President Let’s Make a Deal is floundering and flailing.
He does things like making a lame Pearl Harbor joke while the prime minister of Japan is sitting next to him. One moment, he says we don’t need no stinkin’ allies, the next, he is demanding they help us. He changes the why of the war with Iran every day, and even jumps around about whether it is a war or an “excursion.”
Narrator: It’s a fucking war.
Trump has never seemed like a competent president, but he really seems over his head now. There are cracks appearing in his support, as counterterrorism chief Joe Kent declared he was out, and people like Tucker Carlson are criticizing the war. Although, as Adrastos points out in his quick hitter post yesterday, Kent is like Carlson, a bigoted anti-Semitic freak. Trump attempted to scare Americans into thinking the war was necessary because Iran was oh-so-close to a nuke, despite claiming last summer that we took out their nuke bomb capabilities, but that hasn’t worked, as the war is extremely unpopular outside of the MAGA cult. A potential major terror attack is a looming risk, and Trump seems to either be clueless about the threat or, worse, hoping for one for any number of authoritarian reasons, like screwing with our elections. And of course, this war is leading the world into a global recession.
This is a huge opportunity for Democrats. I don’t mean this as some cynical political statement, cheering on economic suffering so my party can win. This is finding some hope in the inevitability that Trump’s war is screwing the economy at the same time he is tearing apart our democracy, and the silver lining is that it will ensure that the right people who can fix things get into office. And part of realizing that opportunity is reclaiming populism.
For whatever reason, a sleazy Manhattan real estate grifter became the face of American populism. But this wasn’t always the case. Populism was a big part of FDR and LBJ’s agendas, and arguably Joe Biden was the most populist president we’ve had in a long time, given the bills he passed that were focused on helping the lower-income, working-class, and middle-class Americans. Also, it’s always been deeply frustrating to me that “populism” became synonymous with right-wing white racists. It’s, well, kind of racist of our media to declare that only white people can be working-class when there are plenty of non-white folks in the working class.
This could very well change this year. Gas prices show no sign of slowing down. There are signs of the s-word, stagflation. Trump is now asking Congress for more than 200 billion bucks for the Iran war, which is a lot of chutzpa, given the most sacred and holy belief in the Republican Party (and some moderates in the Democratic Party) that there is never any money for social programs that help Americans in need. Even before the war, The Worst People in the World, aka tech executives, were practically gleeful about the prospect of AI taking away a lot of American jobs. Non-tech executives seemed pretty enthused as well, and this is a big reason why AI is about as popular as poison ivy with the general public.
A populist message is going to be the best message our party could carry for this election, because people this summer and fall are going to be calling for the rich to get put into guillotines, given where things are headed. “Common sense bipartisan solutions with our friends across the aisle,” Schumer-esque talk ain’t gonna cut it. If you think Americans are pissed right now, imagine how pissed they will be with $5 a gallon gasoline and rising unemployment.
Due to a combination of misinformation, a hostile DC media, reluctance to blow their own horn about Biden’s worker-friendly policies, and general lack of awareness, Democrats have to sell themselves as the populist solution to the mess Trump has made. They became, in the mind of a lot of Americans, the party of the elite. This is, in part, their own fault. Party strategists over the last 25 years seemed to be increasingly enamored with chasing well-to-do suburban voters, and fair or not, made working-class people feel like they were left behind.
Trump played this angle hard in the 2024 election. Laugh all you want at the caveman language of the “Trump Low Prices Kamala High Prices” signs that were all over my neck of the woods in the fall of 2024, but they seemed to work. The problem for Trump, and the GOP that he assimilated, is that you can’t bullshit away high grocery and gas prices. He no longer even tries to appear like he gives a shit about his working-class people, and instead is openly enriching himself and his wealthy buddies.
A strong populist message, crafted by a party that tells the Marc Cuban donor wing to STFU, can drive the GOP into the ground and make it that much harder for Trump to screw with the midterms.
The last word goes to Woody Guthrie.