Trump, The Populist ‘Trojan Horse’

Photo via The New York Times

STEPHEN BLINDER: If Bon Jovi once famously decried that love had been assigned “a bad name,” the word “populism” seems to have suffered a similar fate. After all, before its more recent disrepute, populism was perhaps most authentically on display in the United States in the late 19th century when the People’s Party championed agricultural America against the backdrop of an increasingly industrialized country. Unfortunately, populism, like most fluid concepts, remains perilously open to forgery. If Donald Trump is a populist, he is one in performance only – the marriage of the two ends there.

Populism once had the potential to transform American politics for the better, from limiting the extent to which the “representative” part of democracy is a buzzword to elevating (even if in voice only) the many Americans who have felt left to fight their own economic battles. Populism, in the mold of the People’s Party, was, as the incomparable E.J. Dionne, Jr. notes in Our Divided Political Heart, “rational, reformist, egalitarian, and democratic,” words that seem antithetical to the very notion of populism today. If that is true, how could Trump have possibly been considered a populist?

What many could not have foreseen in 2016 was the potential for Trump’s corrupted populism to defy historical precedent. While, as author and journalist John Judis writes in The Populist Explosion, “American populist movements have arisen only under very special circumstances,” who could have imagined that Trump’s populist pseudo-imitation would create crises of its own? Indeed, Trumpsim has become not simply a transient response to neoliberal failures and racial progress but a self-perpetuating, crises-inducing, seemingly permanent movement. Of course, that is not to mention what those who called Trump a populist in 2016 had no record of: his policies.

Trump oversaw an economy that had fewer jobs when he left office than when he became president, an inglorious feat not matched since Herbert Hoover. For a president who campaigned on lifting the “forgotten men and women,” being named next to Hoover with respect to economic success (or lack thereof) is not exactly the gold standard. 

Trump’s much-touted Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is yet another example of the stark difference between populism at its best (indeed, “true” populism) and the purely performative, destructive populism Trump embraces. Just over six years on, it is clear the legislation helped the wealthy, not the poor. It helped corporations, not small businesses. 

Indeed, one could go on about national debt, trade deficits, blind faith in the stock market, etc. Make no mistake: while Trump espouses populist rhetoric, that in no way makes him a populist at heart. By way of an imperfect comparison, the fact that Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) once performed a skit in which he attempted to direct a Salvation Army Band did not make him a conductor.

With the benefit of hindsight, if we still consider both Trump and Bernie Sanders “populists” on the same ideological plane, it merely reflects how the term has been misused and misunderstood in recent years rather than a more profound ideological observation. One can and should question the feasibility of Sanders’ policies, but one cannot reasonably doubt their sincerity. Using Uppsala University Professor Anthoula Malkopoulou’s typology of populism – distinguishing between the “ideational,” “strategic,” and “discursive” – it becomes clear why Sanders fits comfortably into the “ideational” and Trump, the “discursive.” Differentiating the two based on left- and right-wing populism is insufficient.

By preying on people’s fears, breeding toxicity, and, most importantly, creating crises, Trump has made his falsified populism “immune to empirical refutation,” to apply the words of Princeton historian and philosopher Jan-Werner Müller in What is Populism?.  Defeating Trump in November is necessary but not sufficient. We need to reclaim the word “populism” before its imposters reclaim our country.

Stephen Blinder is a staff writer for On the Record. He is a junior studying government and philosophy in the College of Arts & Sciences.