The New York Times: Stop calling Trump a Populist

Message to those in the news media who keep calling Donald Trump a “populist”: I do not think that word means what you think it means.

It’s true that Trump still, on occasion, poses as someone who champions the interests of ordinary working Americans against those of the elite. And I guess there’s a sense in which his embrace of white nationalism gives voice to ordinary Americans who share his racism but have felt unable to air their prejudice in public.

But he’s been in office for a year and a half, time enough to be judged on what he does, not what he says. And his administration has been relentlessly anti-worker on every front. Trump is about as populist as he is godly — that is, not at all.

Start with tax policy, where Trump’s major legislative achievement is a tax cut that mainly benefits corporations — whose tax payments have fallen off a cliff — and has done nothing at all to raise wages. The tax plan does so little for ordinary Americans that Republicans have stopped campaigning on it. Yet the administration is floating the (probably illegal) idea of using executive action to cut taxes on the rich by an extra $100 billion.

There’s also health policy, where Trump, having failed to repeal Obamacare — which would have been a huge blow to working families — has engaged instead in a campaign of sabotage that has probably raised premiums by almost 20 percent relative to what they would have been otherwise. Inevitably, the burden of these higher premiums falls most heavily on families earning just a bit too much to be eligible for subsidies, that is, the upper part of the working class.

And then there’s labor policy, where the Trump administration has moved on multiple fronts to do away with regulations that had protected workers from exploitation, injury and more.