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The mistake was in thinking that Trump was going to govern as a populist. The tax cut for the rich, the attempt to repeal ACA, massive deregulation, & perhaps the most anti-worker Department of Labor of the modern era were boilerplate conservative /1 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/opinion/trump-hawley-populism.html?smid=tw-share
Douthat cites this article by Matt Yglesias to support his claim that Trump " flipped the blue-collar Midwest in the general election in part by repudiating the austerity economics of the Paul Ryan-era party."/2 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/11/15941846/trump-moderate-republican
I wrote a thread about why I disagreed with Yglesias's contention that Trump ran as a "moderate." But even if you accept this unlikely claim, it is really hard to argue that Trump governed in this way./3 https://twitter.com/LarryGlickman/status/1146453436969508864
Where exactly was the populism in Trump's presidency? Was it in his Cabinet. CNN had it right: it was "a boon to conservatives, not populists." /4 https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/20/politics/donald-trump-cabinet-conservatives/index.html
Was it in his EO's though which Trump "sought to highlight conservative policy priorities including an immigration crackdown, his still-unfinished border wall, reductions in environmental protections and boosts for domestic energy production."/5 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-executive-orders/2020/10/29/c2329162-17bd-11eb-aeec-b93bcc29a01b_story.html
It's interesting how, throughout his presidency, Trump was (and still is) purported to have dropped his one-time populism in favor of conservativism. To me this headline would be more accurate if the first three words were dropped. /6 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/once-a-populist-trump-governs-like-a-conservative-republican/2017/12/05/e73c6106-d902-11e7-b1a8-62589434a581_story.html
I also found economic populism defined as "a more middle-America-friendly economics, a program of sustained support for workers and families rather than just upper-bracket tax cuts" to be interesting because I am unclear what "middle-America" means in this context. /7
