Don't Call Trump a Populist

I beg you, please stop referring to Trump as a "populist." 

1. It's factually untrue.  Trump is an extraordinarily unpopular president.  Not only did he win the presidency after losing the popular vote, but - even more unusually - Trump's approval rating, in his entire presidency, has never been above 50%.  There have been presidents whose approval ratings have gone up and down, but this is relatively unprecedented.  Usually even unpopular presidents have some kind of honeymoon period, however brief and slight.  His is the first presidency that has never broken 50% in Gallup polling, and has the lowest average approval rating of any president in history.

2. The word "populism" has a meaning.  Populism has a history.  People like Jim Hightower and Molly Ivins are (or were) populists.  Donald Trump simply has absolutely nothing to do with the tradition of Eugene Debs, Terence Powderly, James Weaver, and William Jennings Bryan, let alone people like Ernesto Laclau or Chantal Mouffe.  To call Trump a populist distorts language.  I can call a dog a cat, but that doesn't make it a cat.

3. It implies that Trump's base of support is working class, or low-income voters.  That's not true.  The median income of Trump voters during the primaries in 2016 was $72,000.  That's much higher than the national average of $56,000, and higher than the median income of Clinton voters, which was $61,000.  Trump voters tended to be middle to upper-middle class, not working class or sub-working class.  Among people who make less than $30,000 a year, Trump was very unpopular.  53% of them supported Clinton, and only 41% supported Trump.  Yet the myth of the mass of poor Trump voters persists.

4. And the feeling is mutual.  Poor people mostly don't support Trump, and Trump doesn't care about the poor.  His administration proposed cutting 30% people off of food stamps, and also succeeded in making it more difficult for families to receive TANF.  After promising not to touch Medicaid during his 2016 campaign, his administration changed the rules on Section 1115 waivers to increase the bureaucracy and make pay-outs more complicated, and since then they've been trying to change Medicaid to a system of block grants, which would be disastrous for many of the most needy Americans- all while passing an almost $2 trillion tax cut for the super-rich.

It also seems pretty clear that Trump has a personal disgust and contempt for the working class, whom he regards as suckers.  People who have not acquired millions, people who work hard and play by the rules, are, in his opinion, fools.  He has far more respect for those who are "smart" enough to cheat successfully.  He has more or less said so openly, for instance when, accused of not paying his taxes, he said, "That makes me smart," or when he said that he didn't want a "poor person" to be commerce secretary, that instead he wanted someone "smart."  (Undoubtedly, Trump's distaste for the poor is tinged with some stereotypes - perhaps racial, ethnocentric, and maybe also sexist, since white men tend to be disproportionately wealthy.)

5. Calling Trump "populist" feeds into the narrative that people like Steve Bannon were trying to push - an incoherent narrative that Trump was fighting against the "elites".  It's never clear whom Bannon is talking about when he mentions the "elites," the "party of Davos," the "globalists."  It sounds a lot like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.  Bannon denies, again and again, that this is what he means, but what makes Bannon not a member of these "elites," if "elite" means something other than "Jewish"?  After all, by any objective measure, Bannon himself is elite, the elite of the elite.  He went to the most elite school - Harvard - and then worked as an investment banker for the most elite investment bank on Wall Street - Goldman Sachs, where he made a fortune - and then became a member of the Hollywood elite, a movie producer who produced 18 films - and then helped launch and eventually took over an internet media empire - Breitbart - before working in the White House.  Education, Wall Street, Hollywood, the internet, and the U.S. Federal Government: Bannon is not just elite, he's every kind of elite.  

Trump himself, of course, has never denied that he is a member of the elite, having inherited millions from his father.  Instead, he famously flaunts and brags about his wealth and privilege, and represents the interests of the billionaires everywhere (not just American billionaires...).  And he appointed many elites - especially former Goldman Sachs employees, like Bannon, Mnuchin, Scaramucci, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, etc. - to prominent positions in his administration.  There's no doubt about it: Trump is president because he represents the interests of the elites, against the popular majority.

6. It causes people to conflate Trumpism with real populism.  Left-liberal populism is, well, extremely popular.  When you poll people on the actual issues, "radical" progressive positions are actually mainstream.  Two-thirds of Americans even think "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is in the U.S. Constitution.

A perfect example of real populism is Bernie Sanders's movement.  Bernie Sanders was and is extremely popular.  In February, he had, by far, the highest favorability of any candidate, with 53% (Warren was second with 48%, and Biden was a very distant third with 38%).  Among Democrats, his approval rating scored consistently in the 70%-80% range - higher than any other candidate.  Of course that seems like an ocean of time ago, now that coronavirus hit, and Bernie dropped out of the race.  Nevertheless, even now he's still quite popular.  A recent YouGov poll put him at 51% positive opinion.  That makes him the third most popular living Democrat, behind Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.  

He also speaks about fighting for the working class, and explicitly that means fighting against the elites - "the billionaires," as Sanders likes to say.  Bannon is a poseur, whose pose doesn't even make sense.  Sanders is the real deal.  I'm even tempted to say that the entire tendency to call Trump "populist" functions to discredit people like Sanders (and Ocasio-Cortez, etc.).  That may not be your intention in using this language, but that's the effect it has.

Now... don't misunderstand me, here.  I'm not defending either populism or Bernie Sanders per se.  I think a reasonable criticism can be made about populism - that it is idealist, that it is unprincipled, that it tends to state goals without clear strategies about how to achieve them, that it is simplistic, that it is eclectic, that it just follows whatever happens to be trendy, that, in short, it lacks theory.  All I'm saying is that, for better or for worse, whatever your opinion of populism may be, Bernie Sanders is a populist, and Donald Trump isn't.  That's not my opinion.  That's just reality.

6. It's terrible strategy.  By calling Trump's movement "populist," you are (FALSELY!) ceding power to it, giving up, without a fight, a claim to what is perhaps the most important quality of a movement in a democracy. 

I'm reminded of the struggle between the "Bolsheviks" and "Mensheviks," two factions in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party at the beginning of the 20th century.  "Bolshevik" means "majority," and "Menshevik" means "minority".  In reality, the size of these factions fluctuated, and more often than not, the Mensheviks were larger than the Bolsheviks - sometimes, MUCH larger.  But on one particular vote, the Bolshevik faction was slightly in the majority.  Lenin seized on his opportunity to give his faction a name, and more importantly to give his enemies a name, and the leader of the Mensheviks, Martov, stupidly went along with these names, even though they did not reflect reality.  Outside observers didn't know this history and went along with "majority" (which wasn't really the majority), allowing the Bolsheviks to grow in popularity and stature.  And so, years later, the Menshevik ("minority") faction slipped into the dustbin of history.  Don't make the Menshevik's mistake.

7. But most of all, the biggest reason you should stop calling Trump a populist is that it makes you look like a sneering snob, who considers yourself better than most people.  It makes it look like you think Trump's supporters are stupid - the great unwashed - and that you are a member of a special group of people who knows what's best for everyone else.  Worse, it makes the entire opposition to Trump look like snobs.  Every time I hear you complain about "populism," every time you whine about people not following their own "best interest," I want to scream the lyrics to Suicidal Tendencies' song, "Institutionalized":

My "best interest"?  How can you know what "my best interest" is?

How can you say what my best interest is?!

What are you trying to say - I'm crazy?!

When I went to your schools, I went to your churches,

I went to your institutional learning facilities?

How can you say I'm crazy?

See also: my article, "What is Trump?"