Trump's Real Base Is the Ruling Class
President Donald Trump addresses the media at the White House
Tuesday.President Trump addresses the media at the White House on Super
Tuesday. (Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP)
Don't blame the Trump presidency on the white proletariat. The real
responsibility for this epically transgressive administration - headed by an
individual Noam Chomsky rightly describes as "the most dangerous criminal in
human history" - lies with the billionaire class.
According to a mainstream media myth long believed by intellectuals who
ought to know better, Donald Trump rode into the White House on a great
upsurge of support from poor, white, working-class voters drawn to the
Republican candidate's populist anti-Wall Street pitch in key
deindustrialized battleground states. This conventional Rust Belt rebellion
wisdom was proclaimed on the front page of the nation's newspaper of record,
The New York Times, a day after the 2016 election. The Times called Trump's
victory "a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition
of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters." That same day, Times
political writer Nate Cohn wrote that "Donald J. Trump won the presidency by
riding an enormous wave of support among working-class whites."
This storyline - repeated ad nauseam and taken for granted in the mainstream
media and even in much of the progressive left - is flatly contradicted by
credible data. There was no mass white working-class outpouring for Trump in
2016. Slate writers Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr noted weeks
after the election: "Donald Trump didn't flip working-class white voters,"
they wrote. "Hillary Clinton lost them. . Relative to the 2012 election,
Democratic support in the key Rust Belt states [Iowa, Michigan, Ohio,
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin] collapsed as a huge number of Democrats stayed
home or (to a lesser extent) voted for a third party."
According to the sources cited in Slate's analysis, the decline in numbers
of working-class Democratic voters between 2012 and 2016 was much bigger
than the increase of working-class Republican voters in the "Rust Belt
Five." Among those earning less than $50,000 a year in those states, the
drop in Democratic voting was 3.5 times greater than the uptick in
Republican voting. The party's long tilt to the corporatist and Wall
Street-friendly right, evident under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, explains
in part why 45% of the U.S. electorate didn't bother to vote in 2016. Trump
was elected by just a little more than a quarter of the U.S. voting-age
population.
Unheeded by leftist and liberal intellectuals who still insist that Trump's
base comprised lower- and working-class white people, Lehigh University
political scientist Anthony DiMaggio (an all-too-rare intellectual from the
left with a strong grasp of statistics) has been trying for years to tell us
that Trump's 2016 backers weren't really all that proletarian. While the
president's voters were less formally educated and more likely to work in
blue-collar jobs than backers of the arch-corporatist Hillary Clinton, they
earned higher household incomes. They were no more likely to face labor
market competition through immigration or trade. They were no more likely to
be economically disadvantaged and insecure. Areas hit hardest by
manufacturing job losses actually were less likely to back Trump.
Yes, Trump opportunistically ripped on "free trade," Goldman Sachs,
Clinton's six-figure Wall Street speaking honorariums, finance capital's
cherished carried-interest tax break, and even (indirectly) the Koch
brothers. In an appeal to the "forgotten working people of our great
heartland," he bemoaned shuttered factories and mills whose closings he
blamed on globalist trade agreements.
But as political sociologists David Norton Smith and Eric Hanley argued two
years ago, the disproportionately white Trump base was not differentiated
from white non-Trump voters by class, other demographic factors (such as
income, age, gender and the alleged class identifier of education) or by
economic grievances against the wealthy. What set the largely
petit-bourgeois Trump supporters apart, Smith and Hanley showed, was their
shared allegiance to eight core values and identities: identification as
"conservative"; support for "domineering leaders"; Christian fundamentalism;
prejudice against immigrants; prejudice against blacks; prejudice against
Muslims; prejudice against women; and a sense of pessimism about the
economy.
If it's wrong to see Trump as the product of the white working class and its
populist-proletarian rage, it's equally incorrect to think that Trump rose
to power without significant and essential backing from the lords of
capital. Trump got a big, indirect capitalist boost from elite corporate and
financial Democratic election investors who helped Clinton defeat the
populist-progressive Bernie Sanders - who by many indicators stood a better
chance against Trump than she did. Those same investors then helped convince
Clinton to run a campaign that stayed fatally silent on policy matters of
critical significance to working-class voters.
Trump also was backed directly by the ruling class. In the 2016 Republican
primaries, Trump was able to leapfrog over the heads of his less wealthy
Republican rivals, thanks to disproportionate media attention and to his own
fortune - worth $2 billion by The New York Times' estimation in mid-March of
2016. (A Republican candidate dependent on the usual elite bankrollers would
never have been able to get away with Trump's crowd-pleasing and
rating-boosting antics.)
After Trump won the Republican nomination, however, he could no longer go it
alone. During the Republican National Convention and in the late summer of
2016, Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen have shown, Trump's
flagging, formerly solo campaign was "rescued by major industries plainly
hoping for tariff relief, waves of other billionaires from the far, far
right of the already far right Republican Party, and the most
disruption-exalting corners of Wall Street."
The Trump general election campaign relied on "a giant wave of dark money -
one that towered over anything in 2016 or even Mitt Romney's munificently
financed 2012 effort - to say nothing of any Russian Facebook experiments."
Along with colossal contributions from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and
his wife ($11 million), Sands Casino employees ($20 million) and Silicon
Valley executives, Trump garnered a campaign finance torrent from big hedge
funds and "large private equity firms, the part of Wall Street which had
long championed hostile takeovers." This critical surge of right-wing cash
came after Trump moved to rescue his flagging campaign by handing its
direction from the Russia-tainted Paul Manafort to the far more effective
white-nationalist Breitbart executive Steve Bannon. Bannon was strongly
connected to the eccentric, right-wing, hedge-fund billionaire Robert
Mercer, who poured a vast sum - $26 million (making him Trump's
third-largest backer) - into the Trump campaign.
