Puck’s Peter Hamby wonders whether the grotesquely ostentatious display of massive wealth dominating the inauguration pageant yesterday might penetrate the image of Trump as an avatar of the working man.
This was not a tableau that Steve Bannon and his America First crowd would have chosen. It is true that Trump became the Republican establishment when MAGA swallowed the G.O.P. many years ago, and all the while, Trump was never shy about giving powerful corporate interests a seat at the table, as long as the invite was hashed out in the lobby of a gilded Trump property. But whether in the White House or not, Trump has always possessed a magical ability to convince voters that he’s still a populist outsider, the anti-politician, fighting for Joe and Jane Six-Pack against the “elites”—even as he takes private Mar-a-Lago meetings with multibillionaires expecting favors in return for their campaign checks.
Hamby says that Trump’s populist rhetoric, in contrast to the old country club Republicans, has worked all this time because he sounds more like Rush Limbaugh (or Joe Rogan) than Mitt Romney. His trade policies are supposedly designed to appeal to the working man but I’m not sure that holds up. Trump never really extols the virtues of blue collar America in any specific sense. He says things like “America is being ripped off” and the blue collar workers simply assume he’s talking about them.
Trump’s signature talent is the ability to play to the cultural impulses of the working class while also fattening the portfolios of the wealthy. (Or, more recently, the Coinbase and Kraken accounts of crypto goons.)
Obviously, the working class cares more about their culture war issues than about economic issues which really should make people question whether economic determinism is the panacea everyone always thinks it is.
Anyway, Hamby explains that since Trump is a colossus who dominates everything you can’t really blame rich people for bribing the most corrupt politician in American history. (He didn’t say that exactly but I think that’s a fair interpretation.)
He says that Democrats have “lost their cachet” and their voters are tuning out the news as their leaders retreat waiting for Trump to overstep. (Is that even possible? He just pardoned over 1500 insurrectionists, many of whom beat the shit out of police officers on his behalf! What could possibly be an “overstep” now?)
He wonders how long Trump can maintain his outsider image:
Can Trump plausibly claim to be standing up to powerful tech overlords and moneyed interests when every photo and camera angle shows him surrounded by America’s private sector royalty? Thought about another way: Trump has always derived his power from running against enemies—hated elites and the establishment. But who do you run against when you win so bigly that your enemies just give up and join your team?
Nah. Trump’s true enemy is Blue America and it looks like his cyberbaron oligarchs are just fine with all that even though they have derived their fortunes from it. He’s got plenty of targets to thrill the rubes and the tech-bros alike —- us.