Eight years ago, when Donald Trump addressed the nation for the first time as president, he did so as the revolutionary leader of a massive populist movement. The government he had just been tasked with leading, he argued in his inaugural address, was corrupt, its economic system rigged. The people surrounding him on stage—the country’s political and business elite—had spent decades lining their pockets and growing more powerful as much of the country went to hell. America’s cities, in his telling, had become wastelands, riven by gang violence, drug abuse, and unemployment—problems that could be traced back to the free-trade deals and lax immigration policies pushed by members of both parties.
“Today we are not transferring power not from one administration to another, or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people,” Trump said, minutes after becoming the forty-fifth president. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
For most presidents, the inaugural address is an opportunity to mark their transition from the leader of a party to the head of a nation. The fractious rhetoric of campaigning is set aside in favor of paeans to unity, bipartisanship, and a brighter tomorrow. Having just won an election practically everyone thought he would lose by running as a different kind of candidate, Trump delivered a different kind of inaugural address. Trump was president, but he was still the head of a movement that was fundamentally at odds with most of the nation’s elite. His speech was not just dystopian, it was a declaration of war against the government he was now tasked with leading.
In one sense, this was nothing new for Trump, who had won the Republican nomination and then the presidency in 2016 by seeing off two dynastic members of the political establishment—he humiliated Jeb Bush in the Republican primary before upsetting Hillary Clinton in the general election. For the last decade, Trump has been telling voters that they had been abandoned by a political establishment he would systematically destroy.
In 2016, he really did run a populist campaign, when he argued that the nation’s leaders were screwing over the country everywhere, spending billions on alliances and wars abroad while they abandoned its workers at home via free-trade agreements that moved factories overseas and left entire cities decimated. Casting himself as a different breed of Republican, he broke from long-standing orthodoxy not just on trade. He also broke away from opposition to entitlement programs, a stance that had defined the Republican Party for nearly a century: His promise to protect Social Security and Medicare—both signature Democratic programs—was crucial to his success.
Trump’s brand of populism has always been intertwined with the extreme, xenophobic immigration policy that has been the centerpiece of his political project from its inception. In 2016, his campaign’s central promise was the construction of 2,000-mile wall on the country’s southern border. It was a costly, stupid idea—hundreds of miles of fencing already existed and most undocumented immigrants arrive through legal points of entry, like airports—but a potent metaphor for his larger project, which was built around the return of protectionism and isolationism. By closing off the country, he would free up billions of dollars that were being spent on foreigners or in foreign wars, rebuild the country’s manufacturing sector, and lift up its struggling workers. At the same time, he would crack down on rapacious drug companies, protect clean air and water, and spend a trillion dollars rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Trump took over the Republican Party by promising to reorient it completely away from the business and elite interests that had dominated for decades and toward the workers he said had been abandoned by the leaders of both parties.
One of the most compelling explanations, widely accepted on both the left and right, for Trump’s improbable return to power four years later is that Democrats, the mainstream media, and other “establishment” figures—eager to turn the page on the Trump era—overlooked the continued appeal of Trump’s populism. When Trump ran in 2020, his share of the working class held steady, even though he lost. In the 2024 election, it not only spiked again, but it did so thanks to huge gains made with Black and Latino voters—groups long seen as out of reach for any Republican, let alone one with Trump’s long history of racism.
As he declared victory early on the morning of November 6, Trump argued that he was now leading a multiracial working-class movement. “This campaign has been so historic in so many ways. We’ve built the biggest, the broadest, the most unified coalition,” Trump said, before listing a host of racial and demographic groups who had backed his candidacy. “We had everybody and it was beautiful,” he concluded. “It was a historic realignment....”
Over the coming days, it would become clear that Trump had a point. He had increased the party’s share of Black and Hispanic voters for the third consecutive election and performed impressively with Arab Americans. With these added to his significant and growing base of white working-class voters, the result was not just a realignment, but the fulfillment of a promise Trump made at the start of his political career: The party of big business had become the party of the working class.
