The Original Populists

The word “populist” was coined in the 1890s to describe supporters of the short-lived People’s Party. This formation was mostly made up of poor farmers ground down by big businesses and big banks, though they also built bridges to urban workers and won the support of labor leaders like Eugene V. Debs. They wanted to move the United States off the gold standard to alleviate the plight of small farmers, but they also advocated reforms ranging from a short workweek for factory workers to the direct election of senators.

In the 1896 election, important parts of the People’s Party platform were appropriated by Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan, and the “pops” fell in line behind Bryan rather than nominating their own candidate. They didn’t want to throw the election to the Republican nominee, a reactionary defender of the status quo and champion of the interests of the rich and powerful named . . . William McKinley.

As Thomas Frank discusses in his book The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, McKinley was the original, primordial anti-populist. His presidency was marked by warmongering abroad and brutal indifference to the concerns of poor people at home until an anarchist factory worker assassinated him in 1901.

In Frank’s book, he argues that there’s nothing even a little bit populist about Trump by observing that all of Trump’s most characteristic themes are simply retreads of the Right’s classic themes. Trump’s “war on the media is just an old melody from the [Richard] Nixon era that he has chosen to play in a pounding fortissimo,” Frank writes. His bigotry is rehashed George Wallace. And his love of tariffs “is merely a return to the habits of William McKinley.”

As it turns out, Trump himself thinks it’s a fair comparison.

Appealing to Young Men Without Making Their Lives Better

Trump went on The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) for the same reason that Kamala Harris might soon be making an appearance on the show. In the final days of the election, both campaigns are eager to shore up their support from young men, a demographic that includes a great many JRE listeners.

We’ll see how Harris performs if she ends up taking that particular plunge. Trump might have lost a point or two with the Rogan audience for making excessive use of what he’s taken to calling “the weave” — his habit of wandering at random from topic to topic as the spirit takes him. (A less generous way of describing that might be “accelerating cognitive decline.”) But to the extent that his goal was simply to make himself look a bit more human and approachable to these voters, he probably succeeded. And many of them surely enjoyed watching the former president bro out with their favorite podcaster about mixed martial arts and drop tantalizing hints about space aliens and the JFK assassination files. Still, in three hours, it’s remarkable how little he promised to do for that audience on the level of policy.

Trump knows how to sound vaguely “antiwar” when he wants to, and he did that here and there over the course of the Rogan interview. There was a passing reference to George W. Bush having made a mistake in going “stupidly into the Middle East,” but then Trump made it clear that if he’d stayed in office he never would have fully withdrawn from Afghanistan, instead maintaining a military force around Bagram Air Base in perpetuity. (“You should have never left Bagram.”)

When he talked about how his biggest mistake as president was appointing a lot of the wrong people, Rogan asked if he meant “neocons” and, eager to agree with him, Trump said, “Sure, neocons,” and then went on to praise some of the biggest neoconservatives in his administration, like Mike Pompeo, who he made clear would stay in the picture for a second Trump administration. On Gaza, Trump dropped a big hint that he would be even more deferential than Joe Biden to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that if “Israel had listened to Biden,” they’d “be waiting for a bomb to drop on their head right now.”

On domestic policy, the picture was even more dismal. As inconsistent as he may be when it comes to specifics, Trump at least pretends to want less foreign adventurism. On core questions of economic policy, Trump has exactly nothing to offer young working-class men dealing with financial stress and precarity and uncertain prospects for the future. Taken seriously, his proposal to completely replace income taxes with tariffs might work out to be a recipe for the biggest upward redistribution of wealth in American history.

Instead of progressive income taxes, where you at least pay a bigger percentage as your income increases, Trump’s tariff proposal would transfer the burden to the bottom of the economic hierarchy, with higher prices for everything manufactured abroad that anyone buys at a grocery store. And if you think the long-term effect of all this would be that more things would be produced in America (and hence that the pain at the grocery store would only be temporary), that would also entail that the funds brought in by tariffs on foreign goods would shrivel up over time. That’s a recipe for an even more miserly welfare state than what we’ve got right now.

The only time the word “unions” came up in the whole three hours was in the context of Trump complaining about how dealing with unions was one of the factors that makes it difficult to get real estate projects off the ground in New York. Our rate of union density is already atrocious, not because we dislike the idea of workers organizing together on the job — the polling data is pretty clear that most Americans approve of labor unions — but because our labor laws are so ludicrously stacked against union organizers. Trump clearly has no intention of making the situation better, only worse.

The problems facing the JRE listenership are immense. Unlike comparable nations like Canada and the UK, America doesn’t give its citizens free health care. The United States is the only industrialized nation that doesn’t legally guarantee its working class even one lousy day of paid time off a year. Americans report feelings of “high stress” at an extraordinary rate. And many young men who might listen to JRE worry about whether they’ll ever have the kind of financial stability they think they’d need to get married and start a family.

If you ignore the vibes and pay attention to the details, Trump’s message to these young men was unmistakable. Over and over again, on issue after issue, he told them that he couldn’t care less.