That version of Trump sold himself as a populist outsider willing to take on not just the country’s political establishment but also its business elite. His victory proved that a Republican politician could win without pledging allegiance to the free-market dogmas that had dominated the party since Ronald Reagan. On economics, Trump seemed poised to radically remake the GOP’s ideological foundations.
Today, Trump is back at the helm of the Republican Party, but the anti-corporate rhetoric has disappeared. This time around, the former president isn’t even pretending to stand up to corporate power: He’s defending big business, cozying up to billionaires, and wooing CEOs. And instead of paying an electoral price for this reversal, the polls suggest that he’s winning over more voters—specifically, more working-class voters—than ever before. Trump’s first victory opened the door to an economically populist version of the GOP. His second could very well close it.
That version of Trump sold himself as a populist outsider willing to take on not just the country’s political establishment but also its business elite. His victory proved that a Republican politician could win without pledging allegiance to the free-market dogmas that had dominated the party since Ronald Reagan. On economics, Trump seemed poised to radically remake the GOP’s ideological foundations.
Today, Trump is back at the helm of the Republican Party, but the anti-corporate rhetoric has disappeared. This time around, the former president isn’t even pretending to stand up to corporate power: He’s defending big business, cozying up to billionaires, and wooing CEOs. And instead of paying an electoral price for this reversal, the polls suggest that he’s winning over more voters—specifically, more working-class voters—than ever before. Trump’s first victory opened the door to an economically populist version of the GOP. His second could very well close it.
Central to Trump’s 2016 pitch was that politicians on both sides of the aisle had been captured by wealthy donors and corporate lobbyists. “Big business, elite media, and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place,” he declared at his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination. But he, Trump, would be different.
Throughout the campaign, Trump picked fights with American companies and CEOs. He called Ford Motor’s plan to relocate a car-assembly plant to Mexico “disgraceful.” He described AT&T’s attempt to buy Time Warner as “an example of the power structure I’m fighting” and said that he would block the deal if elected. He accused the pharmaceutical industry of ripping off the middle class and promised to “negotiate like crazy” to bring down prices.
Trump even violated the most sacred of Republican shibboleths: He suggested that he would raise taxes on the wealthy. When he unveiled his tax plan, Trump declared that “it’s going to cost me a fortune” and later doubled down on the notion that it would increase taxes for the richest Americans. His proposal would not, in fact, have done that, and Trump later walked his claims back. But to even flirt with the idea marked a sharp break from other Republican politicians.
This approach was broadly understood as helping propel Trump to victory in both the Republican primary and the general election. A postelection analysis by the political scientist Lee Drutman found that Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in part by winning over many socially conservative but economically liberal voters who had previously voted for Democrats. In an election that was decided by about 80,000 votes in three states, that support might have been decisive.
[Rogé Karma: Do voters care about policy even a little?]
Once in office, Trump slapped steep new tariffs on Chinese imports. His appointees filed antitrust lawsuits against Google and Meta. But for the most part, Trump failed to deliver on his promised economic populism. He filled his Cabinet with former CEOs and Wall Street executives, rolled back dozens of regulations, and appointed hundreds of pro-business judges to the courts. His signature piece of legislation was a massive tax cut that primarily benefited corporations and the rich.
This approach was broadly understood as helping propel Trump to victory in both the Republican primary and the general election. A postelection analysis by the political scientist Lee Drutman found that Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in part by winning over many socially conservative but economically liberal voters who had previously voted for Democrats. In an election that was decided by about 80,000 votes in three states, that support might have been decisive.
[Rogé Karma: Do voters care about policy even a little?]
Once in office, Trump slapped steep new tariffs on Chinese imports. His appointees filed antitrust lawsuits against Google and Meta. But for the most part, Trump failed to deliver on his promised economic populism. He filled his Cabinet with former CEOs and Wall Street executives, rolled back dozens of regulations, and appointed hundreds of pro-business judges to the courts. His signature piece of legislation was a massive tax cut that primarily benefited corporations and the rich.
Even so, Trump had already inspired a small faction of Republicans to
adopt a more anti-corporate, populist approach. Senator Josh Hawley has
accused Big Tech companies of posing “the gravest threat to American
liberty” in history and introduced legislation to break them up. Senator
Marco Rubio has slammed Republican tax cuts (despite voting for them)
and endorsed unionization of Amazon warehouses. Senator J. D. Vance
worked with progressives such as Elizabeth Warren on bills that would
rein in CEO pay and make it harder for companies to merge. Senator Todd
Young has proposed legislation banning most noncompete agreements, which
companies use to prevent their employees from leaving for jobs at a
competitor. New think tanks and publications were founded to create the
intellectual scaffolding for this new post-Trump conservative economics,
and members of the conservative intelligentsia began publishing books that critiqued free-market capitalism.
