Once Trump took office, he went full billionaire, and it seemed at first that his entire populist pose was revealed as a sham. He appointed the wealthiest Cabinet in modern history; his agencies are studded with high-level corporate executives. Speaking to a crowd of cheering supporters in Iowa in June 2017, Trump said, “I love all people, rich or poor. But in these particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person.” [...]
There are a number of familiar explanations for how Trump gets away with all of this. One is that it’s all a con. Trump is an incredible salesman, the thinking goes, and he’s duping the white working class on behalf of a new set of overlords who put on their MAGA hats and sell false hope and snake-oil policies. Another explanation is that it’s all racism. Some of his white supporters from lower-income households are fine with the wealthy making off like bandits, as long as they can comfortably look down on immigrants and others of racial minority groups. [...]
America today is fully in the grip of political tribalism, and people who think that Trump’s billionaire populism is just a con are missing something fundamental. As Yale professor Dan Kahan has found, Americans’ political positions today, both liberal and conservative, are driven much less by individual self-interest than by “loyalty to important affinity groups.” What voters often care most about is having their team — their political tribe — win. And for millions of lower-income Americans, Trump has done a remarkable job presenting himself as being on their team, creating a tribal bond between a celebrity billionaire and blue-collar voters, while excluding the “elites” in the middle. [...]
When people long to rise, but can’t, what then? For many on the left, the response is to denounce inequality and to expose the American dream as a sham. The wealth of the super-rich is “obscene,” says Bernie Sanders, along with many other liberals; what’s needed is sweeping redistribution, regulation and institutional reform. For some voters, this is inspiring — Bernie, too, cuts through the niceties of elite tastemaking — but for a lot of Americans, it’s an alien way of thinking about the nation they grew up in. Americans have an overwhelmingly positive view of free enterprise and a far more negative view of the federal government and socialism. Americans also famously overestimate the degree of upward mobility in this country — the poor more so than the wealthy. [...]
In recent years, however, a number of other billionaire populist leaders have risen in developed countries. The most prominent is Silvio Berlusconi, the jet-setting media mogul who served as Italy’s prime minister for nine years. Berlusconi was infamous for his “bunga bunga” parties with prostitutes, and like Trump, he made crude jokes, publicly mocked women and was accused by his enemies of shady business dealings. He also sparked a global outcry in 2001 when he declared that Western civilization was superior to Islamic culture. (At 81, Berlusconi has now reinvented himself as a moderate.) More recently, Andrej Babiš, a billionaire and his country’s second-richest man, was elected president of the Czech Republic, campaigning on an anti-immigrant, anti-EU platform.
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