In July, after Donald Trump selected JD Vance as his vice-presidential running mate, Michael Lind took to the New York Times opinion pages to celebrate what he called a “new Republican counterestablishment.” He claimed that Donald Trump had overseen the Party’s pivot away from the neoliberalism of “Reaganite orthodoxy” and towards economic populism. According to Lind, Vance’s nomination symbolized the ascendancy within the Republican Party of “America’s newest populist movement” devoted to advancing populist and economic nationalist policies that strengthened American domestic manufacturing and provided good paying jobs for ordinary Americans. While Donald Trump was its “undisputed political leader,” Vance was the movement’s ideological lodestar, with Lind attributing to Vance a belief that the federal government needed to ameliorate “the harm done to working class Americans…by structural changes such as the offshoring of industry and the decline of the bargaining power of workers.” 

Lind is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He started off his career as a political thinker at the Heritage Foundation and a neoconservative in Ronald Reagan’s State Department. Since the 1980’s, he has evolved away from orthodox conservatism and become a socially conservative “anti-woke” populist, advocating an “intelligent economic nationalism.”  He has criticized corporate friendly free trade deals and called for the American federal government to adopt  industrial policies that use tariffs and subsidies to protect America’s domestic jobs and manufacturing base while protecting American workers from corporate power. 

In his Times piece, Lind expressed admiration for Trump’s successful presidential candidacy of 2016.  In that campaign, he claimed that Trump showed a movement toward some of the populist and economic nationalist ideas that he (Lind) favored. However, Trump’s winning of the Republican nomination and the White House itself was such a whirlwind that  unfortunately he had no time to assemble the personnel to staff the policy making and civil service positions required to implement populist and economic nationalist policies. As a result, during his first term, Lind explained, Trump was “forced to rely on Reagan and Bush veterans,” establishment hacks (“many of whom quietly” engineered his policies toward more conventional Republican policies like tax cuts and deregulation). 

Fortunately, Lind wrote, during and after Trump’s first term, a group of populist conservatives–”variously called populists, national conservatives or post liberals”–launched think tanks and periodicals to provide Trump with the infrastructure for populist and economic nationalist policy making should he return to the White House a second time. These institutions would offer Trump a policy making cadre–what Lind called “a new; more populist and nationalist generation to replace legacy Reaganites and corporate lobbyists”–ready and willing to serve him the next time he entered the White House. 

In his Times piece, Lind listed some of these iconoclastic institutions, which included American Affairs magazine and activist groups like the America First Policy Institute and American Moment. However the most prominent of the institutions Lind referenced were the American Compass think tank and Compact Magazine, both founded by Oren Cass. Cass (like Lind) was an orthodox Republican in his earlier career–he was policy director for the 2012 presidential candidacy of the Wall Street front man Mitt Romney–but has since evolved into an exponent of the idea that  big business power needs to be curbed, that the Republican Party needs to place less emphasis on corporate tax cuts and focus on implementing populist and economic nationalist policies. He has called for strengthening aspects of the existing American welfare state–he is favorable to proposals to expand the child tax credit–but stresses the traditional conservative emphasis on imposing work requirements on welfare recipients. He has also indicated support for the creation of  a government run bank to direct subsidies to particular industries in an effort to strengthen American manufacturing. 

MAGA Populism and Economic Nationalism: Thin Substance

In preparing for Trump’s second term, his transition team has publicly distanced itself from the Heritage Foundation and its notorious Project 2025, a blueprint for imposing draconian neoliberal austerity on the federal government, crackdown on abortion rights and the replacement of thousands of federal civil servants with Trump loyalists. During the campaign, the Trump campaign discovered that Project 2025’s proposals were deeply unpopular and tried to distance themselves from it; Trump, obviously lying, claimed to have no knowledge of the Project or its authors. 

