The Phony Populism of Trump and Musk

One of the most confounding things in American politics is the cult worship of Donald Trump, a cruel, narcissistic, wealthy man who cares absolutely nothing about others, by working class individuals scrapping to get by financially and some in the middle class so consumed by racial hatred and grievance that they willingly vote against their own economic interests to the benefit of the super wealthy and corporate CEO's.  Trump continues the pretense that he cares about the little guy or gal, but in truth everything is about benefiting himself - and staying out of prison.   If his adoring cultist lay injured on the side of the road, it's a good bet Trump's motorcade would just drive on by without lifting a finger or making a phone call.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this phenomenon of Trump and other Republicans' phony populism as they play their political base for fools.  I truly cannot understand the total and seemingly deliberate blindness of the MAGA base that mistakes Trump's railing against those they hate - racial minorities, gays, the foreign born and independent women - as proof he gives the slightest damn about them. Trump's tariffs, promised mass deportation of non-whites, and trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the very rich will make prices soar and do nothing to tangibly better the lives of the MAGA base.  All they will receive is an affirmation of their hatreds.  Here are article highlights:

A Donald Trump rally is always a strange spectacle, and not only because of the candidate’s incoherence and bizarre detours into mental cul-de-sacs. . . . . The New York Times, for one, has finally said that the candidate’s mental state is a legitimate concern. . . . Trump’s rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a hall-of-fame entry in political weirdness: Few survivors of an attempted assassination hold a giant lawn party on the spot where they were wounded and someone in the crowd was killed.

The candidate’s tirades are the most obviously bizarre part of his performances, but the nature of the gathering itself is a fascinating paradox. Thousands of people, mostly from the working and middle class, line up to spend time with a very rich man, a lifelong New Yorker who privately detests the heartland Americans in his audience—and applaud as he excoriates the “elites.”

This is a political charade: Trump and his running mate, the hillbilly turned multimillionaire J. D. Vance, have little in common with most of the people in the audience, no matter how much they claim to be one of them. The mask slips often: Even as he courts the union vote, Trump revels in saying how much he hated having to pay overtime to his workers.

Trump then welcomed the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to the stage. Things got weirder from there, as Musk—who, it should be noted, is 53 years old—jumped around the stage like a concertgoing teenager who got picked out of the audience to meet the band. Musk then proceeded to explain how democracy is in danger—this, from a man who has turned the platform once known as Twitter into an open zone for foreign propaganda and has amplified various hoaxes. . . . . but his behavior reveals him as an enemy of speech that isn’t in his own interest.

What happened in Butler over the weekend, however, was not some unique American moment. Around the world, fantastically wealthy people are hoodwinking ordinary voters, warning that dark forces—always an indistinct “they” and “them”—are conspiring to take away their rights and turn their nation into an immense ghetto full of undesirables (who are almost always racial minorities or immigrants or, in the ideal narrative, both).

The British writer Martin Wolf calls this “pluto-populism,” a brash attempt by people at the top of the financial and social pyramid to stay afloat by capering as ostensibly anti-establishment, pro-worker candidates.

These movements are all remarkably alike: They claim to represent the common voter, especially the “forgotten people” and the dispossessed, but in reality, the base voters for these groups are not the poorest or most disadvantaged in their society. Rather, they tend to be relatively affluent. (Think of the January 6 rioters, and how many of them were able to afford flights, hotels, and expensive gear. It’s not cheap to be an insurrectionist.) As Simon Kuper noted in 2020, the “comfortably off populist voter is the main force behind Trump, Brexit and Italy’s Lega,” a fact ignored by opportunistic politicians . . .

One of the pioneers of pluto-populism, of course, is the late Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a rake and a grifter who stayed in office as part of staying out of jail. That strategy should sound familiar to Americans, but even more familiar is the way the Italian scholar Maurizio Viroli, in a book about Italian politics, notes how Berlusconi deformed Italian democracy by seducing its elites into joining the big con against the ordinary voter . . . .

The appeals of the pluto-populists work because they target people who care little about policy but a great deal about social revenge. These citizens feel like others whom they dislike are living good lives, which to them seems an injustice. Worse, this itching sense of resentment is the result not of unrequited love but of unrequited hate: Much like the townies who feel looked down upon by the local college kids, or the Red Sox fans who are infuriated that Yankees fans couldn’t care less about their tribal animus, these voters feel ignored and disrespected.

Who better to be the agent of their revenge than a crude and boorish magnate who commands attention, angers and frightens the people they hate, and intends to control the political system so that he cannot be touched by it?

Trump and those like him thus make a deal with the most resentful citizens in society: Keep us up in the penthouses, and we’ll harass your enemies on your behalf. We’ll punish the people you want punished. In the end, however, the joke is always on the voters: The pluto-populists don’t care about the people cheering them on. Few scores will truly be settled, and life will only become harder for everyone who isn’t wealthy or powerful enough to resist the autocratic policies that such people will impose on everyone, regardless of their previous support.

When the dust settles, Trump and Vance will still be rich and powerful (as will Musk, whose fortune and power transcends borders in a way that right-wing populists usually claim to hate). For the many Americans who admire them, little will change; their lives will not improve, just as they did not during Trump’s first term. Millions of us, regardless of whom we voted for, will have to fend off interference in our lives from an authoritarian government—especially if we are, for example, a targeted minority, a woman in need of health care, or a member of a disfavored immigrant community.

This is not freedom: As Viroli warned his fellow citizens, “If we are subjected to the arbitrary or enormous power of a man, we may well be free to do more or less what we want, but we are still servants.”