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Crowdpac CEO Steve Hilton, a former adviser to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, says he “support[s] Trump supporters.” But he struggles to find praise for President Trump himself, who he had hoped would be “a completely different kind of leader than we’ve seen before.”
“On a very basic level, I thought it was more likely if he was elected that we’d get faster economic growth, and at the very least that that would start to lift people up,” Hilton said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “The only thing that really matters is that he takes action that gets the economy moving in a broad way, raises the growth rate.”
He said that if Trump wanted to, he could probably find some bipartisan common ground on two huge economic issues, tax reform and infrastructure. However, “the choices they’ve made up till now are making that less likely,” Hilton said, and the president’s chances to have a positive impact are “diminishing.”
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Hilton, who also supported Brexit in the U.K. and describes himself as fiercely opposed to “the centralization of power,” will host a weekly show on Fox News called “The Next Revolution” starting in May. He said the show will argue for “positive populism,” which doesn’t break along party lines.
“The overlap between Sanders and Trump, you might describe as a focus on working people, concern about the political system being captured by big donors and this economic crisis affecting so many people,” he said. “That, I think, should be the focus of this administration. I would describe that as positive populism, doing things that help working people.”
He blamed Trump’s troubled administration on the “ideological obsessions” of Republicans in Congress: “That’s clearly what went wrong with the health care thing and he should just ignore them.” Instead, Hilton wants to see more representatives of “positive populism” talking about the economic crisis and what the jobs of the future will be.
“It’s not about H-1B visas or whatever,” he said. “That’s trivial in comparison to the reality that you’ve got a huge proportion of Americans that are really screwed by an inability to be productive. The causes of that are multiple, including family, the way kids are raised, parenting. There’s a lot there that business can contribute to.”
“A lot of the jobs that are disappearing, you kind of want them to disappear,” Hilton added. “They’re not great jobs! Why do we want to hang on to some of these menial jobs that the people that do them — obviously, they appreciate the money — but we can try and think about the future, jobs that people really want to do.”
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