Instead, the Trump transition team has placed personnel from the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) in key roles designing policy and choosing personnel for federal agencies once Trump formally returns to the presidency.  Although lauded by Michael Lind as an example of the “new Republican counterestablishment” supposedly advancing populist and economic nationalist policies, AFPI’s policy advice for a second Trump term appears not to depart sharply from traditional Reaganite neoliberalism. In addition to intensified crackdowns on crime, abortion and undocumented immigrants as well as calling for Antifa to be labeled a domestic terrorist organization, Politico reported in late August that AFPI advocated legislation to make Trump’s tax cuts permanent and policies that further downsized government regulation of the business world. 

On November 9th, after Trump secured his second term in office, Oren Cass took to the New York Times opinion pages and–although praising Trump as an “iconoclastic leader”–could not help but indicate some alarm that the president-elect’s policy outlines appeared to be drifting toward the traditional Republican neoliberal policies of tax cuts and deregulation and away from economic populism. Cass–who is supposedly a significant influence on J.D. Vance’s political thinking–also referenced with apparent distaste the influence upon Trump of cryptocurrency grifters. He observed with disgust that certain unnamed libertarian business executives around Trump–probably Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk–were pushing a policy of completely destroying government programs that helped ordinary people instead of–as Cass advocated–merely trying to make those programs more efficient. He exhorted Trump to take “the road less traveled,” to avoid the promotion of corporate tax cuts, “high stock prices and C.E.O bonuses” and instead implement governmental policies of “real investment” in American industrial infrastructure and the well being of ordinary people.

Cass noted that Trump has consistently expressed support for “rebuilding the American industrial base,” including through policies of tariffs to protect domestic American manufacturers from foreign competition.  However, Trump at one point near the end of his recent presidential campaign, publicly seconded the verdict of Mike Johnson, his ally and Republican Speaker of the US House, that the $284 billion CHIPS and Science Act of 2022–passed by the Biden administration with some Republican support–needed to be canceled. Trump and Johnson both backed away from their stance after receiving pushback from elements of the Republican base. In any case, Cass was aghast. He felt the CHIPS Act–which he claimed has been a significant job creator and boost to domestic American semiconductor manufacturing–was precisely the sort of economic nationalist policies that Trump should be supporting. Cass felt that Trump opposed the CHIPS Act under the influence of Republican establishment neoliberals  (the “Republican Party’s old guard free marketeers”) who were telling Trump to “dispense with industrial policy and cut taxes instead.” 

Much of Cass’s populism revolves around the scapegoating of undocumented immigrants for the troubles faced by the American working class. In his Times piece, Cass suggested that Trump might lack the gumption to carry forward his campaign pledge of launching an unprecedented cleansing of undocumented immigrants from the United States. Instead of launching a full throttled reign of terror, Cass feared that Trump wouldn’t actually depart much from the status quo immigration policy, rhetorically grandstanding as the defender of the homeland against the illegal alien hordes, while quietly accommodating the need for undocumented labor on the part of business leaders in construction, hospitality and agriculture. 

MAGA Populism: Inauthentic

To a large extent, Trump’s populism is inauthentic; it is merely a marketing cover for traditional policies that redistribute wealth from the working class to the rich and intensify the exploitation of ordinary people. While one finds relatively coherent policy proposals from the likes of Oren Case, in the hands of Trump himself–apart from tariffs and immigrant bashing–one will find little coherence as to the specifics of this “populism.” What is coherent often turns out to be the “Reaganite Orthodoxy” which Michael Lind assured his readers Trump had jettisoned: corporate tax cuts, dismantling of environmental protections, elimination of what little protection the federal government affords labor unions, and so on. Contrary to Michael Lind’s expectation, the new populist millennium of Republican politics has not arrived; the “legacy Reaganites and corporate lobbyists” appear to be largely in the driver’s seat of Trump’s policy.

The inauthenticity of MAGA populism is no better illustrated than by J.D. Vance. Vance has worked to give himself the populist “vibe” and the US media has, in many cases, branded him as an anti-corporate populist crusader. However, in many cases, the evidence shows Vance easily buckling to the demands of corporate lobbyists on issues like railroad safety, health safeguards for steelworkers and consumer protections. While Michael Lind curiously attributed to Vance a desire to use federal governmental power to reverse the “decline of the bargaining power of workers,” Vance has given no indication that he seriously has such a goal in mind. In fact, Vance opposes the one piece of legislation currently before Congress designed to increase labor union power, the PRO Act. He has sought to give off a vaguely pro-union vibe but in substantive policy he is little different from the typical anti-union Reaganite Republican. 

