paul, Ross Perot) and others not, tend to peter out over time if they don’t succeed. They lose momentum as advocates grow discouraged and/or move on to other things. When that happens, the situation tends to revert to the previous status quo. Who today remembers the Occupy Movement, for example?

Revolution ... and relapse

On the other end of the spectrum are those populist movements that actually succeeded — almost inevitably with the word “revolution” appended to them: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution. But not always: The Nazis’ takeover of Germany was very much a populist movement at the outset, but it very quickly morphed into an authoritarian nightmare.

That’s what happened in Russia, too. Not once, but twice: Czarist rule was replaced by the Soviet dictatorship, and the overthrow of the Soviets soon led to a de facto dictatorship under Vladimir Putin. Cuba’s revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, consolidated his power as autocrat. In France, the monarchy was deposed, only to be followed by a series of purges and, ultimately, a new dictatorship under Napoleon Bonaparte.

The American experiment was one of the few exceptions, and its success fueled the notion that the United States was somehow exceptional. In fact, the success of that particular revolution probably owed more to geography than anything else. The vanquished “old order” was an ocean away. The revolutionaries weren’t prone to the same kind of paranoia that gripped the French, and the British weren’t as motivated to recapture what they’d lost — it was too far away, and they continued to rule the rest of a huge empire anyway.

The founders of the new United States didn’t crack down on dissent because they didn’t need to. They had the luxury of geographic isolation. Even so, there were those who suggested that the rebels’ leading general, George Washington, accept the title of king. But he refused to consider the kind of power Napoleon seized with such gusto — and that Donald Trump seems to so brazenly covet.

Populist anxiety

That’s not to say the United States has been immune to populism. The depression of the 1890s gave rise to William Jennings Bryan’s free-silver populism, which twice catapulted him to the Democratic nomination.

He lost both times.

The Great Depression of the 1930s offered up populist figures like Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest who pioneered the use of radio to reach his followers — in much the same way Trump has used Twitter. A populist ally of Coughlin’s, Huey Long, was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928 and to the U.S. Senate four years later. He was planning a run for president but was assassinated in 1935.

A recession in the early 1990s opened the door for businessman Ross Perot to launch a populist third-party candidacy that drew 19 percent of the vote.

But there’s always been a certain resistance to populism here in the States. Change is scary; revolutions even more so. The fear that populism might undermine a system that’s worked (relatively) well for more than two centuries has kept it at bay — especially if it’s associated with socialism, as it often is.

One of Bernie Sanders’ biggest tactical errors of the 2020 primary season was to praise literacy programs in Castro’s Cuba. Setting aside whether Sanders had a valid point or not, the optics were terrible. The comment, on top of Sanders’ self-identification as a democratic socialist, proved to be a bridge too far for voters. (One can only wonder whether how he would have fared if he had, instead, marketed himself as a reformer in the tradition of FDR, for example.)

Trump’s neo-populism

Many have claimed that Trump is that rare populist who managed to rise to power within the system without actually destroying it.

Others say he is destroying it.

Comparisons to Hitler, made for pejorative purposes, are all too common with this president, but one rings true, no matter what you think of Trump: Each man rose to power within the system and set out to remake it in his own image.

The point isn’t to disparage Trump but to draw a tactical comparison. Both men were outsiders who pursued two seemingly contradictory goals. On the one hand, they sought to undermine the system that put them in office, while at the same time glorifying (and idealizing) the nation that created the system. But those goals aren’t as contradictory as they might seem. Exalting a nation while discarding its governing principles is like creating a Trojan horse: You can put whatever you want inside and still call it a beautiful gift.

Many populists come off as critics of the nation and its symbols: burning the flag, marching in protest, focusing on its injustices, cursing its traditions. Trump did the opposite, exalting all those things and draping himself in the trappings of the good old USA. He adopted the symbols and made them his own, even while attacking core principles such as an independent judiciary, a free press, and equal rights.    

Is Trump a populist?

Of course, this amounts to the most blatant hypocrisy. Trump’s talking out of both sides of his mouth, which is what he does best. It’s the old shell game: You follow what you can see and lose track of what’s underneath it all.

