Trump’s Populism Is a Fiction
Don’t be fooled by inaugural pomp: The Trump administration is plotting a return to plutocracy.
The theme of President Donald Trump’s inaugural address was the return of power to “the people”—the forgotten Americans, the victims of “American carnage.” It harkened back to his campaign, when Trump presented himself as a populist who eschewed traditional conservative-liberal orthodoxies.
But despite the speech’s theme of transferring power from the cosmopolitan rich to the everyman, his administration’s emerging economic policy would be an unambiguous transfer of income and power in
