Although Republicans from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush campaigned against “big government,” once in power they inflated deficits with tax cuts for the wealthy and massive new military expenditures.
And yet the Republicans’ goal remained austerian at its moral core. Government spending cuts targeted support for the working class within budgets that intentionally ballooned the deficit on behalf of the rich. To “starve the beast” meant cut America’s social-welfare programs – while borrowing more on behalf of the wealthy.
In this light, Donald Trump is the quintessential postwar Republican. Leveraging Big Tech’s allure, stablecoins, low corporate taxes, the threat of tariffs, and, like every one of his predecessors, the dollar’s unrivaled power to attract foreign capital, he bet that supercharging the deficit would accomplish a time-honored Republican objective: whip up enough austerian frenzy in Congress to gut Social Security and Medicaid.
Even by the no-holds-barred standards of Republican class politics, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is extraordinary. Once again, the old pretexts for austerity (“fiscal responsibility,” “debt reduction”) were sacrificed on the altar of the true aim: dismantling state support for the many while enriching the few.
But that is where the comparison between Trump and previous Republican presidents must end. So-called Reagan Democrats – who, like Margaret Thatcher’s working-class supporters in the United Kingdom, kept the right in power throughout the 1980s and beyond – benefited from higher average earnings for workers lucky enough to retain their jobs in the midst of massive job losses. But they couldn’t escape demotion to the precariat indefinitely.
Following the 2008 financial collapse, US capitalism changed forever. While the banks were bailed out, more and more workers with secure, high-quality employment found themselves among the “untouchables” scrounging for a living in short-term, low-paid, dead-end jobs. Whereas Reagan and the Bushes won elections because secure proletarians voted for them and untouchables were too disheartened to vote at all, Trump won by rallying the untouchables, who now included a growing number of hitherto secure proletarians.
Against the backdrop of Bill (and Hillary) Clinton’s open romancing of Wall Street, Barack Obama’s banker bailouts, and Joe Biden’s suicidal strategy of telling struggling people that the Democrats had delivered an “excellent” economy, Trump tapped into working-class rage. All it took to attract voters the Democrats had long since abandoned were some incoherent musings about a “broken” country and the “carnage” that feckless, self-interested elites had inflicted on people like them.
Democrats hope and pray that when the pain from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill begins to bite, workers will desert him. Trump’s budget has been, unquestionably, the nastiest instrument of class war since the Reagan-Thatcher-Bush years. Like a Robin Hood for the rich, Trump weaponized the mandate he received from poorer Americans to slash the social and medical services they rely on while delivering vast handouts to the wealthiest Americans.
I, too, hope and pray that Trump’s working-class base will rebel against a president who so readily betrayed them. But I suspect they might not. The American working class did not rebel against Reagan when their collective prospects tanked while the rich got richer courtesy of federal borrowing. The reason? They were sold two interlocking dreams: capital gains on their homes, driven by the debt-fueled bubble of Reaganomics, which ultimately burst with devastating effects in 2008; and a resurgent, globally dominant America that had shed the albatross of the Vietnam War.
Today, Trump is also peddling two interlocking dreams. One is the dream of crypto riches, reflecting a novel assault on the common good – a campaign to privatize the dollar – that previous Republican presidents lacked the technology even to imagine. Coupled with the AI frenzy, this has triggered not only a bonanza for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, but also fresh optimism among Trump’s working-class base. A significant segment of his MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement, blind to the enormous risks of this new variant of the something-for-nothing mentality that led to the subprime mortgage debacle, dreams of future non-wage sources of income. Trump may be robbing them of food stamps and Medicaid, but he is the conjuror of magical forms of wealth with an “anti-system” aura.
The second dream is the Trumpian equivalent of America’s triumph in the Cold War. On Fox News, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was interviewed about the recent trade deal with the European Union, which, among other one-sided concessions to Trump, included an absurd EU commitment to invest $600 billion in the United States by 2029. Asked whether this amounted to “offshore appropriation,” Bessent diplomatically agreed: “I think a good framing of that is [that] other countries in essence are providing us with a sovereign wealth fund.”
Taken together, the promise of a crypto money tree and the belief that the world is paying for America’s rebirth may be enough to shield Trump from the fury of his betrayed working-class base. If so, who will harvest the grapes of wrath after Trump’s con job is, eventually, found out, and the accumulated rage calls forth a new populist narrative?