Along with the racist voter suppression carried out by Koch-backed
Republican state governments and the geographic advantage afforded
Republican candidates by the Electoral College, this late-season influx of
hard-right election investing tilted the election Trump's way.
Another key source of support was, of course, Fox News, a critical
hard-right, capitalist, propaganda asset owned by right-wing Australian
multibillionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
It wasn't for nothing that David Koch stood, in author Jane Mayer's words,
"with a jubilant smile amid the throngs of revelers at the Hilton Hotel in
midtown Manhattan" on the night of Trump's election. Adelson, Mercer,
Murdoch and other right-wing oligarchs, including the Koch brothers,
appreciated how Trump's faux-populist campaign promoted a hard-right variant
of the extreme neoliberal nostrums they'd long advanced in the name of the
"free market." Trump's economic plan to "make America great again" and
"create 25 million new jobs" was simple and straightforward: massive tax
cuts, a simplification of the tax code, a vast reduction in government
spending, a rollback of "excessive regulation," the scrapping of the North
American Free Trade Agreement, and expanded oil and gas drilling. With the
exceptions of his tariff-mongering and immigrant-bashing (which the Kochs
and Mercer likely expected to fade once they placed their people in the new
administration), Trump's economic platform was lifted right out of the
neoliberal playbook. While candidate Trump might have promised to smite
elites, his proposals, in Mayer's words, "threatened instead to enshrine a
permanent aristocracy in America . [the Kochs] . stood to benefit to an
extent that dwarfed earlier administrations, as did many other
billionaires."
Trump has shown that he understands who his real and most powerful base is -
the billionaire class - ever since his election. His transition team and
inaugural committee swarmed with right-wing oligarchs and their lobbyists.
The president spends evening hours conferring by telephone not with MAGA
hat-wearing proles but with fellow right-wing billionaires and
multimillionaires - the only class of people he really respects. As he rips
up regulations, lets key federal agencies wither and staffs top government
posts with right-wing oligarchs and their toadies - consistent with Bannon's
call for the "deconstruction of the administrative state" - the real winners
under Trump have been the economic elite. These are the leading
beneficiaries of Trump's effort to introduce what leftist economist Jack
Rasmus calls "a more virulent form of neoliberalism," replete with a
pronounced assault on democracy and a drift toward tyranny. Journalist
Thomas Meaney notes that Trump as president has "fed the richest in society
in the currency they prefer - dollars - and fed his fans lower down with a
temporarily effective substitute - recognition." As David Masciotra writes
at Salon, "The acknowledgement and solace Trump provides for the
insecurities and prejudices of the little-red-hat boys conceals the true
beneficiaries of his presidency. . [Trump's] socialistic giveaway [tax cut]
to the wealthy has cost America $1.9 trillion. For that same staggering sum
of money, the Trump administration could have forgiven all outstanding
student debt, created a system of affordable child care for working parents,
and eliminated tuition at community colleges. . Corporations that profit in
the hundreds of million, including FedEx, General Electric and Netflix, pay
no taxes under Trump's plan, while 10 million Americans of average means .
saw their tax bills increase."
Like Trump or not, many in the upper bourgeoisie are contributing to his
record-setting campaign finance take (up to a Darth Vader-like $253 million
by end of January, more than half from large donors). Trump's war chest is
stocked by big money super-PACS -America First Action, Future45, Great
America PAC, Rebuild America Now and The Committee to Defend the President -
funneling cash to the grand cause of keeping "the most dangerous criminal in
human history" in the world's most powerful position.
If the lords of capital were seriously concerned by the demented president's
fascistic conduct- replete with regular racist hate rallies, open flirtation
with political violence, not-so-veiled threats to resist a 2020 electoral
outcome that doesn't go his way, and the granting of pardons to sociopathic
war criminals - they could collapse his presidency with ruling-class weapons
they will employ with zeal should Sanders somehow defy the odds and attain
the presidency: capital strike and a constant propaganda war claiming that
the administration was crippling prosperity.
Expressing sentiments common across the commanding heights of the investor
class, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, a lifelong Democrat, has voiced
preference for the neofascist Trump over Sanders, a moderate social democrat
advancing policies that qualify as centrist in capitalist western and
northern Europe. The corporate-captive Democratic Party's openly
authoritarian, Wall Street-friendly superdelegates are ready to hand Trump a
second term by "super"-voting in the Democratic National Convention's second
ballot to deny Sanders their party's nomination, even if he comes to the
convention with a large plurality of primary delegates. Deep-sixing the
highly popular, progressive senator at the convention will likely wreck the
party, crippling it for the general election - a risk the superdelegates are
perfectly willing to take.
So what if Trump is, in Chomsky's words, "dedicated with fervor to
destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant
future (along with millions of other species)"?
And so what if another corporate-neoliberal Democratic presidency in the
Clinton-Obama-Biden-Buttigieg-Bloomberg-Council on Foreign Relations-Center
for American Progress mode would (if Biden or Bloomberg could somehow defeat
a possibly recession-plagued Trump) birth a 2025 Republican presidency even
more fascistic than Trump's? The oligarchs don't care. They'll work out a
comfortable accommodation with that monster, too.
Paul Street
Contributor
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He
is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban
League. Street is also the author of numerous books,.
Paul Street
