Goodbye, populism. Hello, plutocracy

A lot of Donald Trump’s behavior over the course of 2017 has fit under the general heading of “shocking but not surprising.” From the continued attacks on the media to the constant lying to the simple unprofessionalism of so much official White House work product to the indulgence of casual racism, we’re getting the Trump we saw on the campaign trail.

But what’s flown under the radar is that there is plenty surprising about Trump’s conduct in office. In particular, on economic issues he’s governed a lot more like a hard-right conservative than a freewheeling populist.

As a candidate, Trump promised a crackdown on abusive pharmaceutical pricing. As president, Trump has put a pharmaceutical executive in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS is changing regulations to better fit the needs of pharmaceutical companies, and Trump is personally pocketing club membership fees from people with business before the federal government, including the CEO of Allergan. The candidate who ran as the champion of the forgotten man has led an administration dedicated to such causes as making it easier for financial advisers to rip off their clients and ensuring that workers suffer continued exposure to toxic chemicals in paint-removing solvents.

Trump has abandoned a huge swath of populist campaign promises and picked up the mantle of congressional Republicans’ agenda. In exchange, Republicans have abjured any meaningful oversight of the executive branch — allowing Trump to run the government and shape tax policy in a way designed to enrich himself and his family.

The combination of graft and plutocracy shows every sign of being a huge political loser. But nobody on any side of the bargain shows any indication of wanting to change course.

Donald Trump's broken promise of populist economics

Trump ran as an opponent of global financial elites, who promised to curb the carried interest tax loophole and reimpose Glass-Steagall regulations. Even while voicing skepticism about climate change, he swore to protect clean air and clean water and even floated a $10-an-hour minimum wage along with a $1 trillion infrastructure investment. As president, he’s done the exact opposite — promoting financial deregulation, rolling back all forms of environmental enforcement, and making a corporate tax cut the centerpiece of his economic agenda.

It adds up to a 180-degree reversal from his campaign promises, including on his signature issue of trade.

Candidate Trump ran hard on promises of trade protection. In his Contract With the American Voter he vowed to withdraw from NAFTA, label China a currency manipulator, and even introduce what he termed an End the Outsourcing Act that “established tariffs to discourage companies from laying off their workers in order to relocate in other countries and ship their products back to the U.S. tax-free.”

After winning, he delivered an inaugural address that featured a commitment to “protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs.” He promised that “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength” and said his administration would “follow two simple rules: Buy American and Hire American.”

There was nothing in either document, by contrast, about rolling back regulations of large financial institutions, shrinking federally protected public lands, deregulating internet service providers, cutting Medicaid benefits, or attacking Social Security Disability Insurance payments. On the contrary, Trump explicitly promised not to do some of these things — drawing a contrast between himself and other Republicans.

Meanwhile, beyond canceling the already-dead Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, the rest of Trump’s trade agenda has simply stalled. A NAFTA renegotiation process is underway that’s brought no results, and on China — a key issue in the campaign — Trump isn’t doing anything at all. His team has, instead, moved quickly on issues like reversing an Obama-era rule to protect servers from having their tips stolen and making it harder for consumers victimized by their credit card company to sue for redress.

Trump’s heterodoxy was key to his election win

Trump carried some unique weaknesses as a presidential candidate, but he also went into Election Day 2016 with one profound strength — he was regarded as unusually moderate on the issues for a Republican.

And that assessment was by no means crazy.

Trump spoke about his desire to have a health care system that would “cover everyone,” potentially at government expense. And he said he opposed the idea of cutting taxes on rich people — an unpopular policy priority that has been at the top of the GOP agenda for at least 20 years. Instead, he was going to do a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill.

Of course, Trump also adopted right-wing — at times far-right — positions on culture war and racial issues. It was the campaign of build the wall, support the cops, say “merry Christmas,” and put a gun in every closet. But the pitch was that in Trump you’d get a candidate who was a culture warrior instead of a plutocrat, and that earned him the votes of a significant slice of white working-class Midwesterners who’d voted twice for Barack Obama. His decision to refashion himself in office as a down-the-line exponent of hard-right policies has been the key strategic decision of the Trump presidency.

This likely explains a fair amount of his toxic unpopularity — he’s 20 points under water in approval rating, far less popular than any previous president at the end of his first year in office.

But while abandoning populism has been a political failure, it has won Trump fans in the Republican congressional caucus. And that, in turn, has earned him impunity from congressional oversight.

It’s time for some game theory

If Trump’s ideological turnabout has been remarkable, equally remarkable has been the change of heart many congressional Republicans have experienced about Trump.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), for example, said in February 2016 that Trump was “a kook.” He explained further that “I think he’s crazy.” During the campaign, Graham said he wouldn’t vote for Trump — a stance that Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mike Lee, John McCain, Rob Portman, Dan Sullivan, Ben Sasse, Cory Gardner, and Dean Heller also took, along with 30 House Republicans.

An obvious corollary to these statements would be for Republicans to hold Trump, once he took office, to an unusually high bar of conduct for a president. Instead, they’ve not only done nothing — they’ve often taken pains to prop him up.

By November, Graham himself was denouncing the “endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president.” And there’s nary a peep about Trump’s personal corruption from him or from any of the other dozens of GOP members of Congress who once doubted Trump’s fitness.

Congressional Republicans have had nothing to say about Trump using the powers of office to line his own pockets through his businesses (even though as a candidate he promised to deconflict himself), or maintain secrecy about his real financial system (even though as a candidate he promised to release his tax returns), and have even increasingly backed him in his drive for a partisan purge of the FBI.

Whether implicitly or explicitly, this seems to be the basic contour of the deal that has cemented Trump’s hold on power. The old establishment overlooks his personal misdeeds, and in exchange he embraces its full economic agenda in a way he never did as a candidate. The result is a kind of political worst of both worlds, and it’s no surprise that Trump is ending his first year with the worst approval ratings on record for a modern president at this point in his term. But for both the president and his allies in Congress, it may be preferable to the alternative.