The Danger of Attempting to Harness Trumpism Without Trump

Pedro Gonzalez

Politics, Americas

Fun fact: it won’t work.

David Dorn lay dying in a pool of his own blood outside of a pawn shop in St. Louis while a bystander streamed his final breaths on Facebook Live. The retired police captain had been shot by looters while protecting his friend’s business amid the riots sparked by the death of George Floyd.

Fox News Host Tucker Carlson noted hours before the fatal shooting that then-President Donald Trump had refused greater use of force against riots on the advice of staffers who told him that cracking down on them would appear racist. That October, Trump unveiled the Platinum Plan. It promised criminal justice reform and $500 billion in “capital” for black communities, conceived at the behest of “Fuck tha Police" rapper Ice Cube, whose input Trump solicited for what was essentially a massive reparations program.

Much of this seems forgotten now; Dorn’s death on June 2 has been largely forgotten. Still, the details of his murder are worth recalling as speculation mounts over whether Trump could once more win the White House. A better question is whether he should run at all.

The disconnect between the idea of Trump as a strong, capable leader and reality covers more than the sidewalk on which Dorn died. 

Trump’s crusade as an outsider against decrepit GOP orthodoxy was critical to his success in 2016, seemingly disrupting its trajectory. As a populist, he challenged the pieties and pseudo-principles of the establishment, violating taboos on trade, crime, immigration, and more. In 2015, political scientist Lee Drutman calculated that “populists”—defined as those who favored maintaining or increasing Social Security spending, while maintaining or decreasing immigration—made up 40.3 percent of the American electorate. On the other hand, Drutman found that the groups that wanted to cut Social Security and increase immigration, “‘business conservatives’ (3.8 percent), who are better described as ‘neoliberals,’ and ‘political conservatives’ (2.4 percent), who might also be described as ‘libertarians,’ made up only 6.2 percent of voters.” Even if unwittingly, Trump tapped into the former, which was a much larger constituency that blurred the lines of conservative and liberal.

Trump won, in other words, because he was supposed to change the Republican Party—but the party changed him.

In 2016, when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was running for president, he attacked Trump for his lifelong support of universal health care. Trump stood his ground. “We do need health care for all people,” he said in response. “What are we gonna do, let people die in the street?” Despite Cruz’s efforts to turn “Trumpcare” an albatross, Trump beat Cruz and won Texas. The following year, he praised Australia’s single-payer system, saying to then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, “you have better health care than we do.” It likely helped Trump with voters that Republicans attacked him for not being a “true conservative,” and that he responded by admitting as much.

By 2018, Trump had made a hard turn on the issue, sounding indistinguishable from Cruz, dismissing the position he once held as “socialist.” 

While some insist the Special Counsel investigation handicapped the Trump White House, a lot did get done—just not what was promised. Trump, who had campaigned as a fire-breathing populist in 2016, was by 2020 holding a naturalization ceremony on stage at a Republican National Convention that focused on criminal justice reform and the “GOP-friendly version of feminism.”

In 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, created by former Goldman Sachs CEO Gary Cohn and shepherded through Congress by former House Speaker Paul Ryan, replaced Trump’s remarkably popular trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. After promising not to cut Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare “like every other Republican,” he did just that for his 2020 budget. In December 2018, Trump signed the First Step Act, a soft-on-crime bill that released many dangerous criminals, some of which went on to recidivate and even murder. 

On the eve of the 2020 election, Stephanie Mencimer, an advisory board member at the Fund for Investigative Journalism, wrote that “President Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate have single-mindedly pursued policies that will harm white working-class voters, through cuts in social welfare programs like food stamps and Medicaid and by allowing huge corporate mergers.” Those voters, of course, were also Trump’s staunchest supporters in 2016.

Though Ryanites would remain in the administration, Trump staffers more closely aligned to his base were gone by late 2018, from Steve Bannon to Darren Beattie. “[G]iven recent events, it is clear to me that forces that do not support the MAGA promise are—for now—ascendant within the White House,” Sebastian Gorka warned in a letter amid being forced out as an adviser in August 2017. Stephen Miller curiously survived in the White House, though nothing came of the trademark immigration issues he championed like ending birthright citizenship.

