How Trump Taps Into Working-Class Resentment
The Secret Key Behind The Success of Trump's Phony Populism
How could a New York City billionaire with an especially sordid history of stiffing the small businesses and independent contractors who worked with him become the supposed champion of “the forgotten man”?
Good question. For Democrats post-2024, this may be the question. The path to Trump’s election win went straight through the working-class. A working-class that either did not turn out for Harris or became so disillusioned as to turn to Trump to fix their problems.
Working-class resentment was—and is—the defining feature of 2024. Clearly, many people in this country are desperate for change on a deeply emotional level. Ironically, Trump’s policies will actually bring more of the same—namely, growing income inequality and the 40-year Reagan status quo—whereas Biden’s policies were the start of a revolutionary break from that status-quo.
Yet Trump spoke to the raw anger and resentment of Americans this election cycle and Vice-President Harris did not. Why? Why is Donald Trump so good at playing the outsider, even when he is arguably the ultimate insider?
To truly understand Donald Trump’s appeal to the working-class in 2024, we have to go back about 50-60 years ago. When Donald Trump was the privileged son of a Queens real estate developer trying to make it with “the big fish” in Manhattan.
You see, the New York of Donald Trump’s early days was one overrun with tribalism and simmering resentments. To many of the old money WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Manhattan elites, Trump was nothing more than a young “loud mouth” from Queens, a man born and raised “on the wrong side of the East River.”
As Donald Trump himself put it in The Art of the Deal, “I was a kid from Queens who worked in Brooklyn, and suddenly I had an apartment on the Upper East Side … I became a city guy instead of a kid from the boroughs” (emphasis mine).
On the one hand, Trump always felt like he should be “one of them.” After all, he was a rich WASP just like them. He got an Ivy League degree just like them. And eventually, he “made it” in real estate just like them.
On the other hand, no matter how “successful” Donald Trump ever became, he would always be a kid “born on the wrong side of river.” A tacky real estate developer whose brashness masked his bitterness towards the Manhattan elites who never accepted him. Who seemed to laugh at him behind his back. Who looked at his gaudy buildings and his suspicious real estate practices with disgust and scorn.
He was a man “yearning to make it on the big stage,” and the big stage rejected him. Looked down on him. Talked down to him. Condescended to him.
Many working people share Donald Trump’s type of resentment. In Providence, Rhode Island, we have the wealthier East Side, and then we have “everybody else.” In many other cities across this country, we can see similar rivalries between the “haves” and the “have nots.” Having visited Allentown, a former blue-collar steel town in the battleground Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I can attest to the same divisions along racial and economic lines. Indeed, in the Lehigh Valley, Trump made inroads in both 2016 and 2024 into this traditionally Democratic area.
In other cases, the division pits region against region. “The flyover country” vs. “the coastal elites.” Or “regular Middle America” vs. “the Deep State, the media, and Hollyweird.”
You see where I am going with this. Donald Trump had the perfect recipe for pretending to speak to “the common man.” He had the perfect ingredients for creating a phony populism based on fake class resentment.
To be clear, the working people of America have every reason to feel put upon, abused, condescended to, and looked down upon. Unlike Trump, the people living paycheck-to-paycheck suffered more than rejection at the hands of America’s elite-educated corporate oligarchs.
Income inequality has grown, and corporate profits have grown with them. Unions have shrunk, and the average wages of Americans have shrunk with them. Meanwhile, billionaires like Elon Musk have bought our politics. For example, Musk donated $240 million to Trump in the final months of the campaign, in large part to bury the soon-to-be exposed Tesla safety record (see The Rachel Maddow Show of Monday December 16, 2024).
Musk and Co. have bought our government so that they can get steal the spoils of government for themselves, taking away the long-established safety net of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security from those who need it the most.
Through all this, Donald Trump has been clear where he stands. Unfortunately, many of his supporters do not see that. Perhaps because, as one person once said, Trump “understands how people feel when they’re close enough to power to see it, but not so close that it’s within reach.”
“The Trump franchise,” she explains, “has always been about promising the masses access to a very particular brand of wealth and glamour. That’s a potent mixture for the disenfranchised [working people] drawn to his rallies: Trump offers entry into a distant world, yet he’s simultaneously disdainful of elites.”
When you dig deeper, you will see where Trump’s true allegiances lie. Phony populism is a poor substitute for the real thing.