This faction never represented anything close to a majority of the GOP, but at times it appeared to be the party’s future. Hawley, Vance, and Rubio came to be regarded as some of the party’s rising stars. (Indeed, Vance and Rubio are reportedly on Trump’s short list for running mate.) A new wave of Republican donors, most notably Peter Thiel, began funding candidates who embraced a more heterodox economic approach. And a belief took hold in some corners of the right that Trump’s first-term economic policies had been watered down by establishment figures including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. In a second term, the thinking went, Trump would be free to unleash his inner populist.
The 2024 campaign has made those hopes look naive. As the anti-monopoly advocate Matt Stoller recently pointed out, Trump has “mostly stopped challenging big corporations, except in cultural terms acceptable to Wall Street.” And even there, Trump seems less interested in attacking “woke capital” than the greater MAGA movement is. After his supporters began boycotting Budweiser for making a marketing deal with a transgender influencer, Trump pleaded with them on Truth Social to give the company a “second chance.” Perhaps not coincidentally, that entreaty came just before a campaign fundraiser hosted by a lobbyist for Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser’s parent company.
Trump has made many such reversals recently. After years of publicly
feuding with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Trump opened up a steady line of
communication with the world’s richest man, allegedly even discussing
the possibility of an administration position. When Congress passed
legislation to ban TikTok—something Trump himself had attempted to do
while in office—the former president came out against
the ban after meeting with one of the company’s biggest investors, Jeff
Yass. (Trump denied discussing TikTok with Yass.) In 2021, Trump called
bitcoin “a scam.” Now, after a recent meeting with bitcoin miners, he
touts his support for the crypto industry, promising
to defend it against “Biden’s hatred of Bitcoin.” For his troubles,
Trump received a $1 million campaign donation (in bitcoin, of course)
from each of the crypto-loving Winklevoss twins.
On taxes, Trump has gone from promising to soak the rich to actively seducing them. “You’re rich as hell,” he told attendees at a Mar-a-Lago event late last year. “We’re gonna give you tax cuts.” He has campaigned not only on extending his 2017 tax-cut law, which is set to expire next year, but also on introducing further cuts for all earners, including specifically the “upper class” and “business class.”
At a recent Business Roundtable event, Trump promised a room of 80 CEOs that he would further drop the corporate tax rate. He has even floated the idea of eliminating the federal income tax altogether. In April, Trump told oil executives and lobbyists that they should donate $1 billion to his campaign because of how much his deregulatory agenda would help their industry.
[Adam Serwer: Why Wall Street won’t stop Trump]
Granted, Trump has promised steep tariffs on foreign goods and proposed a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, neither of which corporate America is exactly thrilled about. But the enemy in his crosshairs is no longer big business: It’s environmentalists, China, and, as ever, illegal immigration, which Trump has labeled “an all-out war on the working-class minorities of our country.”
Trump’s new message strongly suggests that his second administration would be even more supportive of big business than his first. Corporate America knows it. In recent months, the Trump campaign has received a slate of endorsements from high-profile Wall Street executives and major donors, and experienced a surge in funding. Corporate leaders, many of whom vocally opposed Trump in 2016 and 2020, have been largely silent this time around; some, like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, have publicly praised Trump.
Perhaps more telling than Trump’s reversal is the electorate’s reaction to it. Republicans such as Vance and Hawley have long argued that economic populism was the key to winning over working-class voters who once supported Democrats, as Trump did in 2016. But Trump has abandoned much of his old rhetoric and policy stances, and is doing far better in the polls than he did in 2016 or 2020. He’s doing particularly well, relative to past Republican candidates, with working-class Black and Hispanic voters. And he holds a commanding lead over voters who cite “the economy” as their top issue.
If Trump wins despite his pro-business pitch, the obvious lesson for the Republican establishment will be that you don’t need to anger your donor base to win over working-class voters—and that Trump’s electoral success had more to do with his personal appeal to voters than with his unorthodox policy positions. And if Trump governs again as a pro-business Republican, the same politicians who have built their brands on bashing corporations could again be forced to vote for tax cuts and deregulation. If Trump’s first election helped birth the movement to realign the right on economics, his return to the White House might be enough to smother it.
A cartoon by Clay Jones.
As
he defends big business, cozies up to billionaires, and woos CEOs, he
denies he ever said some of his more popular pronouncements. Hey
Donnie, we've got them all on tape!
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