When it comes right down to it, one of the most ridiculous ideas of all is that Trump’s a populist, a man of the people, a champion of the little guy.

He’s not.

In the words of radio shock jock Howard Stern (who had Trump on his show several times pre-2016): “The Trump voter who idolizes the guy, he despises you.”

If you look at the substance of who Trump is and what he stands for, this should be painfully obvious. He’s a billionaire who has opposed food stamps and medical assistance for those at the opposite end of the spectrum. Instead, he’s passed tax cuts that benefit the wealthy (people like him) and refused to raise the minimum wage.

He marketed Trump Tower to the jet-setting luxury crowd — after using undocumented Polish workers to clear the site where he built it. According to The Independent, they worked “12-hour shifts, without gloves, hard hats or masks or masks (and) ... were paid as little as $4 an hour for their dangerous labour, less than half the union wage, if they got paid at all.”

But Trump’s behavior doesn’t matter, because Trump has succeeded in distracting his supporters with the shell game of flag-waving patriotism and empty blue-collar rhetoric.

Populist past

True populism is a bottom-up movement. It starts at the grassroots and can be conservative or liberal: the common thread is a widespread sense that “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

Populism fueled the Occupy movement, the Tea Party, Vietnam War protests, the Moral Majority, the #MeToo movement, civil rights marches and, on the other side, George Wallace’s pro-segregation crusade. Each group had one thing in common: a grievance against what it considered a small grouper of elite power brokers.

For Vietnam protesters, it was “the military-industrial complex.” For the Tea Party — initially, at least — it was “tax-and-spend liberals.” #MeToo directed its ire at abusers and those in power who enabled them. Occupy targeted Wall Street crooks and wheeler-dealers. Both sides of the segregation issue saw themselves as victims: the civil rights protesters angry at white oppressors with roots in Old South slavery, and the segregationists raging against northern elites trying to meddle in affairs that were “none of their concern.” (The states’ rights argument has long been a rallying cry for racial discrimination.)

The Moral Majority even went so far as to declare itself the “majority” in its name, railing against what they saw as an erosion of traditional values by a powerful minority of reprobates.

Populism is a “power to the people” thing.

Pseudo-populist president

Trump, by contrast, is a “power to the Donald” guy.

He opposes moves that would increase the people’s power — not just things like wage growth and health-care reform, but baseline political issues. Populists love direct democracy, because it gives them a voice: one person, one vote; Trump relied on the Electoral College to win in 2016 and wants to actually discourage people from voting. His opposition to mail-in ballots, motor voter registration and similar initiatives are about as anti-populist as you can get.

Then there’s Twitter. Social media, for good or ill (and a lot of it is pretty damned ill), is a populist outlet.

Trump wants to control it. If someone says something he doesn’t like, he tries to intimidate, browbeat and silence them. But when Twitter itself to fact-checks his posts, he threatens to regulate it or shut it down. Not because it removed his posts, because it hasn’t — even though many would appear to violate the platform’s terms of service. Simply because it has flagged them as misleading.

The Scarborough smear

It didn’t even flag his most egregious and hurtful recent lie.

Of late, Trump has been stoking an unfounded conspiracy theory against one of his media critics, Joe Scarborough. Trump’s tirade seemed to suggest that “Psycho Joe” (Trump’s name for him) was to blame for the death of a woman in his Florida office when he served in Congress back in 2001.

Scarborough was in Washington at the time, and the woman — who suffered from an undiagnosed heart condition — died after falling and hitting her head. An autopsy found as much. Her widower wrote to Twitter, asking that Trump’s tweets be removed as a violation of its terms of service. The platform refused, apparently cowering in fear of Trump.

Trump’s pattern of bullying, threats and abuse of power have nothing to do with real populism. They’re the tools of dictators like the people Trump appears to admire most: Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and their ilk.

Trump’s no populist. He’s a con man playing a shell game, and winning by wrapping himself in the flag.

In fact, his very success shows how difficult it is for a populist to carry the day in the United States. Real populists speak truth to power.

He speaks falsehood to retain it.