Not only has Vance shown himself to be anti-union but has given explicit support for reviving company unions, co-sponsoring the Teamwork for Employees and Managers Act of 2024, a brainchild of Oren Cass which Republicans have tried to brand as empowering workers–when it would obviously place workers even further under management control than they are now. 

MAGA Populism’s Real Roots

There is something resembling an authentic side to MAGA populism. That authentic side does not feature MAGA politicians being on the side of ordinary people against economic elites but rather representing small and medium sized businesses against Wall Street banks and big corporations. Much of the Republican base has become these smaller, non-publicly traded companies–Koch Industries is a leading example.

Because of smaller profit margins, small and medium sized businesses often have even more incentive than their bigger brethren to subject workers to lower wages and bad working conditions. As Michael Lind commented in his Times piece: “the activist base of the G.O.P. is still dominated by many small business owners who may not like big corporations and banks but also view trade unions and high wages as mortal threats.” 

It’s not that Republicans don’t get their share of support from CEOs of publicly traded companies: most prominently among leading corporate oligarchs, Trump has the support of leading Silicon Valley figures Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist, co-founder of Paypal and CEO of Palantir, was the leading funder of Vance’s 2022 US Senate campaign and helped Vance get started as a venture capitalist more than a decade earlier. Thiel is also close to Matt Gaetz, the far right former Republican congressman who has been nominated by Trump to be Attorney General. 

After Gaetz was nominated, Matt Stoller, the progressive anti-monopoly activist, paid tribute to him on his blog. Stoller–who has worked with Oren Cass in recent years for the purpose of trying to find common ground on economic populism between Bernie Sanders supporters and MAGA enthusiasts–praised Gaetz for his “track record on corporate power,” He pointed to Gaetz’s strong support for the vigorous measures against corporate monopolies pursued by the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, the anti-trust chief at the Biden Justice Department. Stoller was clearly enchanted by Gaetz’s vigorous, seemingly principled efforts to limit corporate mergers and support for Lina Khan’s decision to ban employers from imposing non-compete agreements on employees. He praised Gaetz for taking on the military industrial complex: Gaetz used the forum of a congressional hearing to rail against Lockheed Martin’s monopoly patent on the F-35 fighter jet. 

Whatever else one might say of Gaetz being a reputed sex trafficker and statutory rapist as well as his crypto fascist politics, Stoller is seemingly right in calling Gaetz a principled anti-monopolist. But what Stoller misses is important. There are certain familial influences that undoubtedly motivate Gaetz. His father Don (currently in the Florida legislature) was an entrepreneur, founding the hospice care company VITAS Healthcare in 1983 before selling it for half a billion dollars nearly 20 years later. His brother in law, Palmer Luckey, is the founder of Anduril, a start-up drone and electronic warfare company with major investments from Peter Thiel. In April, Anduril won a drone production contract from the Pentagon, beating out established companies Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grunman. 

In other words, the main influence for Gaetz’s antitrust fervor is that he comes from a world of entrepreneurs and startup capitalists who have a vested interest in easing their own ability to compete in markets by supporting governmental curbs on monopolistic practices. Peter Thiel–although he is hostile to Lina Khan–as an investor in startups likewise has a vested interest in curbing monopolistic strangleholds on certain industries, whether it be that of Google, Facebook or Lockheed Martin. Unlike his mentor Thiel but because he also comes from the world of venture capital and knows the harm monopolistic practices can do to start-up companies, J.D. Vance has also supported Khan’s policies.

A New Politics Needed

We desperately need a new politics powered directly by ordinary people, where the working class unites around shared interests and does not allow demagogues to divide it by scapegoating undocumented immigrants. We need people to understand that politics is fundamentally broken when the likes of J.D. Vance and Matt Gaetz get to portray themselves as “populist” while representing a faction of rich capitalists as they face off against other politicians (Democrats) often representing even richer factions of capitalists.

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