Despite how a person may feel about these issues and individuals, the events that surrounded them set the stage to show that Trump did not campaign as a conservative even though he governed as one and filled his administration with establishmentarians. One study even found that political appointees under Trump were only about 50 percent Republican—compared to the Clinton and Obama administrations, where appointees were around 80 percent Democrat.

As with Ronald Reagan, the myth of Trump has taken on a life of its own, divorced from the realities of his tenure.

Speaking with Sean Hannity in May 2016, Trump struck favorable notes on antitrust enforcement and said, “[Jeff Bezos is] using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed.” Not only was that statement followed by a massive tax cut for Bezos, but antitrust enforcement actually declined under Trump while monopolization expanded. Rather than seeking conflict with corporate masters of the universe, Trump courted them with the help of senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s Office of American Innovation (OAI).

Ivanka Trump, who served as a White House advisor for her father, warmed to left-wing Google CEO Sundar Pichai, building a bridge between him and the White House. In partnership with the nonprofit Ad Council, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and IBM executive chairman Ginni Rometty, Ivanka’s message to Americans was “learn to code.” He was so attached to Silicon Valley that even after Twitter de-platformed Trump, he reportedly refused to join either Parler or Gab without receiving an ownership stake or equity in either company. Cook was able to play Trump well enough that the latter removed tariffs on the Apple Watch amid the trade war with China. Along with Bezos and Kushner, Cook helped steer Trump away from cracking down on visa worker programs that undermine the wages and job prospects of Americans. They would also secure generous exemptions for the first iteration of the pandemic “immigration ban” until public opposition made it impossible for Trump to avoid enhancing the measure.

Through the OAI, domestic policy advisor Brooke Rollins mobilized private sector pressure against Trump, forcing him to perform what Reuters called an “unusual reversal” on his “zero-tolerance” policy at the border. Rollins went from heading the Koch-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation to working in the OAI and ultimately leading the Domestic Policy Council under Trump. She was influential in promoting soft-on-crime policies and a more lax approach to immigration than what either conservative or liberal media care to admit. 

In October 2020, the Migration Policy Institute reported that immigration enforcement “in the U.S. interior during the Trump administration has lagged far behind the president’s 2016 electoral promises as well as the record of his predecessor, Barack Obama.” Researchers found that “the Trump administration deported only slightly more than one-third as many unauthorized immigrants from the interior during its first four fiscal years than did the Obama administration during the same timeframe.”

The likelihood of an amnesty deal in Trump’s second term was high. One was floated in 2019 and another hinted at in 2020. On top of reversing the zero-tolerance policy at the border, the Trump administration introduced through the First Step Act a provision to shorten mandatory minimums for traffickers caught smuggling drugs into the country by boat or submarine; most drugs enter the United States by maritime routes. “These criminals have never been eligible for such leniency and are rarely if ever U.S. citizens,” warned Jeff Sessions, who served as Attorney General under Trump after being the first federal official to endorse him. Kushner, however, hated Sessions, and that hatred was reportedly the real wedge between “the last boy scout” from Alabama and Trump.

In November 2020, the Migration Policy Institute made similar findings on the legal immigration front. 

Overall numbers of admissions on a permanent and temporary basis “declined only somewhat during most of the Trump years, remaining largely in line with broader trends that predated it.” Indeed, in August 2020, The Economic Times reported that the federal government approved 95.5 percent of all H-1B visa applications filed for the ongoing fiscal year—the highest ever since Trump took office. “This changed with the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought about a dramatic reduction in immigration unlike anything seen in years,” analysts found.

None of this should come as a surprise given that Trump appointed Chad Wolf to helm the Department of Homeland Security. Wolf served as a paid immigration lobbyist for the National Association of Software and Service Companies, a trade body of Indian firms. He failed to push for more funding to build the border wall while lavishing cash on unconstitutional sanctuary cities—money that was in his power to withhold. Wolf also used his discretionary powers to approve thousands of extra H-2B visas on April 1, amid an unemployment crisis caused by pandemic containment measures. Only explosive outrage forced a reversal on his part.

The irony of the pandemic is that it actually improved Trump’s immigration agenda and record. 

