The Missing Populist

T rump went missing from the campaign trail last week because he contracted COVID-19 and was put into Walter Reed hospital. But Trump the populist has been missing a lot longer.

Donald Trump in 2016 ran against the Washington consensus on globalization and military engagement. In Hillary Clinton he had the perfect foil. Just as Boris Johnson would a few years later in the United Kingdom, Donald Trump broke down the electoral wall of support for his opponents by winning heavily in areas that had been hammered by globalization. This crumbling wall was the bill come due for parties on the left that had embraced globalization as an economic creed and “cosmopolitanism” as their moral ethos. Filmmaker Michael Moore memorably described Trump’s success in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania as his win in the “Brexit states.”

So where is that candidate now?

In the long run, Democrats believe, they still benefit from their move up to wine-track voters. Chuck Schumer once said, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.” Maybe that will pan out, eventually. The shift of suburban women to the Democrats in 2018 was very notable. But selecting Joe Biden is almost like creating a bridge from the old Democratic coalition to the new one.

Biden was the best shot of stanching Democratic losses among the downwardly mobile and precarious white workers who have been shifting to the GOP. His biography, age, and personal affect gives him a connection to the downwardly mobile white voters who are crucial to the Trump coalition. Biden has leaned into this by framing the election as one that pits Scranton against Park Avenue.

By the absolute crudest measure, Biden is getting to be “more populist” than Trump. In last week’s debate Joe Biden said the word “jobs” over a dozen times. Donald Trump said it just three times. That’s a loss for Trump.

Okay. Biden may more naturally relate to America’s “Brexit voters” than Hillary Clinton did, but politically Trump needs to point out that Biden is a Clintonite.

Trump has sometimes made the first half of a populist political argument against Joe Biden. It usually features the word “47 years” marking the amount of time since Biden’s first election. “I held Joe accountable for his 47 years of lies,” Trump says. Or, “I’ve done more in 47 months than Joe Biden’s done in 47 years.” So what?

Trump has to make the case that, in those 47 years, Joe Biden was a traitor to Scranton. Joe Biden supported the adoption of NAFTA, he supported China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization, he supported the Iraq War. Joe Biden supported giving credit-card companies more latitude to prey on their customers with higher interests rates, and making credit-card debt harder to discharge in bankruptcy. He made life better for college administrators and harder for aspiring members of the middle class by making student debt impossible to discharge. During a pandemic-induced economic crisis, Joe Biden still supports a massive expansion of immigration.

Donald Trump should be highlighting that, until the COVID-19 crisis, his tough stance on immigration, his tougher stance on trade, and his tax and deregulatory policies led to real increase of wages and record-low unemployment for working-class people, especially blacks and Hispanics.

Trump not only missed the chance to go at Biden for his 47 years of leaving Scranton behind. He also failed to connect other parts of his case against Biden to this theme. When Joe Biden spoke about the tragic death of his son Beau, Trump blew past the moment heedlessly — in a way many will find disrespectful — to talk about Hunter Biden.

But by failing to tell a story of how Hunter Biden traded on his father’s 47 years of connections to get bizarre jobs and strike deals that someone of his accomplishments never could have done on his own, Trump muffed it and laid the rhetorical emphasis heavily on Hunter’s drug abuse. Biden, in a moment that will connect with many populist voters, defended his son as someone who struggled with drug abuse but whom he still loves unconditionally.

Five years ago, Trump launched his campaign and its slogan “Make America Great Again.” Democrats blanched. “Isn’t it already great?” And with a candidate who collected checks for speaking to Goldman Sachs, it sure was great. Trump’s slogan, his policies, and his rhetoric about the “forgotten man” and “American carnage” all helped him connect with an independent type of voter who doesn’t like a GOP that seems too dominated by politicians who are comfortable in loafers and seersucker in the summer. Trump talked compassionately and forcefully about drugs in American communities, blending it with his message of economic and cultural populism. Voters rewarded him for it. If Trump loses this race, it will be because he was too self-obsessed and forgot the forgotten man that he campaigned for in 2016.