Fifteen years ago, that transformation would have been unimaginable; without Donald Trump, it likely would have been impossible. But here was clear evidence that the populist moment Trump had launched a decade earlier was stronger than ever. In the days and weeks following Trump’s victory, talk of the “realignment” was everywhere, for understandable reasons. Democrats, already grappling with the failure of a decade of anti-Trump messaging, now had another even bigger problem to deal with: If their party’s support among the nonwhite working class continued to slip, it was doomed. For much of the press, this prospect served as the latest—and arguably most profound—example of a decade-long failure to understand Trump’s appeal to regular people. For Republicans, Trump’s capture of these voters transformed an otherwise unremarkable victory—a plurality of the popular vote and the tenth-largest Electoral College margin of victory since 1960—into a historic mandate. The populist moment Trump had heralded a decade earlier had finally arrived.
There was one problem: Since his first victory, Trump has shed nearly all of the populism, replacing it with authoritarian rhetoric centering his own battle with the country’s elites, rather than the struggles of his voters. During his first term, Trump largely governed like a bog-standard Republican, staffing his administration with executives and ramming a $2 trillion corporate tax cut through Congress. Even after his movement had successfully exiled his critics within the GOP and taken over most of its infrastructure, there has been little talk of cutting down on price gouging—a centerpiece of his first presidential campaign—or increasing competition. Even the rhetoric about protecting American workers has largely slipped away, as Trump has embraced the nineteenth-century notion that tariffs will rake in billions (and perhaps replace the income tax in the process). Instead, Trump’s project is nakedly and completely authoritarian.
In the opening weeks of his second term, Trump has wielded a populist mandate and used it almost entirely to advance the interests of the rich and powerful. The opening weeks of Trump’s second term have been perhaps the most frenetic and consequential in more than half a century. Over the course of just two weeks, he effectively ended the country’s foreign aid program; all but shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; announced the transformation of Guantánamo Bay into a concentration camp for immigrants; empowered the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to slash budgets and fire employees at will; and watched as the Senate appointed the most extreme Cabinet in recent American history. In the coming weeks, Trump and Musk may very well act on pledges to cut more than a trillion dollars in spending and gut the Department of Education, along with God knows what else. All these actions could credibly be described as revolutionary.
Few, however, could be credibly described as “populist.” In fact, Trump and Musk are currently engaged in one of the biggest works of deception in American history, claiming the mantle of the working class as they tirelessly work to advance their own interests. As his hold over the Republican Party has grown and his share of the working-class vote has increased, Trump has become less and less populist.
Indeed, the early weeks of his presidency suggest that those who have obsessed over his takeover of the Republican Party have missed half the story. Yes, Trump had undoubtedly twisted the GOP into his own image. Today it is more openly authoritarian and dominated by bigots, cranks, and crackpots than ever before. But Trump has changed, too. His rhetoric is still populist—he rails against elites at every opportunity—but little else is. Trump no longer embraces policies that boost competition, disempower corporations, and help workers. Instead, he has increasingly embraced long-standing Republican priorities—slashing the federal bureaucracy, gutting regulations, and providing handouts to massive corporations. Donald Trump may have expanded the Republican Party’s share of working-class voters, but his success with them has hardly resulted in a populist revolution. Instead, the early weeks of Trump’s second term represent the return of the Republican austerity politics that he railed against in 2016.
Today, nearly all of Trump’s speeches are centered on his own petty grievances and fixations, which are increasingly detached from the lived experience of his audience. His economic populism, meanwhile, has all but disappeared, in favor of hot-button culture war issues that have been the bread and butter for a plutocratic Republican Party for years. Trump is now as likely to talk about an issue almost no one personally deals with (trans women playing girls’ sports) as he is to attack a corporate establishment that now largely supports him. Indeed, the opening weeks of Trump’s second term have been spent with the administration’s fire firmly aimed at federal workers who are being fired by the thousands. A decade ago, Trump rarely spoke about the deficit and pledged to protect entitlement spending (a promise he later broke). Today, his administration has pledged to at least a trillion dollars in spending and is currently preparing to gut Medicaid to pay for another corporate tax cut. In many ways, the early weeks of Trump’s second term have as much in common with campaign promises made by Mitt Romney in 2012 as they do with those made by Donald Trump in 2016.
A decade ago, when Trump was regularly attacking Romney on the campaign trail, he predicted that his political movement would soon transform their party. He was right. The emerging working-class Republican majority is one of the most consequential political developments in a decade. But that doesn’t mean it’s a workers’ party now.