In the early days of 2020, Kushner and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) launched an effort to increase the number of EB-5 visas by 650 percent and lower the investment threshold to $450,000 from $900,000. The program is rife with fraud and dominated by Chinese investors, effectively allowing them to buy citizenship. The pandemic killed the EB-5 push, as it did Wolf's extra H-2B visas. By the end of Wolf’s tenure, Americans did not get a border wall, but the construction efforts did blast ravines into mountains that have reportedly become new highways for illegal immigration.

Put plainly, the overall decrease in legal immigration was largely a product of a shuttered world and not a genius Trump tactic. Apart from immigration, the pandemic could have been an opportunity to harden domestic supply chains, as Japan did. Instead, Kushner’s pandemic response consisted of turning to McKinsey & Company management consultants and relying on China for health care supplies that should be made domestically.

The economy was arguably Trump’s greatest achievement, but the myth and reality are different even there. For example, though he lauded overseeing growth for low-wage workers and those just above them, that pay boost was, in no small part, attributable to state minimum wage increases across the country.

An analysis of Labor Department data by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) shows the real, inflation-adjusted median hourly pay rose 3.8 percent in states where the minimum wage increased. Real median pay fell by half a percentage point in the twenty-four states without a minimum wage raise. Between May 2017 to May 2018, real wages increased 2.4 percent for the bottom fifth of workers in states with minimum wage increases versus 0.26 percent for workers in states where pay floors remained unchanged. “The big increase in low-wage workers’ pay is largely the result of the fight by low-paid workers to raise the minimum wage across the country,” senior NELP researcher and policy analyst Irene Tung told USA Today.

Based on United States Census Bureau data, an October 2020 Capital & Main analysis found national median family income growth during Trump’s first three years was virtually identical to the growth rate in the last three years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Median household income growth slowed during Trump’s first three years to 2.1 percent annually compared with 2.6 percent during Obama’s last three years. Measured by typical household income, which includes households with single people and unrelated people living together, “26 states saw slower growth under Trump even before the pandemic—including in half of the 2020 battleground states,” according to the analysis.

Trump won in 2016, in part, because he promised to end the job offshoring that blighted the lives of industrial swing state voters, sending their livelihoods abroad. However, a report published in late 2020 by the advocacy group Public Citizen found that hundreds of thousands of American jobs were offshored during his presidency and that the process was subsidized by taxpayers. 

By the time Trump sought reelection, approximately “311,427 American jobs had been government-certified as lost to trade during Trump’s presidency, with 202,543 explicitly listed as offshored.” The report also noted that eight out of the top ten firms receiving government contracts under Trump were government-certified as having offshored jobs. Further, at least “one of every four taxpayers’ dollars spent by the federal government on procurement contracts during the Trump administration went to the pockets of companies that offshored American jobs during his administration.”

Why? For one, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act accelerated offshoring. And rather than investing revenues in better wages, which is what conservative economics holds should happen, corporations feasted on a stock-buyback buffet. In the end, Trump offshored more jobs in his first term than Obama.

Overall, Middle America got the economic shaft good and hard from Trump. According to figures from the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Tim Dickinson, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, reported, “the tax cut’s benefits to middle-wage earners worked out to about $65 a month.” Dickinson notes that “the income tax cuts will begin to phase out in 2025, and by 2027 many working-class wage earners will face a higher tax burden.” “Sandwiched” is a good term for what seems to have happened to Middle America.

Between 2016 to 2019, workers in the top 20 percent enjoyed five times the gains of workers in the bottom quintile and roughly 3.5 times the middle 60 percent’s gains. Gains for workers in the bottom 20 percent also surpassed those of middle-class workers. In February last year, citing an analysis by Capital & Main, Newsweek reported that middle-class incomes “grew at a rate of 2.7 percent from 2016 through 2018, compared to a 5.8 percent growth rate from 2014 through 2016 when accounting for inflation.” On the other hand, the corporations and CEOs that lobbied for more immigration, hijacked the White House’s policy agenda, and supported both the Black Lives Matter riots and pandemic measures that kneecapped small businesses struck gold.

Bezos added $13 billion to his net worth in one day and the median pay package for a CEO at an S&P 500 company soared to $12.7 million in 2020. Many of the members of Trump’s “Great American Economic Revival” industry groups went from providing moral and material support to rioters to marginalizing Trump supporters and allies after the 2020 election. Under Trump, the billionaires who paid a lower tax rate than Middle Americans for the first time in history ended up supporting Biden.

There is an argument now that Trump has learned from all these mistakes, that he is wise to the machinations of the swamp and sees the bad actors for who they truly are. However, what happened leading up to and since the November election proves this to be false.

Through the use of shell companies and vendors, Trump’s campaign squandered almost half its $1.26 billion war chest. Business Insider reported that the money moved indirectly to friends and allies of the Trump family. At the same time, amid close midwestern races, the campaign pulled ad buys from Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan. Trump ended up losing three of those five states. Organizers elsewhere reported difficulty getting funds from the campaign, although it concluded with a surplus.

Between November 3 and January 31, Trump and the Republican Party reportedly raised $255.4 million from voters supposedly to overturn the election and save the country. Save America, Trump’s leadership PAC created after the November election, entered 2021 with $31 million cash on hand alone, a Federal Election Commission filing shows. The problem with that PAC is that it raised money for a cause it was legally prohibited from supporting.

“In the weeks following the November 3 election, President Trump asked donors to give to his ‘election defense fund,’ but in reality, the money raised flowed to Trump’s leadership PAC, which never paid for any post-election litigation and legally could not even do so,” Brendan Fischer, an expert in campaign finance and government ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, told American Greatness.

“One of the only restrictions on Trump’s leadership PAC is that it cannot be used to support Trump’s own campaign, including the costs of litigation arising out of his campaign,” Fischer added. “In short, Trump raised tens of millions of dollars on a claim that his PAC would do something that it was legally prohibited from doing all along.”

These fundraising efforts were often misleading, effectively preying on the most desperate. In some cases, Trump supporters were unwittingly enrolled in recurring donations that quietly drained their bank accounts. Refunds were paid from the tens of millions of dollars raised after the election. Journalist Shane Goldmacher accurately characterized the money refunded in this manner to an “interest-free loan from unwitting supporters at the most important juncture of the 2020 race.”

Trump’s endorsements further illustrate the point of non-learning. 

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas), endorsed by Trump, was instrumental in creating a weaponized hate crime bill introduced by Democrat Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), also endorsed by Trump, and now apparently the party’s figurehead, speaks of America's past as “original sin” and has embraced the Democratic Party’s call for more criminal justice reform from across the aisle. Most recently, Trump endorsed Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) to replace Sen. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) amid his feud with Paul Ryan. Stefanik is Ryan’s protégé, whose views on immigration are closer to Ryan’s than Trump's in 2016.

It is easy to forget now, and it was hard to see then that there existed a fundamental contradiction between Trump the campaigner and Trump the incumbent. It’s even more difficult to accept that though Trump won as an outsider, he was subsequently assimilated into the establishment and stripped of his anti-establishment essence—whether he realizes that is irrelevant. Trump’s policies and endorsements matter more than his rhetoric and squabbles with Republicans, who still manage to outflank and use him to advance their ends. By not creating a distinction between the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, the decidedly more establishmentarian 2020 version of Trump has come to define Trumpism with its Paul Ryan hangers-on under his nose. Indeed, Trump's candidacy and even victory in 2024 would be a boon for the enemies of his movement, as the more honest ones admit. 

In 2017, New York Times columnist David Brooks noted that “Trump may not be the culmination, but merely a way station toward an even purer populism.” Whoever comes next will “add an anti-corporate, anti-tech layer,” giving teeth to Trump’s antitrust bark. Zeynep Tufekci, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, wrote in an op-ed that liberals could consider themselves fortunate “Trump is not good at his job.”

“The attempt to harness Trumpism—without Trump, but with calculated, refined, and smarter political talent—is coming,” Tufekci wrote. “And it won’t be easy to make the next Trumpist a one-term president. He will not be so clumsy or vulnerable. He will get into office less by luck than by skill.”

Others elsewhere have issued similar warnings to their hysterical peers who saw in Trump a much graver threat to the establishment than he was in practice, considering that virtually every single arm of the managerial regime is more emboldened today than ever, from the Pentagon to the FBI.

If the movement that began in 2016 wants to break the cycle of disappointment, then it should learn from Trump’s successes and failures, and find or cultivate leaders capable of realizing the fears of their enemies.

Pedro L. Gonzalez is associate editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture

Image: Reuters